CORRUPTION, JUSTICESAIS ANDReview VIOLENCE vol. XXXIII IN Dno. EMOCRATIC 1 (Winter–Spring INDIA 2013) 37 Corruption, Justice and Violence in Democratic India Jason Miklian and Scott Carney Institutionalized corruption is pervasive in India. It requires individuals and businesses to negotiate bureaucratic mazes, pay off government servants, and break laws merely to acquire the basic elements of governance. With nearly half of India’s economic activity in the informal sector, ‘shadow economies’ permeate the lives of every citizen. What on the surface looks like a dysfunctional or broken system operates smoothly and beneficially for the politicians, businesses, and connected individuals who use it with ease. For the average Indian citizen, however, access is challenging, and corruption is a visible reminder of the failed promise of democracy. This article broadens the anti-corruption agenda in India by recognizing how corruption carries with it ingrained structural components that cannot be disentangled from the formal sector. In some cases, what is thought of as ‘corruption’ actually improves operational efficiency for citizens when compared to India’s overworked judiciary and extensive bureaucracy. Any serious attempt to ‘fix’ corruption must also account for the rationalizations of individuals and companies that engage in what are commonly seen as corrupt activities. O n the surface, the presence of widespread corruption throughout India conjures notions that the country is inherently dysfunctional or ‘broken.’ But for the politicians, businesses and well-connected individuals who use the system with ease, it operates exactly as intended, with wellunderstood rules of engagement and mutually beneficial frameworks. The scale of graft over the past decade has surprised even those already jaded from depressing headlines: US $30 billion lost to government coffers in coal scams, US $25 billion forfeited in underpriced telecom auctions, and US $10 billion of smuggled conflict diamonds mark some of the bigger scandals that have splashed across newspapers and TV channels. It is not just the lost potential revenue, but the brazenness and seeming universality of these activities throughout the Indian government that drive frustration with sectors as varied as international adoption, real estate, and the medical industry all rife with graft.1 For the average Indian citizen, these exclusive networks of power are a visible reminder of the failed promise of democracy. In 2012, the anger reached a breaking point as a populist anti-corruption movement, led by Jason Miklian is a researcher at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) and NORAGRIC, UMB AS, Norway. Scott Carney is an investigative journalist and author of the book The Red Market: On the Trail of the World’s Organ Brokers, Bone Thieves, Blood Farmers and Child Traffickers. © 2013 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 37 38 SAIS Review WINTER–SPRING 2013 the charismatic activist Anna Hazare, drew hundreds of thousands of protesters and nearly shut down the capital of New Delhi. In this essay, we link the roles of justice and corruption, using the seemingly disparate examples of the coal industry in Jharkhand and land mafias in Andhra Pradesh to illustrate that social justice markers are not only integral to any discussion of corruption in India, but that their interaction effects define the very foundations of India’s citizen-state relationship. The forward goal of this work is to broaden the agenda of anti-corruption efforts in India by recognizing how corruption carries broad structural components that underpin the decisions made by individuals to engage in what we see in the West as a ‘corrupt’ manner. In India, obtaining the right paperwork to run a business means negotiating a maze of backdoor dealings for permits, payoffs to politicians and judges to ensure fast-tracked applications, and pleasing dozens of other bureaucratic vultures along the way. Operating by the letter of the law can, in fact, be a detriment; there are so many differing laws, jurisdictional squabbles, and overlapping regulations that entrepreneurial officials can target erstwhile compliant businesses for ‘fee collections,’ threatening unending court delays otherwise. The regulations are so convoluted that at times it is actually impossible to adhere to the overlapping legal schemes. Despite knowledge of these obstacles, the massive carrot of India’s newly opened market has proven irresistible for many multinational corporations. Foreign direct investment (FDI) laws mandate that multinational companies must engage in joint ventures with Indian companies, who manage the logistical operations inside the country. Since the informal economy is where business occurs for local, national and multinational firms, everyone is a partner in India’s corruption scheme whether they know it or not. Most citizens do not have the luxury of corporate ‘contingency coffers’ or slush funds to pay bribes. When they navigate the legal system, most find themselves wandering Kafkaesque administrative buildings in vain searches for the correct authorities to stamp the multiple bureaucratic approvals on their overly complicated forms. The same problems extend into the criminal and civil justice systems, where an overburdened judiciary is unable to fairly deliver verdicts in an efficient manner. Unless they invest in private legal services or payoffs, the result is that even people’s most basic rights are left unattended by a state that is widely perceived as lackadaisical. India’s poorest third is hit the hardest. Making less than a dollar a day, these citizens cannot possibly hope to acquire the funds necessary to get the wheels of bureaucracy moving. For some, the situation becomes so desperate that they turn to insurgent groups or mafias bearing promises of a more effective parallel government. For others, it merely becomes a grinding reminder of how corruption eats into everyday life, skewing the allocation systems of local economies.2 With forty to fifty percent of India’s economic activity taking place on the black market,3 the topic deserves study equal to that of India’s formal economy, which is often celebrated within a popular ‘emerging power’ storyline. The ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ markets in India cannot be separated, as CORRUPTION, JUSTICE AND VIOLENCE IN DEMOCRATIC INDIA 39 all major sectors and activities require both legal and illegal or corruptioninducing components to operate. Informal activities do not necessarily result in negative outcomes, as sometimes solutions can only be implemented by going beyond official frameworks. For example, billions of dollars never made it into state coffers due to . . . sometimes solutions can only the artificial underpricing of be implemented by going beyond telecom access licenses in exofficial frameworks. change for kickbacks, but this may have in fact benefitted India’s poorest through cheaper mobile service, faster implementation of the technology, and more national competitors operating in underserved areas that might have otherwise been unprofitable. While often considered synonymous with bribery, the broader tenets of corruption are interconnected with issues of justice, access to power and state-citizen relations. This is especially true in democracies. Reducing corruption is a matter of both public management and social justice, as rapid economic growth in developing democracies can indefinitely support a fundamentally different and more integrated form of corruption than the mere financial connotations generally assumed.4 Entrenched institutionalization of corruption in today’s India means that ‘corruption networks’ (or ‘retail corruption’)5 define the financial and bureaucratic interactions that citizens and companies undertake with government representatives of all types. The corruption network thus permeates the everyday activities of all citizens, becoming a unique social institution in and of itself. In 1975, writer Suresh Kohli argued that corruption was a “ritual of India,”6 a near-religious activity that is socially accepted as a way of doing business. But does this still hold true today? Whereas brazen scams increasingly dominate headlines, and anecdotal conversations with almost anyone who lives in India suggest a worsening problem, handwringing over corruption as a ‘hopeless’ issue has existed in the national dialogue for at least 100 years.7 In comparative terms, India consistently scores in the bottom third of Transparency International’s Global Corruption Perceptions Index, but it has gradually inched up the chart since the index’s inception in 1995.8 This suggests a nominally improving, but still pervasive, concern. We reject, however, the notion that Indians are by nature more corrupt or tolerant of corruption due to social or cultural factors—a notion that has become a dominant trope in much academic literature and in the words of top anti-corruption officials.9 Illustrating the vast scope of its active but inefficient judiciary, at least 120 of India’s 523 members of Parliament currently face criminal charges.10 The problem is not limited to financial crimes; at least 330 elected members of India’s 4,050 Members of Legislative Assembly (MLAs) are defendants in ongoing rape cases.11 Former Indian Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) head, C.V. Narasimhan, decried his own impotence, noting: “Not a single CBI case involving ministers has ended in a firm conviction in the court 40 SAIS Review WINTER–SPRING 2013 during the last 40 years.”12 The problem is not limited to elected officials; it is common for prospective civil servants to pay bribes equivalent to two to three years’ worth of their future salary to land prime positions. The fee is an investment in one’s future, as the potential intake through bribes in the new position of power will far outweigh the initial outlay of cash. This is also one of the many reasons why the system is so hard to crack. Even the newest recruits into the system—people who in other bureaucracies might be the most idealistic—become the most adverse to change because they have the most to lose. The rare cases of conviction of corrupt officials are at best hollow victories, as the structural opportunities that encourage and facilitate the activities are not addressed. For businesses, however, this situation need not be a deterrent as long as it is predictable. Indeed, evidence shows that the more criminal a region’s leading politician is, the less likely that bribe-taking and bribemaking occurs farther down the chain.13 Companies operate under the assumption that a bribe needs to be paid somewhere in the system; if it goes to the top politician in the district or state, it carries a favorable degree of accountability in the personal relationship that results. These informal relationships often constitute the real-time alternate power structure of the country. Bribes can take the form of patronage, or rent-seeking, instead of cash. At times, like in the case of the so-called “land mafia,” an entire extragovernmental, fiat-based bribery system resembles a modern incarnation of feudalism nestled within the world’s largest democracy.14 A Kingdom of Coal Displacement, illegal activities, and corruption within the Indian natural resource sector are not recent phenomena, and the Jharkhand coalfields are no exception.15 When establishing a framework of governance for the sprawling subcontinent, the British created multiple levels of administration to both concretize a system of manageable internal checks and balances and to subjugate from above.16 Public servants were rewarded for regulatory adherence over productivity under the Raj. After India’s independence and nationalization of selected industries, many bureaucrats were promoted into positions where they had localized monopoly powers over the selection of who would have the right to do business. The new Indian state was too inefficient to oversee the old system, providing a powerful structural incentive for institutionalized corruption.17 In Jharkhand, as elsewhere in India, underground mineral resources belong a priori to the state. The government either mines the minerals itself (in this case through Coal India Limited and its subsidiary Central Coal Fields Limited) or auctions off mining rights to private entities or publicprivate partnerships. This arrangement opens three extensively exploited avenues for corruption: mining without a license, rigging the license system itself, and siphoning profits and resources from government-owned entities. Anemic public sector salaries,18 and a general lack of policing and oversight of public officials exacerbate these conditions.19 CORRUPTION, JUSTICE AND VIOLENCE IN DEMOCRATIC INDIA 41 While one might think that illegal coal mining would be conducted in the dark of night, the reality is anything but.20 Given that many coal seams lie as little as two feet under the surface, anyone with a pickaxe and a bit of muscle can become a coal miner. Mining is typically a small family business, as the men extract the large chunks of light black rocks while the women prepare makeshift coking fires in the ground in order to process the coal for sale. Throughout the region, it is common to see trails of hundreds of bicycles laden with coal snaking from mini-pits to markets, passing innumerable police stations along the way. The police ignore these activities for several reasons: illegal mine bosses pay them off, many policemen themselves come from mining families, and finally, many reason that these petty activities are necessary to prevent larger social unrest.21 At least one constable suggested to the authors of this piece that since low-wage workers make about double the salary in the illegal sector than they would working for a legal mine, ignoring the issue is actually a net social good that redistributes wealth to the people who need it most.22 At the top, Jharkhand politicians rig the opaque Raj-era auction system to grant licenses to cronies. One such player was former Chief Minister Madhu Koda, who pocketed more than US $1 billion in bribes during his tenure before being charged with several counts of corruption.23 Among the various offenses uncovered by India’s independent Comptroller and Auditor General, India’s coalfield mining licenses are allotted in a non-transparent, non-competitive bidding manner with no information on how applications for specific coal blocks are selected and with no relationship to the base quality of the applications or ability of the applicants themselves.24 According to the independent audit, improper and arbitrarily low-priced coal block allocations resulting from bribes cost the state US $30 billion in revenue. India’s Supreme Court took up the issue (dubbed ‘Coalgate’) in November 2012 and ordered a cancellation of most private contracts. However, the possibility for structural reform remains low due to the involvement of powerful politicians from all major parties at nearly every level of the scam and calculated obstruction from other government agencies that are mandated to assist, including the CBI.25 Institutional reforms to prevent successors from following Koda’s path have yet to be implemented. Massive profits and near-continual scandals involving corrupt officials with secret Swiss bank accounts are buttressed with despair amongst those living in the mining areas. Thousands of villagers are displaced annually for mining projects, with the vast majority unable to reclaim their previous living standards.26 Mining companies encourage the suppression of antimining activism by the state and see their activities as inevitable because ”no matter what they do, land is going to be acquired” from local populations for industrial purposes.27 Journalists and workers from non-governmental organizations have been killed for reporting on illegal mining activities. Local government actors labeled those who resisted mining displacement as “supporters of the Communist Party of India-Maoist” (or Maoists), a 7,000 member insurgency force fighting the state in many parts of central India. 42 SAIS Review WINTER–SPRING 2013 While Jharkhand itself was partially founded to provide greater accountability to citizens, the culture of corruption has left the new state hopelessly outmatched.28 With energy demand skyrocketing in South Asia and pressure from New Delhi, national and multinational businesses’ expansion of mining operations continues unabated. Despite the desire for cooperation among international actors to see the implications of coal projects on livelihoods, institutionalized corruption is so ingrained in the coal mining industry that even World Bank offihave abandoned their . . . institutionalized corruption cials own countr y directives is so ingrained in the coal mining and guidelines designed to industry that even World Bank protect indigenous communities in order to keep officials have abandoned their own projects operational. 29 It country directives and guidelines may also be ethically specious to ban illegal mining designed to protect indigenous activities in Jharkhand uncommunities in order to keep der the guise of reducing corruption when it would, projects operational. in actuality, mean support for those who have already benefitted from the initial round of corrupt practices at the expense of the poorest in society.30 Attempts to “move beyond coal”31 in India due to its deleterious effects on the local and global environments are constantly stymied. Coal remains the source for over fifty percent of India’s energy, and is seen by both Asian and Western media outlets and think tanks as the driver of future Asian prosperity.32 India’s Freelance Justice Paradigm Popular demonstrations with occasional outbreaks of violence are common in India, and the demonstration in the summer of 2008 in Tamil Nadu’s coastal capital of Chennai was little different. The mob overturned cars, threw rocks at police, broke through barricades and trashed the inside of several government facilities. However, this revolt had an interesting twist: it was composed entirely of the city’s lawyers, who ran riot inside and out of the High Court of Chennai for almost a week. On the surface, their complaint was over inappropriate pay scales, but the collective violence unearthed more subtle inequities of India‘s justice system. Chennai’s lawyers were so powerless to have their cases appealed and resolved in the courtroom, and so frustrated at the apparent unwillingness of the government to attempt to correct the deficiencies, that they felt their only access to power was mob violence. India’s justice problem is monumental. Not only does a typical case take fifteen years from filing to resolution,33 but if every case that was cur- CORRUPTION, JUSTICE AND VIOLENCE IN DEMOCRATIC INDIA 43 rently filed in India’s judicial system were to be given a fair trial it would take over 300 years to cut through the backlog.34 In the absence of a functioning judiciary, India’s executive and enforcement arms pick up the slack, often with their own idiosyncratic form of justice. This has led to a raft of haphazard solutions that range from highly effective to catastrophic failures. With this checkered record, citizens face a stark In the absence of a functioning choice when trying to resolve pending legal action: they judiciary, India’s executive and can go to the courts, use the enforcement arms pick up the traditional justice system of India (the panchayat, where lo- slack, often with their own cal community leaders deliver idiosyncratic form of justice. their own idiosyncratic judgments), or barring that, the mafia. In rural areas where the government’s control is even more tenuous, they use jaan adalats (people’s courts) run by insurgent groups like the Maoists. In the same areas, some district police chiefs have become so frustrated at the government’s judicial impotence that they have authorized their own people’s courts, allowing their forces to serve as judge, jury and (sometimes literal) executioner whenever they enter villages.35 The choice ultimately boils down to the difference between competing models of public justice. What is often called ‘judicial corruption’ is, in reality, a symptom of the judicial branch’s failure in favor of executive solutions. The judiciary’s lack of power means enforcement arm of the state has to fill the vacuum, or non-state actors who can deliver the same sense of justice will. Take, for example, the issue of land inheritance. With dozens of different inheritance schemes in India that descend from the country’s feudal past, large properties are contested by dozens of parties. Sorting it out in the courts could take generations, and disputants are not allowed to cultivate, sell or otherwise utilize the land until claims are finalized. For families who wish to see resolution for themselves instead of their unborn grandchildren, the only other realistic option is to turn to the ‘land mafia.’ More a network of gang posses than a Sicilian-style tight-knit familial network, India’s land mafiosos are organized crime figures who operate across several different criminal enterprises ranging from prostitution and drugs to political favor and electioneering, and are situated to various degrees in many of India’s large urban areas. Muthappa Rai, the so-called “Godfather of Bangalore,” explained the process:36 he learns of a land dispute and invites the most significant parties to a meeting. He hears their claims and decides how to divvy up the property according to what he thinks is right. In order to maintain his authority, he must appear impartial, and so usually gives each party a percentage of the value of the land, while pocketing twenty to fifty percent of the overall value as his cut. People who disagree with his ruling are potential subjects of violent retribution. In effect, mafia leaders like Rai serve in the same role as a traditional Zamindar or judge today. This 44 SAIS Review WINTER–SPRING 2013 neo-feudal situation comprises an effective and swift workaround to India’s convoluted judicial system. Though not always fair or transparent, mafia dons thrive because their system of parallel justice offers tangible solutions to long-standing feuds that would otherwise keep land and families locked in decades-long stases. Without people like Rai, it would have been impossible to clear land in Bangalore for the innumerable IT parks, upscale hotels, airports and high-end apartment buildings that are now the city’s signature. Beyond the debate over whether corruption levels in democracies are best understood as measures of ‘inclusion’ or ‘exclusion,’37 we see institutionalized corruption as encouraging and even enforcing alternative justice systems, be they manufactured under a competing democratic framework or otherwise. In India, the state has lost control of the judiciary through its own inefficiency, and varied actors jostle for control of the ability to dispense justice from their own idiosyncratic and self-interested positions. These actors need not only be non-state in nature. In order to target organized crime, Indian enforcement authorities (themselves a bewildering panoply of police, military, and paramilitary forces) at times adopt mob tactics themselves, hiring “encounter specialists” who have tacit permission from the executive branch to conduct extra-judicial killings. This violence is often viewed as necessary, especially when it is justified a fight against religious extremists, ‘terrorists,’ or others who challenge the state. But in practice, little separates encounter specialists from their mob counterparts, “supari killers” or contract hit men, ultimately eroding the state’s moral superiority. While different vectors of justice delivery in India can be understood in the context of their facilitation of so-called “underground” economies, they should also be contextualized to the role of the relationship between the state and its citizens. Successful insurgent groups and mafias undercut the ability of a state to maintain authority. While all states receive challenges to the legitimacy of their governance, how they respond to these challenges defines the transparency and coherency of their relationship with their citizenry. As Warren notes, corruption “breaks the link between collective decision making and people’s powers to influence collective decisions through speaking and voting, the very link that defines democracy.”38 In this regard, India’s constitution39 carries a defined understanding of the role, duties, and legitimacy of the state to employ policies designed to secure a monopoly of violence. Of course, the state cannot tolerate the existence of alternative justice systems as they defy the core foundation of the state’s monopoly on violence, defined here as the right to be the sole provider of legitimate punitive action to those persons under its domain. Democracies also have unique responsibilities and duties related to the constitutional social contract that reach beyond the traditional understanding of monopoly on violence and which view state-individual relations along legitimacy-security poles.40 A democratic monopoly on violence is thus a benchmark for explaining when a democracy is strong enough to conduct, justify and hold itself accountable for the punitive actions it takes against its citizens. This is an earned right CORRUPTION, JUSTICE AND VIOLENCE IN DEMOCRATIC INDIA 45 obtained from a state’s history of responsible action towards its citizenry, who in turn bestow their government the duty to honor human security precepts. Transgressions are punished, but do not jeopardize the foundational institutions as citizen recourse is possible through the justice system, at the ballot box, or both. Throughout India, the government has partially failed to fulfill its social contract by failing to hold its bureaucrats and politicians accountable for transgressions while simutaneously failing to uphold collective promises. These dual poles give rise to what can best be described as oligopolies of violence, as citizens turn away from government to actors perceived to be providing more effective service provision, be it land mafias in urban settings, Maoist ‘people’s courts’ in the rural heartland, iron, steel, and coal kingpins in mining belts, or other actors navigating the economic periphery. Indian attempts to reclaim a democratic monopoly on violence and honor the broken social contract are hampered by the structural barriers to reform of issues underpinned by institutionalized corruption and the use of military-based security frameworks of political violence. These efforts have served in many parts of the country to criminalize dissent, pressuring India’s overburdened judicial system to ‘fast-track’ charges against alleged dissidents in the name of national security.41 The erosion of legal avenues of dissent further pushes people to favor alternative justice systems regardless of their perceived brutality. As in many developing states, in India the ability for those in seats of power to act in a corrupt manner is intertwined with the general expectation that all actors in such positions are corrupt, which frames all interactions among parties before a word is exchanged. The expectation of corruption is so great that even ‘less corruptible’ actors follow suit and hew towards their assigned role. Even local community leaders and civil society organizations act upon these pressures of societal corruption when placed in the role of implementing government projects.42 In fact, the overall system is so intertwined with informal relationships and underhanded dealings that it may not even be possible to do business in India without at least dipping a toe into what the outside world sees as illegal markets. This explains why US retail giant Wal-Mart, Norwegian telecommunications firm Telenor, South Korean Steel manufacturer POSCO,43 and dozens of other multinationals looking to gain a foothold in India have been caught up in bribery scandals in exchange for access. They do not know of any other possible way to operate, and are informed by their mandated joint venture partners that these extralegal activates are not only necessary, but standard practice. Reducing Corruption, Restoring Accountability: The Possible (but Improbable) Dream So, is the notion of a corruption-free India truly hopeless, the “impossible dream” as some scholars have argued?44 Despite resistance from powerful forces who gain from the status quo, demographics and technologi- 46 SAIS Review WINTER–SPRING 2013 cal advances may yet provide avenues for improvement. As in many other countries, India’s increasing wealth and higher education levels correlate with reduced corruption. As in many other countries, India’s These trends are expected to continue and are supported increasing wealth and higher by current research on lesseducation levels correlate with corrupt, highly 45literate states such as Kerala. Other antireduced corruption. corruption initiatives like the freedom of information law,46 the Right to Information Act (RTI)47 and new Universal ID and eGovernance mechanisms48 also show promise, and are buttressed by various successful implementation stories from other previously corrupt societies. Politicians and media sources trumpet these and other programs as returning power to the people, increasing transparency and establishing governability to rural areas in particular. Many of these solutions have their own problems. Abuse of RTI requests further strains the courts,49 and any laws or initiatives ultimately hinge on their enforcement in order to succeed. While most of Indian society still views technology as either a benevolent force or catch-all solution, as the information technology sector becomes increasingly intertwined with government, savvy tech leaders have already begun to erode virtual rights and mine citizen data for profit or ‘security.’50 More fundamentally, the celebration of tech. . . any sort of anti-corruption toolkit must nological solutions to reduce be made with awareness of the unique corruption ilcountry-level power and access dynamics lustrates Delhi’s awareness that that underpin the reasons for corruption. easy solutions It cannot be a one-size-fits-all series of best are nonexistant. Powerless to practices from the West . . . fix its own bureaucracy, many government actors encourage citizens to bypass the top-down initiatives whenever possible in favor of new bottom-up ideas that may shame the powerful, but do not necessarily hold them accountable. Furthermore, while establishing such systems may indeed make it easier for a middle class Indian to fill out taxes or obtain ration cards, it is less easily implemented by those lacking access to the most basic tools needed for both this system and the courts. Although anti-corruption demands are gaining political traction, especially amongst India’s middle class, Anna Hazare’s 18 months of protests have thus far led only to a bill in Parliament for the creation of an anti-corruption watchdog, which has been tabled and carries little chance of passing. But more than the creation of watchdog bodies that may or may not end up with real teeth, any sort of anti-corruption toolkit must be made CORRUPTION, JUSTICE AND VIOLENCE IN DEMOCRATIC INDIA 47 with awareness of the unique country-level power and access dynamics that underpin the reasons for corruption. It cannot be a one-size-fits-all series of best practices from the West or other states that often simply attempt to get officials to stop taking bribes.51 The very concepts of justice and corruption in India are still ambiguous, wrapped in individual, institutional, and cultural legacies. That are at once overly formal—in terms of official bureaucratic procedures—and tremendously informal in the ways that executive remedies and actions are ultimately applied. Further research is needed at not only the national level but also at the subnational (state and district) levels to map power and access structures in order to understand what works and what does not in the contemporary policy laboratory that is India. These insights can broaden the agenda of anti-corruption efforts beyond the punitive action-specific and sector-specific activities currently favored within India. This is not to encourage an institutionalization of corruption, but to uncover workable avenues of effective, tangible reform through transparency programs that allow conceptions of justice to develop organically from open dialogue. While prosecutions of gross abuses are undoubtedly important, it is equally important not to implement knee-jerk reactions like closing off those informal avenues currently used by the poorest before state capacity can provide a legitimate alternative. Notes 1 Carney, Scott, The Red Market (New York: William Morrow, 2011). Marianne Bertrand, Simeon Djankov, Rema Hanna and Sendhil Mullaintham. “Obtaining a Driver’s License in India: An Experimental Approach to Studying Corruption.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 122, no. 4 (2007): 1639–1676. 3 Vandan Ajay Kumar, “Judicial Delays in India: Causes and Remedies.” Journal of Law, Policy and Globalization 4 (2012). 4 Michael Johnston, Syndromes of Corruption: Wealth, Power and Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 5 Jean Cartier-Bresson, “Corruption Networks, transaction security and illegal social exchange,” Political Studies 45 (1997): 463–476; Samuel Paul and Maunbhai Shah, “Corruption in Public Service Delivery.” In Sanjivi Guhan and Paul Samuel (Eds.) Corruption in India: Agenda for Action (New Delhi: Public Affairs Centre, 1997). 6 Suresh Kohli, Corruption in India (New Delhi: Chetana Publications, 1975). 7 Jonathan Parry, 2000. “’The Crisis of Corruption’ and ‘The Idea of India’” in Italo Pardo (Ed.), Morals of Legitimacy: Between Agency and System (New York: Berghahn, 2000). 8 Transparency International (TI), “Corruption by Country: India.” Rolling updates, available at: http://www.transparency.org/country#IND. Accessed on February 19, 2013. 9 KK Tummala, “Corruption in India: Control Measures and Consequences.” Asian Journal of Political Science 10 no. 2 (2002): 43–69. 10 V. Chandrasekaran, “Corruption in India and Mechanism to Control: A Study,” Radix International Journal of Research in Social Science 1 no. 12 (2012):1–10. Real-time tracking suggests that this figure has increased to 128, some twenty five percent of Indian legislators. An interactive map and list of pending cases can be found at: http://www.mibazaar.com/ indianpolitics.html Accessed on February 18, 2013. 11 “369 MPs, MLAs face charges of crimes against women” Rediff India, Available at: http:// www.rediff.com/news/report/lawmakers-369-face-charges-of-rape-crimes-against-women/20121221.htm Accessed on December 21, 2012. 12 Jon ST Quah, “Curbing Corruption in India: An Impossible Dream?” Asian Journal of Political Science 16 no. 3 (2008): 240–259. 2 48 13 SAIS Review WINTER–SPRING 2013 Matthieu Chemin, “Do Criminal Politicians Reduce Corruption? Evidence From India.” CIRPEE Working Paper 08/25. Department of Economics, University of Quebec at Montreal, 2008. 14 Scott Carney, 2011. “The Godfather of Bangalore.” Available at: http://www.wired.com/ techbiz/people/magazine/16-11/mf_mobgalore?currentPage=all . Accessed March 28, 2013. 15 Mathew Areeparampil, “Displacement Due to Mining in Jharkhand.” Economic and Political Weekly 31 no. 24 (1996): 1524–1528.; Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt and David Williams, “The Coal Cycle: Small Scale Illegal Coal Supply in Eastern India.” Journal of Resource, Environment and Development 2 no. 2 (2005): 93–105. 16 RP Taub, Bureaucrats Under Stress: Administrators and Administration in an Indian State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969). 17 Paul and Shah, 1997. 18 SK Das, Public Office, Private Interest: Bureaucracy and Corruption in India. (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001). 19 Quah, 2008. 20 The authors made several visits to coal mining districts of Jharkhand between 2007 and 2012; this paragraph references their observations there. 21 Lahiri-Dutt and Williams, 2005. 22 Author interviews, Hazaribag district of Jharkhand, 2011. 23 Miklian, 2011. 24 Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG), “Draft Performance Audit, Allocation of Coal Blocks and Augmentation of Coal Production by Coal India Limited.” http://www. sourcewatch.org/images/4/40/Draft_CAG_report_Pt_1.pdf (Accessed on February 18, 2013). 25 Perhaps enivatably, the scam has itself bred new scams. Two editors of the 24-hour news channel Zee TV were recently caught trying to bribe one of the primary accused beneficiaries of Coalgate with exposure of the story unless his business purchased 100 crore (approx. $20 million USD) of advertising time on the channel. Exchanging bribes for suppressing ‘scoops’ is a common business model for many of India’s new media outlets as rapid proliferation has bred a hyper-cometitive industry. It’s also a common mudslinging tactic by corporations as the breath and depth of investigative reporting has grown. 26 Jason Miklian, “Revolutionary Conflict in Federations: The Indian Case.” Conflict, Security and Development 11 no. 1 (2011): 25–53. 27 Comment by former State Bank of India and Reserve Bank of India Director Dinesh Mittal, Mega-Projects and Development Conference, New Delhi, January 20, 2010. 28 Interestingly, the state that Jharkhand was carved from – Bihar – has enjoyed a remarkable turnaround in terms of accountability and econmic growth since the bifurcation. While Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar receives much of the credit for Bihar’s remarkable turnaround over the past decade, many large-n studies of democracy and corruption support the general assertion that removing resource wealth (coal and iron in this case) makes states with weak democracies more governable. See f.ex. Bhattacharyya and Hodler 2010. 29 Tony Herbert and Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt, “Coal Sector Loans and Displacement of Indigenous Populations: Lessons from Jharkhand.” Economic and Political Weekly 39 no. 23 (2004): 2403–2409. 30 Lahiri-Dutt, Kuntala, “Illegal Coal Mining in Eastern India: Rethinking Legitimacy and the Limits of Justice.” Economic and Political Weekly, 42 no. 49 (2007): 57–66. 31 Friedman, Caroline and Teresita Schaffer, “India’s Energy Options: Coal and Beyond.” Washington DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, South Asia Monitor Series 132, 2009. 32 Economist, 2012. “The Future is Black.” January 21.; Galuszka, Peter, 2012. “With China and India Ravenous for Energy, Coal’s Future Seems Assured.” New York Times, 12 November 2012; PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC), 2012. “The Indian Coal Sector: Challenges and Future Outlook.” Report with the Indian Chamber of Commerce. 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(Accessed March 28, 2013). 42 Rene Veron, Glyn Williams, Stewart Corbridge and Manoj Srivastava, “Decentralized Corruption or Corrupt Decentralization: Community Monitoring of Poverty-Alleviation Schemes in Eastern India.” World Development 34 no. 11(2006): 1922–1941. 43 Jason Miklian, “The Political Ecology of War in Maoist India.” Politics, Religion and Ideology 13 no. 4 (2012): 561–576. 44 Quah, 2008. 45 Nicholas Charron, “The correlates of Corruption in India: Analysis and Evidence from States.” Asian Journal of Political Science 18 no. 2 (2010): 177–194. 46 Peisakhin, Leonid and Paul Pinto, “Is Transparency an Effective Anti-Corruption Strategy? Evidence from a Field Experiment in India.” Regulation and Governance 4 no. 3 (2010): 261–280. 47 Alasdair Roberts, “A Great and Revolutionary Law? The First Four Years of India’s Right to Information Act.” Public Administration Review 70 no. 6 (2010): 925–933. 48 Jamshed J Mistry, “The Role of eGovernance in Mitigating Corruption.” Accounting and the Public Interest 12 no. 1 (2012): 137–159. 49 Roberts, 2010. 50 R Ramakumar, “The Unique ID Project in India: A Skeptical Note.” Ethics and Policy of Biometrics: Lecture Notes in Computer Science 6005 (2010): 154–168.; Frances Zelazny, “The Evolution of India’s UID Program: Lessons Learned and Implications for Other Developing Countries.” Center for Global Development: CGD Policy Brief, 2012. 51 Johnston, 2005. 36