On November 20, the US Securities and Exchange Commission announced that they had charged Indian businessman Gautam Adani with bribery of public officials in India and securities fraud. In parallel, the US Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York announced a criminal indictment in relation to the same offences.
Despite Adani being at the centre of the political discourse in India for the last few years, it is far from certain that this will become a political liability for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Quite apart from the fact that the public officials accused of accepting these bribes come from parties across the political spectrum, whether or not these charges snowball into political catastrophes domestically are driven by certain broader public perceptions of the state and corruption.
The remoteness of the state
Historically, political power in India was dispersed between several layers of legitimate authority. The more local sources of authority (like caste groups) operated relatively independently from the sovereign, and often exercised greater influence over the everyday lives of the population. The sovereign was generally a degree removed.
While the modern state – through the processes of colonisation and subsequently decolonisation – imposed itself at the top of this structure, the remote and diffused manner in which most Indians view the state remains. Citizens typically demand very little from the state, and many barely interact with it, unless forced to. The idea of a state with responsibility for the welfare of its citizens is so remote in the minds of a majority of the electorate that political parties are still able to get away with rebranding state welfare schemes as the personal benevolence of their leadership.
In this framework, bribery, which is fundamentally a crime against the state – a misuse by a state functionary of public office – tends to be seen as a victimless crime, unless the costs to the public are articulated in a manner that captures the public imagination. For example, in the 2012 coal scam, a large portion of the media created the impression that the notional losses calculated by the Comptroller and Auditor General of India were actual out-of-pocket losses to the exchequer. Without this bit of media inaccuracy, it is arguable that the scam wouldn’t have had the same impact in the public imagination. This, together with the broader social rhetoric of the India Against Corruption movement, convinced the electorate that serious harm had been done to them.
Political rhetoric also focusses on making the losses from bribery scandals more real for the electorate. In 1987, the Bofors scam came to be defined by the BJP slogan, “Gali gali mein shor hai, Rajiv Gandhi chor hai (The word is on the street, Rajiv Gandhi is a thief). Here, we see the replacement of the idea of bribery with theft to drive it into the public understanding that they had been robbed. But rhetoric alone is not enough. Without a widespread media campaign painting a compelling picture of public loss, Rahul Gandhi’s 2019 use of the slogan “chowkidaar chor hai” against the BJP failed to capture the public imagination.
Disproportionate gains
When a clear loss to the public cannot be articulated easily, the discourse on bribery has tended to focus on the other side — the politician becoming wealthy through unfair means. How this is received is usually driven by certain pre-existing notions on who deserves to become wealthy and how. In the elite political space, disproportionate assets held by grassroots (especially backward caste or Dalit) politicians generate condemnation and outrage. But while this elite outrage is powerful enough to ensure investigations and prosecutions, it is often not shared by the constituents of the accused politician, who continue to show their support by voting for the broader political family involved, using another family member as a proxy for the disqualified politician.
Also read: Adani’s Indictment Further Erodes Public Trust in SEBI
But when the corruption discourse involves a capitalist from a caste whose traditional role was business, both the traditional indoctrination of caste and the more modern indoctrination of neoliberalism ensure that the outrage in the elite political space is more guarded. Hence, a business family’s wealth reportedly increasing by a staggering 1,225% between 2014 and 2023 will not invite the same scrutiny or calls for explanations as an increase in politician wealth.
Cooperative and non-cooperative corruption
How capitalist corruption is perceived in neoliberal societies is further determined by what is termed “cooperative corruption”. Scholars classify corruption into two categories – non-cooperative and cooperative. In non-cooperative corruption, a public official demands money to provide something that the bribe giver is already legally entitled to receive (a copy of a birth certificate, or municipal land records, for example). In this form, the public gains nothing and is in fact being forced to enrich a public official just to enforce their existing rights. This form of corruption tends to be widely disliked and is easy to rally public opinion against.
Cooperative corruption on the other hand is where a public official takes money from A to illegally provide A with something that they wouldn’t otherwise be entitled to. In this situation, the member of the public giving the bribe is also benefiting from the corruption. When there are sufficient members of the public benefiting from the corruption, manufacturing public opinion against it becomes challenging. The wider the net of beneficiaries, the more difficult it becomes to generate any political will to challenge corruption.
Indian capitalists have long used the securities market to create the impression that the benefits they generate for their company (through fair means or foul) are being shared with the wider public. In the 1980s, this was best exemplified by Reliance Industries. At that time their investor base was filled with so many small shareholders that their annual shareholder meetings often needed a cricket stadium. This fiercely loyal base, that undoubtedly benefitted from Reliance’s rise, was to step in to shield the company, including by subscribing enthusiastically to a securities issues, when the Indian Express published a series of stories alleging widespread corruption within the group.
Since liberalisation, the repeated assertion that growth and development is only possible through private ownership of resources has gained such an uncontested hold over the elite political imagination that it is now offered as the common sense view. This has made it easier for Indian corporations to claim they exist in the national interest. When they are accused of wrongdoing, especially abroad, they immediately invoke ideas like nationalism. This creates the unconscious impression that the entire nation is the collective beneficiary of the entirety of their growth, irrespective of the means used. Any targeting of the corporate in this narrative becomes a targeting of India’s growth by foreign powers.
For all allegations of corruption to automatically gain political traction in a population, one of two preconditions must exist in society. Either a vast majority of the population must be brought to believe that the state exists to serve them. When this is expected of the state, a defrauding of state systems automatically becomes a defrauding of the public. However, given the arbitrary and often brutal manner in which the Indian state interacts with its citizens, this is unlikely to happen in the near future. Alternatively, a vast majority must be convinced that corruption represents a moral failing unacceptable in their business or political leadership. This is trickier, because corruption in India often operates in the gap between what society considers morally acceptable and what is legally permitted. While instances of blatant corruption can still shock, the idea of corruption is not condemned in its totality.
At the end of the day, the political anger with conglomerates on the ground tends to be driven by first, visible and rising levels of inequality and second, by the marginalised populations who are directly dispossessed of their resources — specifically land — in the name of development. Both these concerns are unfortunately often dismissed and deprioritised in the elite political space. Unless this latest round of bribery allegations can tap into this broader discontent, it is unlikely to gain serious political traction.
Sarayu Pani is a lawyer by training and posts on X @sarayupani.
Missing Link is her new column on the social aspects of the events that move India.
