Questioning success: Dispossession and the criminal entrepreneur in urban India

The dispossession of urban India

In a widely read 2008 article, Partha Chatterjee asks how the liberalisation of the economy has affected the structures of Indian political power, and whether the urban middle class has developed a greater faith in corporate capitalism over the previous 25 years. Inspired by Sudipta Kaviraj’s (1988) Gramscian analysis of the Indian state, Chatterjee portrays the postcolonial state as a coalition of dominant classes, comprised of landholders, state actors and corporate capitalists (cf. Bardhan, 1984). Chatterjee (2008: 56) argues that since independence in 1947, the relationship between these classes was one of constant struggle since no single faction could ever arrive at absolute control. The structure of the Indian state represented this blocked dialectic, and was characterised by a democratic system which expressed the interests of class factions through political parties; the influence of corporate capitalists and rural elites on government; and the converse influence of government on industry, expressed through licensing regimes in private manufacturing, the dominance of the state sector in heavy industry and support for import substitution.

Kaviraj and Chatterjee’s model of dominant class struggle in independent India is well substantiated and provides a necessary complication to the problematic idea of the socialist Nehruvian state, whose supposed dominance over the Indian economy from the late 1940s was tempered by the demands of a faltering private sector in need of periodic state investment, protection from foreign competition and, in some cases, nationalisation (Bagchi, 1981, 1972; Chatterjee and Sen, 1988; Sen, 1982; Zachariah, 2005). In Jamshedpur, the Tata company had benefited from state financial assistance from as early as 1925 (Gupta and Thavaraj, 1974: 59; Nomura, 2011; Slater, 1925: 62; Varshney, 1964: 30; Wagle, 1981: 123), and had successfully used its considerable political influence to persuade Mahatma Gandhi to quell industrial unrest in its steel works during the same year (Singh, 1998: 31). Following Indian independence in 1947, like most domestic companies, Tata continued to enjoy state support in the form of protectionist economic policies, which made the export of industrial commodities to India non-cost-effective for most producers.

Chatterjee contends that the liberalisation of the economy fundamentally changed the relationship between dominant classes in independent India. The deconstruction of a notoriously corrupt licensing regime, the greater ease with which foreign capital and goods were able to enter the Indian economy, and the establishment of new areas of investment in telecommunications, technology and finance, all served to erode the monopolies of existing national corporations such as Tata, whose chief antagonists were increasingly other capitalists (Chatterjee, 2008: 56). Outside of the formal sector, liberalisation prompted a hardening of class lines, as a vast swathe of Indian society stood to gain little from the entry of foreign capital, but was nonetheless further alienated from the means of production, and saw the value of the product of their labour decline in the face of market competition. Chatterjee defines this sizeable section of Indian society as a faction made up of the peasantry, urban poor, artisans and petty producers in the informal sector (Chatterjee, 2008: 53, 57). Though impoverished, this faction nonetheless possesses a great deal of political power, which is wielded on an ad hoc and unstable basis in direct political negotiations, and is termed ‘political society’ (Chatterjee, 2008: 57; see also Chatterjee, 2004).

Chatterjee’s model of liberalisation’s impact on national corporations, and the unstable political power of India’s subalterns is well considered. Particularly notable is his observation on the role of governmental aid in softening the political impact of primitive accumulation (Chatterjee, 2008: 55, 62), which takes its inspiration from Sanyal’s (2007) discussion of capitalist development, which itself has an affinity with Polanyi’s (1957: 130) writings on the double movement and the welfare state. However, Chatterjee’s model becomes highly problematic in its definition of the clear class antagonists of ‘political society’, a faction termed ‘civil society’, which is comprised of the formally employed urban middle classes (Chatterjee, 2008: 57; see also Chatterjee, 2004). This faction views the political apparatus as atrophying under the pressures of corruption and bureaucratic incompetence, and has turned its back on its traditional role as the guardian of the developmental state. Civil society pins its hopes for India’s future on the efficacy of corporate capital, whose professionalism and dynamism it admires. This is then a hegemonic class, which has ‘come under the moral-political sway of the bourgeoisie’ (Chatterjee, 2008: 57).

Chatterjee’s model constructs a broad binary with which to understand a complex series of problems surrounding class, dispossession and its relationship to economic reform – a binary which suggests that macro-economic processes create factions of market winners and losers located within discrete sectors, whose political consciousnesses are at odds with one another. It is my contention that while there are obvious winners and losers in the game of Indian neoliberalism, the experiences of dispossession do not correspond to factions defined in the terms that Chatterjee presents, which are a familiar opposition between the formal and informal sector that characterises many studies of Indian political economy (Chatterjee, 2008: 57; Corbridge and Harriss, 2000; Harriss-White, 2003; Sen et al., 2004a, 2004b). Neither, I argue, is the consciousness of India’s civil society necessarily a hegemonic and uncritical one. On the contrary, workers in the formal sector may express a suspicion and moral antipathy towards corporate capital that is markedly similar to that described for India’s peasants (Chatterjee, 2008: 61).

A closer interrogation of India’s formal sector reveals that its boundaries are increasingly porous, and that the use of the term to approximate a loose class concept is not well substantiated. Phenomena such as the casualisation of corporate labour create a sizeable section of the workforce that is employed continuously in the same workplace for lengthy periods of time, who identify closely with the values of formal work, and yet enjoy little or no employment security (cf. Breman, 2004). I suggest that such processes create entirely new categories of citizens outside the formal/informal distinction; namely long-term casual workers with critical perspectives on corporate capital, whose labour is nonetheless disciplined by a desire for permanence (Sanchez, 2012b). This type of worker is increasingly typical not only of manual employment in industrial corporations, but in the new and apparently skilled professions of India’s offshore service and technology sectors, which epitomise India’s neoliberal ambitions (Nadeem, 2011, Nisbett, 2009).

The IT and outsourcing workers of the Indian metropoles, who would seem the strongest candidates for membership of Chatterjee’s ‘civil society’, invariably perform work that is both highly insecure and characterised by an acute alienation from the labour process (Nadeem, 2011). These types of work may well be central to the discursive repertoire of Indian neoliberalism (Biao, 2006). However, the labour performed in these sectors is usually characterised more by routine and closely regulated tasks than enterprise and innovation. Furthermore, the disjuncture between ideology and practice in these professions is the subject of a good degree of cynicism on the part of workers themselves, who refer to their employment as low-skilled, poorly rewarded and contingent on the demands of employers, lacking any guarantee of permanence (Nadeem, 2011: 192). Compounding this perception, suspicions of nepotism in recruitment and the persistence of caste and class prejudices are common areas of complaint for employees, who question the relationship between one’s competence and career success (Nisbett, 2009). This suggests not only a less secure position for members of India’s civil society than that proposed by Chatterjee (2004, 2008), but also a fundamentally more critical consciousness regarding corporate capital.

The recent extension of employment insecurity to India’s middle classes and aristocracies of labour is a development that is entirely consistent with the logics of economic liberalisation, and one should imagine that workers in urban professions would indeed begin to negotiate the labour market with greater degrees of uncertainty. The relaxation of restrictions on the movement of capital is intended to facilitate more open markets, in which there is a greater degree of competition between producers, traders and investors. As such, there is a greater incentive towards flexible labour in most liberalised economies, facilitating a long-term lowering of labour costs (Harvey, 1987, 2005). This incentive is usually accompanied by an increased legislative ability on the part of employers to circumvent obligations towards workers, and the advent of greater constraints on the power of collective action; both developments which transform the essential character of formal employment and show continuities with the precarity of the informal sector (cf. Cross, 2010). Comparative studies of labour in liberalised economies reveal that the erosion of security is emblematic of numerous types of work in contemporary capitalism (Carbonella and Kasmir, 2008; Freeman, 1998, 2000; Genda, 2005; Gill, 2000; Harvey, 1987, 2003; Kasmir, 1999; Kosugi, 2008; Mathur, 1998; Wilson, 1999) – a development with which many readers of this article will no doubt be familiar in the context of academic employment (Bousquet, 2008; Nelson, 2010). That a sizeable proportion of India’s ‘civil society’ should also experience liberalisation as a process of increasing precariousness is therefore not surprising.

The formal/informal distinction has utility insofar as it may describe the characteristics of a specific relationship between an employer and employee, broadly defined in terms of legal obligations and job security (Hensman, 2011: 99–104, 164–70). However, the reification of formal and informal characteristics to a unified ‘sector’ with a shared class position is ill-advised (see Breman, 1976, 1996). The formal sector presents itself as an increasingly fractured and degraded collection of global work experiences, while the informal sector necessarily refers to a broad range of practices, from which it is unwise to infer a commonality of experience. Security, stability and prospects for advancement are difficult to quantify in informally organised workplaces, which are frequently structured by obligations of caste and kin (Harriss-White, 2003: 184ff). As such, a unity of class experience within this sector is unlikely. For example, an excellent ethnographic analysis of the informal garment sector of Tirrupur, Tamil Nadu, describes how labour in that industry during the late 1990s was characterised by a great deal of exploitation and debt bondage, embodying many of the problems popularly associated with informal employment (De Neve, 1999, 2005). By comparison, a contemporaneous ethnographic study conducted in the same sector, in the same town reveals a rather different picture (Chari, 2004). Chari’s analysis of Tirrupur’s informal garment factories suggests a pronounced level of upward mobility for workers, and a popular sense that enterprise has the capacity to better one’s standing in a liberalised global market for Indian products. Here, the ideology of the ‘self-made man’ is an integral means through which small-scale producers in the informal sector imagine a positive relationship with corporate capital, as they manufacture goods for foreign consumption (Chari, 2004).

The primary distinction between De Neve and Chari’s research contexts is the way in which informal networks of caste and kin are used to structure employment and distribute capital in specific workplaces. Standards of living, degrees of exploitation and levels of job satisfaction are not determined by informality per se. Furthermore, one’s political consciousness regarding the efficacy of capital and the corruption of the state is also unlikely to be guided by the formality of one’s workplace. Chari’s research participants express a political consciousness in greater thrall to capital than the employees of Jamshedpur’s Tata industries, who widely doubt the ability to attain market success without recourse to corruption and violence, yet nonetheless frame their experiences in terms of three generations of formal corporate employment (Sanchez, 2012b).

The purpose of this discussion is not to deny that very large numbers of Indian artisans, petty producers, peasants and the urban poor are negatively affected by economic liberalisation. Evidently they are, a fact well borne out in studies of urban gentrification (Baviskar, 2006; Randeria, 2003) and an avalanche of work on the relationship between market forces and crises in Indian peasant agriculture (Agarwal and Sivaramakrishnan, 2000; Aiyer, 2007; Arnold, 2001; Assayag, 2005; Banerjee, 2009; Bijoy, 2006; Bijoy and Ravi Raman, 2003; Deshpande, 2002; Ghosh, 2006; Halliburton, 1998; Jacob, 2006; Mishra, 2006; Mohanakumar and Sharma, 2006; Mohanty, 2005; Nair and Menon, 2009; Ravi Raman, 2005; Stone, 2002, 2007). However, the inference that such types of dispossession are primarily associated with a definite sector, which encompasses almost all of India’s informally employed, is highly problematic. Furthermore, the political opposition of this sector to a hegemonic, bourgeois class, whose privilege is inversely related to subaltern loss, is overly simplistic (Chatterjee, 2008).

Liberalisation has certainly created new avenues for the expression of elitism in urban India; from changes to the urban environment in the growth of gated estates (Brosius, 2009; Waldrop, 2004) to greater opportunities for middle class consumption (Brosius, 2010; Fernandes, 2000; Gooptu, 2009; Gupta, 2000; Lukose, 2009; Mazzarella, 2003; Rajagopal, 2001; Sridharan, 2004; Thapan, 2004). However, these developments are not experienced consistently across India’s urban middle classes, and certainly not across the broad coalition of Indians who are directly employed in formal sector industries, some of whom may experience their labour in ways that undermine the very distinction between the formal and informal sector (Nadeem, 2011; Nisbett, 2009; Sanchez, 2012b). Neither could the expression of elitist aspirations in civil society be said to indicate any real increase in economic and social security. Fernandes’ (2006) landmark study of India’s new middle classes suggests that the nation’s urban elites experience acute indebtedness and status anxiety, and have a relatively weak grasp on their privilege, however forcefully patterns of consumption may suggest otherwise.

In reconfiguring the struggle between dominant classes, liberalisation not only accentuated the disenfranchisement of those traditionally lacking economic power, it also disenfranchised those in apparently comfortable urban sectors, in entirely new ways (see Jeffrey, 2010). Understanding this process entails a move beyond the rigid class and sectoral binaries that have often limited regional understandings of the relationship between economic processes, dispossession and political consciousness (Chandavarkar, 1997; see Arnold, 1980; Chakrabarty, 1981, 1983, 1989; Ramaswamy, 1973, 1977, 1983, 1988). A serious reading of class, labour and capitalism in India requires a focus on how people move across conceptual categories, and indeed an understanding of the contingent spaces between them (Chandavarkar, 1985, 1994, 1999; cf. Gooptu, 2001). The casualisation of labour in Jamshedpur’s Tata industries not only undermines the distinctions between the formal and informal sector by introducing new types of employment insecurity into corporate labour forces. The process also closes the gap which ostensibly exists between the hegemonic consciousness of India’s civil society and its ‘political’ counterparts (Chatterjee, 2004, 2008). Permanent and casual Tata workers alike share a critical perspective on capital, which uses languages of corruption to question the success of corporations and social elites.

Questioning success from the formal sector

Rajiv’s workplace in the Tata Motors plant is a strange one, overwhelmingly composed of men whose wages, job security and standards of living are lower than that of their fathers. That this shop floor is to be found in a prosperous company town, in the midst of a sharp rise in national Indian living standards makes this all the more perplexing. The Tata workforce, which once claimed a cohesive self-identity rooted in secure employment (Bahl, 1995), is now a fractured one that labours under a great deal of uncertainty regarding the future. The workforce comprises no fewer than four types of non-permanent employment, each entailing their own distinct pay scales. These grades of employment are termed variously: ‘apprentice’, ‘trainee’, ‘temporary worker’ and ‘contract worker’, and comprise 76 percent of the plant’s entire labour force (Sanchez, 2012b).

Apprentices and trainees share the bottom rung of the Tata employment ladder, although apprentices have a marginally higher status by virtue of sitting a government-approved examination at the end of their programme. The apprentice and trainees earn between RS1500 and RS2400 per month, ² working six days a week for three years in a range of usually menial shop-floor tasks; a period in which they receive a bare minimum of formal training. Apprentice training is available almost exclusively to the children of permanent company employees, and as such Tata maintains a consistency with the ‘industrial citizenship’ that characterises company town employment regimes (Burawoy, 1979: 113); indeed, it is the commitment to the value of formal sector employment which enables casual labour in the city to progress with such stability. Many employees cling to the uncertain hope of regularisation for years at a time, and are as such rather easily disciplined by their superiors.

After three years, graduated apprentices and trainees move into the ranks of ‘contract labour’, where they earn RS6000 per month. ³ Those who fail their exams become ‘temporary’ workers, and take home a monthly pay packet of RS5000. ⁴ Typically, workers will remain in either of these grades of employment indefinitely. Despite the variety of Tata work grades, there are two important points which are consistent across the shop floor. First, all non-permanent employees are barred from membership of the plant’s only trade union, receive none of the housing or healthcare provisions of permanent workers and lack any certainty regarding their future. Second, almost all such workers are the children of permanent employees, and there is a notable lack of antipathy between the various grades of the workforce. Relations between permanent and casual employees are informed by a shared critical perspective, which suggests that casual workers are unjustly excluded from a secure career, and that permanent workers are unable to effect change upon the plant’s corrupt trade union.

In the previous ten years, practically no non-permanent workers have actually made it to the top of the regularisation ladder and into a secure job. As older workers have retired or accepted redundancy packages, the workforce has become cheaper and weaker; definitively embodying the logics of urban flexible accumulation (Harvey, 1987). Rumours, myths and critiques circulate on the shop floor, which look towards the likely course of the future, and how it deviates so strongly from the past. Key to workers’ discourses surrounding the casualisation of labour are generally well-informed suspicions that the process dwells in a dubious grey area vis-a-vis employment legislation. Certainly the lack of regularisation for continuously employed non-permanent workers conflicts directly with the Contract Labour (Regulation and Abolition) Act. ⁵ Workers are correct to note that the company’s periodic shifting of employees into forms of ‘refresher training’ breaks their contract, and sends them back to the bottom of the state labour commissioner’s mythical regularisation list. Apprentices and their fathers also note that a third of workers registered as apprentices and trainees is an awfully large number for any facility. But then apprentices are the only Indian workers formally denied a minimum wage or maximum working hours, and the apprenticeship schemes are accordingly regarded in a cynical light. ⁶ What united popular understandings of the casualisation of labour in Tata Motors was the suggestion that changes in employment regimes constituted a means, first, to lower wages and, second, to disenfranchise workers from the trade union representation that could potentially raise them again. It was understood that the process involved a level of corrupt complicity from the legislative arms of the state. It was expressed even more frequently that the corruption of the plant’s only trade union was critical to the denial of non-permanent worker representation.

Contemporary discourses of corruption in the Tata Workers’ Union suggest an alignment of union interests with capital, in which the organisation helps to facilitate the weakening of labour by excluding the current generation of casual Tata workers from representation. While this model may be deployed on the shop floor to explain developments arising from economic liberalisation, the union has nonetheless been characterised by conservatism since the 1920s, and corruption discourses surrounding the organisation must be placed in their proper context (Bahl, 1995). The Tata Workers’ Union is the founder member of the Indian National Trade Union Congress (INTUC), a federation aligned to the Congress Party that has traditionally pursued a non-confrontational and sporadically complicit relationship with capital, evidenced in the failure of INTUC unions to challenge the decline of permanent employment in the Ahmedabad textile industry during the 1990s (Breman, 2004: 163), managerial collusion during industrial action in Bombay during the 1950s and 1960s (Wersch, 1992), and the refusal to extend representation to seasonal contract workers in Jamshedpur at any point during the 20th century (Sanchez and Strumpell, forthcoming). More broadly, INTUC unions have framed their struggles almost exclusively in terms of the narrow economic interests of their members, as opposed to anything approaching national class politics (Ramaswamy, 1983). Importantly, therefore, Tata workers’ corruption discourses do not imply that the union was ever the champion of broader class interests, since the organisation’s conservative history is a matter of common local knowledge. Rather, popular discourses suggest that the power of the organisation, which once principally maintained the boundaries of a city-wide aristocracy of labour, has more recently been turned inwards, towards the dispossession of its traditional membership.

Rajiv’s experience of Tata dispossession was typical. He was a well-educated and hard-working man from a company family who had once anticipated a career in a corporation internationally renowned for its employment benefits. However, at some point in his teens the Tata dream began to unravel. The secure jobs that were previously inherited from one’s parents became quite hard to access. The jobs available paid less than in previous years, did not offer the security of a company home and healthcare plan, and could be withdrawn at almost no notice. By the time we met in 2006, Rajiv’s working life had taken a path that seemed to lead to nowhere in particular. At the same point in his own life, Rajiv’s father had a home and a wife, could save money, take holidays with his children and looked forward to a monthly Tata pay cheque until retirement. Rajiv’s experience was quite different. His salary of RS2000 was not enough to leave his parents’ home, and his likely progression to the ranks of contract employment in the next two years did not make him a sought-after marriage partner. He still lived in his childhood bedroom, in a state of suspended adolescence, while he considered how best to work his way out of his current predicament. In their parents’ Tata homes, some young men in non-permanent employment dreamed of becoming players for European football teams. Others spent their evenings tutoring school children in mathematics and hoped to pursue PhDs so that they might become lecturers in state universities. Others chased distant relatives in Chennai for job contacts in the international call centres. Rajiv tried to become an entrepreneur.

One hot and humid day in August, Rajiv left work early, went home to his parents’ house and changed into the smarter of his two sets of non-work clothes; he had an interview for a loan at the bank. Rajiv had been asked by one of the plant’s middle managers if he would like to engage in some informal outsourcing work for the Tata Motors Company. The plant relies on a good deal of secondary manufacture, which is contracted to small industries across the city, chiefly the assembly of components and the tooling of axle hubs for some models of trucks. The manager charged with the axle tooling contract knew that Rajiv’s father owned a small and disused workshop where this work could be undertaken. It was also evident to anybody that knew him that Rajiv was an ambitious, serious and dependable man.

Rajiv was excited by the proposal. He hoped to save money, marry at some point in the future, and finally begin to live the life that befitted a man of nearly 30. His financial projection for the year ahead led him to believe that these goals were eminently attainable. He had been promised RS20 for every completed axle hub he finished, and he anticipated that his workshop could complete 24 pieces per day. His income would be further supplemented by selling the scrap iron castings from each hub for a further RS20. On the basis of these estimates, Rajiv’s business would generate significant revenue, which would allow him to hire an employee who could carry out the work while he finished his Tata apprenticeship. After paying wages of RS100 per day, Rajiv stood to make RS247,680 per year, ⁷ or roughly 12 times his current salary. However, the workshop was still an empty shed, and he would first need to invest in tools and transportation. For this he needed a loan of RS300,000. ⁸

Rajiv returned to work the next day dejected. His application for a loan had initially seemed to go well. The bank manager was friendly and helpful, and was impressed by Rajiv’s carefully compiled figures. However, it turned out that becoming an informal sector entrepreneur was quite difficult, and those most likely to succeed were people who already possessed a certain amount of wealth. After patiently listening to his projections, the bank manager refused Rajiv’s loan since he had nothing to put up as collateral. The things which Rajiv did possess were anachronistic investments from a paternalistic company town past: he was polite and hard-working, and had ironed his only smart shirt that afternoon. These were qualities that potentially said something about his character and his family background, but they were not ready substitutes for the security of a home or car to take possession of. In the aftermath of his loan rejection, Rajiv returned to his earlier cynicism regarding the nature of success in the liberalised Indian economy. He suggested that the same uneven distribution of power and privilege that had stranded him in non-permanent employment had now conspired to alienate him from the tools required to leave it. He argued, like many of his colleagues, that success in the Indian marketplace was skewed towards those already in possession of wealth and political influence. Experience taught him that acquiring these investments in the first place was more than likely facilitated by some type of corruption or criminality.

The lowering of wages and the erosion of employment security are important developments for all of Jamshedpur’s industrial citizens, and discourses which relate these developments to perceived infractions of labour legislation are usually well informed. Rajiv’s suggestion that his own lack of entrepreneurial success was the consequence of some type of unseen machination is perhaps a highly personal and rationalising commentary, which attempts to assign reason to the misfortune of daily life. A classically trained ethnographer may thus be inclined to interpret personalised commentaries on the inner workings of neoliberal capitalism through the same lens as Azande perceptions of witchcraft (Evans-Pritchard, 1937). We might even regard these discourses as something analogous to the metaphorical commentaries on dispossession which have been said to characterise the myths and rumours of subaltern communities (Comaroff and Comaroff, 1993; Scheper Hughes, 2000). This type of reading, however, would not be well-founded. What the modelling of personal misfortune represents in this context is a far more pervasive and insightful discourse on the relations of production, which suggests a political critique of the wider neoliberal project; that this critique speaks plainly and directly to the structures of the economy is significant.

For Jamshedpur’s industrial workers, the assumption that Indian capitalism benefits the corrupt, the wealthy and the powerful relates to a wider context of highly public elite criminal entrepreneurship, which makes such assumptions appear well founded. In Jamshedpur, the assassination of the Tata Workers’ Union president in 1993 following his resistance to early retirement initiatives (actually carried out on the steps of the union’s office at the behest of his colleagues) gives rise to an assumption that the union is in the grip of an organised criminal subversion, in which violent entrepreneurs enter trade union politics in order to extract bribes from industrial capitalism (Sanchez, 2010: 168ff). In this context, violence may well be popularly regarded as central to the hegemony of corrupt institutions, and as facilitating the casualisation of labour.

The assassination of the union’s president can be seen to have curbed the influence of an internal faction which was prepared to break with the organisation’s conservative agenda. The most immediate effect of this type of violence is the reassertion of authority within the union itself, dictating the future course of institutional politics. More broadly, the implicit threat of violence continues to intimidate further opposition to the union from workers and rival organisations. The result is an almost complete absence of radical collective action in Jamshedpur’s Tata industries, which weakens labour by virtue of consolidating the authority of corrupt trade union leaders. Tata workers’ knowledge of this recent history, and direct experience of its continued impact, inspires a political consciousness that logically aligns corruption and violence with the interests of corporate capital.

The common suspicion that the Tata company pays bribes to state politicians and legislators to forestall regularisation must likewise be properly contextualised, since the surrounding Jharkhand state is home to many politicians whose power and personal wealth coincides with highly publicised criminal charges for murder, kidnapping, assault and bribery. That the criminal travails of these state figures have been linked to corruption scandals in the once inviolable Congress Party lends discourses of elite criminal success an added air of plausibility, as does the fact that almost a third of Indian members of parliament are currently charged with a criminal offence (Sanchez, 2012a: 51–2).

The close relationship between corruption, violence and institutional authority has been a pronounced feature of the regional political economy since the 1970s, during which time significant numbers of career criminals began to enter the Indian parliament – a development that originated in the political use of violence during Indira Gandhi’s dictatorial ‘State of Emergency’ from 1975 to 1977 (Sanchez, 2012a). The widespread recognition that criminality has played a role in the Indian political economy for many years supports, rather than undermines the critique of corporate capital which contemporary Tata corruption discourses represent. What the corruption models of Rajiv and his colleagues articulate is a powerful popular indictment of the ideologies surrounding neoliberal progress in India. Far from having entered a new corporate age of transparency, professionalism and opportunity, liberalised India is perceived to function on the same corrupt, oligarchic terms as in the past, albeit with an altered cast of victims and a greater variety of business opportunities. This perception is well-substantiated in the public operation of parliamentary and labour politics.

Commentaries on corruption may well express discontent with the practices of elites in ways that inherently reproduce the structures of oppression. Certainly in Jamshedpur, the desire for permanent wage labour is at the heart of such commentaries. However, I am loath to call the discourses of Jamshedpur’s shop floors a ‘weapon of the weak’ (Scott, 1985), since the content of the critique tends to question the legitimacy of broader social structures. This is achieved by identifying the enduring relationships between a range of social institutions, and positing self-interest and corruption to determine these relations. That criminality and violence are said to be inherent to forms of political and economic success lends corruption discourses a certain ethical weight. However, these commentaries are primarily systemic as opposed to moral, and should be regarded as distinct from the broader modelling of epochal social decline which characterises Hindu cosmology (Pinney, 1999).

The commentaries of Jamshedpur’s dispossessed suggest a need to move beyond the ethnographic denial of an incisive political consciousness in corruption discourses. In studies of India, a dominant research focus upon localised and bureaucratic forms of corruption suggests a provincialising and mystifying series of outcomes from the discourses which surround them – principally the popular belief that corruption is concentrated in the petty institutions of the local state (Das, 2001; Gupta, 1995), and the conclusion that perceptions of corruption are exaggerated and primarily serve the interests of bribe-takers (Parry, 2000). Analyses of hegemonic discourses regarding petty bribe-taking are not appropriate analytic frameworks to approach the wider gamut of Indian corruption. Corruption discourses that conceptually unite the broader operations of capitalism, political power and criminality are wholly different types of commentaries from those surrounding petty bribery, and require a fuller consideration of the political consciousness which they entail (see Jeffrey, 2002; Wade, 1982). It is such a model that allows Rajiv to explain his lack of entrepreneurial success in highly political terms that encompass the global trend towards urban dispossession and flexible accumulation (Carbonella and Kasmir, 2008; Freeman, 1998, 2000; Genda, 2005; Gill, 2000; Harvey, 1987, 2003; Kasmir, 1999; Kosugi, 2008; Mathur, 1998; Sanchez, 2012b; Wilson, 1999).

Conclusion

The perceptive reader may well ask, if Rajiv cannot become an entrepreneur in Jamshedpur, then who can? And to what extent will this entrepreneur’s success really depend upon a relationship with corruption and criminality? These questions explore the role currently played by criminality in the Indian economy, and ask whether Rajiv’s discourses are nothing more than urban mythologies. Research which I conducted among entrepreneurs in Jamshedpur’s finance and debt collection sectors largely answers these questions. While the basic conclusions of this work have been published elsewhere, it is appropriate to briefly return to them in order to conclude this analysis (Sanchez, 2010, 2011).

While many sons of Tata workers opt for the uncertain rewards of a company career, some do not. Often these men’s fathers have accepted early retirement prior to their son’s coming of age, and as such they are ineligible to apply for training positions reserved for company children. Or, more rarely, some Tata sons simply choose to seek their fortunes elsewhere. Through either of these routes, a certain number of people find themselves outside of the company gates. A number of such men follow the same reasoning as Rajiv and attempt to become entrepreneurs.

Unsuccessful entrepreneurs typically made similar mistakes to Rajiv, in that their business proposals relied on personal investments that were wholly unmarketable. One young man whom I knew very well aspired to become a successful criminal entrepreneur and was consistently engaged in fanciful scams of an almost cinematic form (Sanchez, 2010: 179ff). This individual mistook the organised crime of Bollywood for its real-life incarnation, and as such believed that charismatic investments such as daring and ingenuity were substitutes for capital and powerful friends (Sanchez, 2010: 181). For this reason, his speculations never bore fruit. The successful entrepreneurs of the city’s finance sector pursued quite a different business model, and their investments were underwritten by more tangible forms of collateral that tacitly confirmed many of Rajiv’s suspicions. Wealthy entrepreneurs maintained a wide network of corrupt state officials, organised criminal enforcers, accountants, mediators and bureaucrats. Their continued success involved a flair for negotiating between apparently distinct skills and institutions, which is revealing of the relationship between criminality and India’s liberalised economy.

The most commonly pursued sources of profit for the successful entrepreneurs among whom I conducted research were debt collection contracts for high street banks and international companies. When appropriate, these goals were pursued through the informal patronage of a local politician or police officer. At other times, one’s firm might hire contacts in organised crime to enact coercion upon debtors or reluctant business partners (Sanchez, 2010: 175). In other contexts, it was prudent to rely on the more immediate powers of wealth, which was used to offer a well-placed bribe or dazzle one’s interlocutors with displays of largesse. Sources of profit loss, such as imprisonment or extortion were also minimised by skilfully applying a combination of political influence, violence and capital, which eroded any easy distinction between the formal and informal sector, between corruption and organised crime, and certainly between criminality and capitalism.

Whatever the ideology of neoliberal progress, business success in Jamshedpur was frequently dependent upon one’s ability to negotiate the applied use of violence and corruption, an observation analogous to that articulated in Anton Blok’s (1974) classic ‘violent entrepreneur’ analysis of the Sicilian Mafia. This criminality proceeds in ways that are integral to the operation of capitalism, and performs an important role in directing flows of wealth and power. This insight, while seldom articulated in South Asian research, is nonetheless not a new one. Comparative understandings of criminality and state corruption routinely benefit from a close analytic focus on the ways in which informal criminal practices not only intersect with, but also directly serve the interests of formal sector capitalism; particularly in contexts of economic liberalisation (Arlacchi, 1983, 1986; Gambetta, 1993; Handelman, 1994; Herzfeld, 2009; Kang, 2002; Varese, 2005; Volkov, 2002; Yurchak, 2002).

One of the basic conclusions to be drawn from this observation is that the movement of capital undermines the broad conceptual boundaries created by social scientists. The capital flows of corruption and criminality collapse many of the distinctions between formal and informal economies, and largely confirm Rajiv’s model of the origins of entrepreneurial success. This suggests a critical engagement with the ideological underpinnings of economic liberalisation that is significant, and questions the extent to which once secure areas of the urban formal sector regard corporate capital in politically favourable terms (Chatterjee, 2008). However, there is a broader lesson to be learnt here, which is that the tendency towards intellectual ‘purification’ in the social sciences can create analytic binaries that are as constraining as they are productive (Latour, 1993). Nowhere is this truer than in the easy opposition between a dispossessed, yet critical, informal sector and a secure, yet hegemonic, formal sector.