An Indian summer

Corruption, class, and the Lokpal protests

Bibliographic Data

ID7098543
AuthorsAalok Khandekar (0000-0001-9157-9764, Maastricht University, corresponding author), Deepa S Reddy (0000-0002-0297-8630, Anthropology and Cross-Cultural Studies, University of Houston-Clear Lake, USA and Human Factors International)
Year2013
Volume15
Issue2
Pages221-247
Publication date2013-08-13
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Consumer Culture (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1469-5405 • E-ISSN: 1741-2900
PublisherSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/1469540513498614
OpenAlexW2334838849
LanguageEN
Citations received8
References cited34

In the summer of 2011, in the wake of some of India’s worst corruption scandals, a civil society group calling itself India Against Corruption was mobilizing unprecedented nation-wide support for the passage of a strong Jan Lokpal (Citizen’s Ombudsman) Bill by the Indian Parliament. The movement was, on its face, unusual: its figurehead, the 75-year-old Gandhian, Anna Hazare, was apparently rallying urban, middle-class professionals and youth in great numbers—a group otherwise notorious for its political apathy. The scale of the protests, of the scandals spurring them, and the intensity of media attention generated nothing short of a spectacle: the sense, if not the reality, of a united India Against Corruption. Against this background, we ask: what shared imagination of corruption and political dysfunction, and what political ends are projected in the Lokpal protests? What are the class practices gathered under the “middle-class” rubric, and how do these characterize the unusual politics of summer 2011? Wholly permeated by routine habits of consumption, we argue that the Lokpal protests are fundamentally structured by the impulse to remake social relations in the image of products and “India” itself into a trusted brand. Taking “corruption” as a site at which the middle class discursively constitutes itself, we trace the idioms and mechanisms by which the Lokpal agitation re-articulates the very terms of politics, citizenship, and democracy in contemporary India

Citizenship · Democracy · Elite · Language change · Media studies · Middle class · Nothing · Parliament · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Spectacle · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Gender Studies · Law · South Asian Studies and Conflicts · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies

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