Abstract
Why do mediatized political scandals fail to effect discernable transformations of a systemic kind? This article offers one possible answer to this question by revisiting the media event known as “the Radia tapes scandal” to think through the reasons why, despite its explosive contents, the scandal changed little in the day-to-day workings of Indian political life. I argue that the noneventful temporality of mediatized political scandals is important to attend to because it is in the sphere of the everyday that we might be able to discern how corruption mediates relations between states and publics. That is to say: scandals do not change systems because systems rely on corruption, leaks, and information flows to render themselves stable. By fixating on leaks as a political tool, we run the risk of taking a system’s self-representation of disorder at face value. In making these points, I historicize the Radia affair within a longer arc of mediated corruption scandals in India and then juxtapose the leaks themselves to an artwork by the collective, CAMP.
Niira Radia, Parentheses
In the summer of 2017, as heatwaves began to announce their presence in various parts of the country, the shadows of two events—one recent, one more distant—offered little respite from the sun. The Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) antagonism toward even vaguely dissident media organizations like NDTV 1 was on full public display, very close to the 42nd anniversary of the Emergency, imposed by Prime Minister India Gandhi in 1975—an event that has, in the memory of independent India, become synonymous with the suppression of democratic norms and press freedom. At least two commentaries (Bhattacharjee, 2017; Sharma, 2017), which reflected on these events in the early days of summer, made passing mention of a scandal that had grabbed sensational headlines seven years prior and signified the high watermark of unethical complicity between the media and political parties—one moment in a long history of journalistic subservience to the powers that be: “remember the Niira Radia tapes?” one writer asked in parentheses (Sharma, 2017).
The nonchalant invocation of Niira Radia (almost as an afterthought in the context of more pressing concerns about the repression of journalists) bequeaths the events of 2010 a strange, nostalgic quality—“remember” Niira Radia? As we attempt to understand Narendra Modi’s attitude toward journalists, their tendency to hang on to every word of his, and the Emergency as a political event, Niira Radia hovers as a spectral presence of sorts, and the “Radia tapes” become another sign—another node—in a long itinerary of corruption within Indian media and political circles. The case of a Nairobi-born, Delhi-based corporate lobbyist who was entangled in the thickets of a multibillion dollar scam to fix contracts in the Indian telecom industry and cozied up to those populating the corridors of power, from heads of media companies to prominent ministers and politicians across party lines, caught the national imagination for a certain time between 2010 and 2011 (see Figure 1). Her shenanigans came to light after hundreds of hours of audio tapes were leaked to the public in 2010, resulting from the Income Tax Department’s sustained efforts to monitor her phone calls. Two current affairs magazines published many of the 5,851 conversations (Stacey, 2010) on their websites, setting off a chain of events that rattled the very foundation of the Indian establishment; senior journalists, political strategists, ministers, and industrialists were all caught in the crosshairs, with Niira Radia on the other end of the line.
But what quickly came to be called “the Radia tapes scandal” was not the first instance of massive political corruption and intrigue that had been caught on tape and leaked out into the open. The history of postindependent India, particularly the period after the 1960s, is replete with highly public cases of political corruption and scandals of various kinds. There were many before Radia, and many after. That the Radia tapes have, in 2017, become mere memory is not, therefore, surprising. Nor do I intend the citations aforementioned as a quiet form of rebuke to otherwise important critiques of the contemporary scenario. Instead, what passing references to Niira Radia reveal is a disjuncture between the present, when the scandal surrounding her has faded into parentheses, and 2010, when the Radia tapes seemed to pose a serious and formidable challenge to the reigning political and media status quo in the country. Many other scandals have erupted in the intervening seven years that, along with wiping Radia from public memory, have refocused anger toward other public enemies, or other issues that consume headlines today. What is more, many of the protagonists who had to duck for cover after the Radia tapes were leaked are key players in the media business today, framing the public consumption of pressing contemporary issues. 2
What follows, then, is not so much an autopsy of the events surrounding Niira Radia and her elite collaborators, but an attempt to understand this recession of memory which has become part and parcel of every major corruption scandal we can think of in India since 1947. Whether we think of the Bofors issue, former Bihar Chief Minister Lalu Prasad Yadav’s involvement in the so-called “Fodder Scam,” or the series of exposés surrounding the Commonwealth Games hosted in Delhi in 2010 3 —each case is defined by a certain fluctuation of public affect; intense rage and anger followed by the resumption of ordinary life. Nor has this seemingly eternal cycle of anger and ordinary weariness escaped the eye of all commentators and critics. Consider two moments.
In the course of a speech on the political economy of media, delivered during a meeting of the Indian History Congress in 2011, N. Ram (former editor of The Hindu) referred to economist Prabhat Patnaik’s discussion of two major media events of the twenty-first century: the coverage of the 2002 pogrom in Gujarat where thousands of Muslims were slaughtered under then Chief Minister Narendra Modi’s watch, and a 2001 sting operation by the online news portal Tehelka that exposed cultures of bribery and corruption in the BJP-led government’s defense ministry. The latter case, which was the first major digital media-based scandal in Indian history, has been the subject of much discussion, and I will have more to say about it below. About these events, Ram said: “Neither exposé made any discernable difference to political outcomes” (2011, p. 1303). Luckily for him, Patnaik had an answer which foreclosed any need for further interrogating this fairly important observation. Why did the representation of Muslim death and ministerial corruption have no political effect? Because Ram opined leaning on Patnaik, of “the ascendancy of a new kind of international finance capital, based on the globalization of finance, the spinelessness of nation states and political formations in the face of this ascendancy …” (ibid., p. 1304).
Now consider anthropologist William Mazzarella’s comments on the Tehelka sting in an essay (2006). Although the sting led to the resignation of people like Defense Minister George Fernandes, “soon it was back to business as usual. Fernandes was reinstated (he had in any case never been caught on video) and the commission instituted to investigate the sting dragged on and on, to waning public attention” (ibid., p. 474). The very journalists who had been hailed as courageous truth tellers were soon “subjected to a labyrinth of legal and paralegal harassment” (ibid., p. 474). By attacking the media, planting rumors, and fostering a lack of attention on the public’s part, the government pulled itself back from a point of crisis.
If Ram diagnoses the exposé’s lack of political bite in terms of the logics of finance capital, Mazzarella turns to the concept of mediation “as the ambiguous foundation of all social life … by which actually irreducible particularities of our experience are, apparently, reduced: in other words, rendered provisionally commensurable and thus recognizable and communicable in general terms” (ibid., p. 476). He then proceeded to unpack the Tehelka exposé and its fallout in terms of the ideology of e-governance, defined as the attempt to “synthesize a political language of transparency with a corporate managerial vision” (ibid., p. 476). In both cases, what interests me is less the explanatory mechanism—finance capital, e-governance—than this point in their texts when, briefly, Ram and Mazzarella identify the nonsignificance of the exposé in the long run. In the following pages, I want to hold on to that diagnosis and offer a different reading of the political scandal in India by taking off from moments like these—moments in which the eventual nonevent of the scandal becomes apparent and life remains much as it was before the exposure occurred.
My suggestion is threefold. First, the Radia tapes leak occurred at a particular historical juncture—almost simultaneous to the WikiLeaks data dumps in 2010—which we need to better understand. The concurrent unfolding of two high-level instances of elite corruption—one global and one national—framed much of the reception, Niira Radia received. Second, as Julian Assange’s changing fortunes (from celebrity hacker to embassy prisoner) show, vocabularies of “the event” are not necessarily the best ones for thinking about political scandals. Third, Ram and Mazzarella’s gestures to the possible futility of exposés inadvertently touches upon what is perhaps the most important issue at hand: the temporality of the political scandal in India (but arguably, also elsewhere in the world). Often, conditions of permanent mediation are assumed to dictate how a scandal unfolds today. Acceleration, viral circulation, information flows—these are the most common buzzwords associated with scandals of all kinds that erupt across mainstream and social media channels. The event seems to subsume everything. Skeptical of this reading, I venture that the temporality of scandals is determined not by technological media but by the citizens’ affective relation to the state. The optic of information leaks and data flows primarily thematizes scandals in terms of events. However, attending to the ebbs and flows of scandals, while keeping in mind a longer duration, pointedly raises the question of why the momentum of leaks cannot be sustained. Or, put another way: how do systems absorb shocks? 4
This last question is the most intriguing; and I think corruption is an important concept to grapple with in attempting to answer it. I will, therefore, trace Niira Radia’s recession from memory as a symptom of larger itineraries of corruption and transparency in India. Historicizing that event in relation to a plethora of other scandals and exposés, I will suggest that shifting our gaze from leaks to systems can be useful for discerning how corruption becomes a vector by which states maintain a sense of coherence. Corruption is a technique of government. Leaks, excesses, and uncontained flows are, therefore, not necessarily subversive but often integral to the mechanism by which systems find stability. A claim of this order rests on explicitly thinking systems outside of events. I am more interested in the ordinary than in why things return to that state. With all of this in mind, the next section will provide a brief history of the entwinement of media, corruption, and statecraft in India since the 1950s. I will then tackle the Radia tapes affair more centrally by engaging it within this wider ecology of corruption, and offering a reading of both the event and an artistic intervention into the event by the collective, CAMP. Finally, I will end by returning to some of the questions raised thus far to see how much closer we might be to understanding the political scandal in ordinary time.
Media, Corruption, Scandal
First things first. What exactly does corruption mean? The commonsensical use of the word turns on ideas of occlusion, unethical practice, and collusion between institutions and actors, cutting across various arenas of social life. According to the World Bank, corruption designates “the abuse of power for personal or group benefit,” whereas the United Nations Development Programme refers to it as “the abuse of public power for private benefit through bribery, extortion, influence, peddling, nepotism, fraud, or embezzlement” (cited in Kochanek, 2013, p. 265). For the sociologist Gunnar Myrdal, corruption approximates the “improper” leveraging of public influence for “selfish” gains (ibid., p. 365). These definitions share the commonsense view that corruption implicates public officials in wrongdoing; that it involves cozying up to state actors and using such proximity to “help” a specific interest group. Stanley Kochanek points out that while in the past, economists often viewed corruption positively as a method for effectively undercutting bureaucratic procedure and laborious red tape, they are increasingly coming around to the view that in the contemporary world corruption is a hindrance to economic prosperity, growth, and effective governance (ibid., p. 365).
Kochanek’s historical interpretation of corruption in India is well worth paying some attention to. He suggests that modern corruption dates easily back to the inception of British colonialism where the East India Company’s simultaneous involvement in commerce and governance opened the door for the kinds of abuse of power described above. After Independence, as a nominally socialist welfare state began to take shape, the promise of development and government jobs led, he argues, to the accelerated swelling of the Indian administrative machinery: “Corruption became increasingly widespread as the result of a socialist-oriented developmental state, centralized planning, comprehensive government control, and regulation of the economy, the growth of public sector enterprises and popular demands for government services and subsidies” (ibid., p. 368). In the 1960s, corruption emerged as such a major matter of public concern that the Congress party—deeply implicated in many scandals since the 1950s—instituted the Santhanam Committee on the Prevention of Corruption to look into the matter. But instead of stemming the tide, Kochanek demonstrates how, over the following decade, collusion between industrialists, businessmen, and the ruling Congress party further deepened—something he interprets as an effect of the license raj and a desire, on the part of capitalists, to keep the Communist party away from the reins of government.
It was precisely this nexus that, in the 1980s, led to numerous scams around defense deals, including “a billion-dollar scandal involving the purchase of Swedish Bofors 155mm howitzers” (ibid., p. 369)—what is commonly called the Bofors scam, and has haunted the Congress party ever since the initial moment when it destroyed Rajiv Gandhi’s prime ministerial reputation. The hits kept coming well into the 1990s, long after the decline of the Congress as India’s only major political force at the center. In the early years of that decade Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao was embroiled in a scandal when Harshad Mehta, a stockbroker facing charges for securities fraud, said he had bought Rao’s protection by giving him a 10-million-rupee payoff at his residence. Then, in the mid-1990s, the Hawala scandal burst into public attention when the CBI claimed that around 100 politicians (including three ministers in the Rao government) had taken massive bribes from businessmen. Eventually, Rao would become the first (and only) Indian prime minister to be convicted of corruption by a court of law—until the conviction was overturned some years later.
The period between the 1970s and 1980s is also notable for a vibrant tradition of investigative reporting which, according to Maya Ranganathan, simultaneously indexed a flourishing democracy with a strong, free press, and a democracy hollowed out and rotting from within through deeply ingrained corruption (2014). In her view, the ousting of editor Arun Shourie from The Indian Express in 1982 (after he had carried out at least two highly successful and uncomfortable campaigns demonstrating the corrupt practices of important Congress party functionaries), was “perhaps one of the first indicators of proprietors choosing to appease politicians for the sake of long-term business interests” (ibid., p. 70). The slow demise of investigative print reporting over the 1980s was accompanied by the rise of television, VHS, and eventually digital media by the turn of the millennium, creating new conditions for investigative reporting.
The 1980s is also the period when, according to Ravi Sundaram, “the state’s monopoly over media infrastructures started to recede and low-cost recording devices became available in local markets for widespread use” (2015, p. S301). With the rapid dissemination of cassette and video technology in this period, older regimes of media production, circulation, and consumption began to give way to a new landscape of uncertainties over which the government did not have full control. These uncertainties were further amplified during the 1990s, especially after economic liberalization and globalization ushered in major structural changes in Indian culture and society. According to a report published in 2010, “over half of India’s population (223 million households) has access to a television set, out of which 103 million have access to cable or satellite television, including 20 million households of DTH subscribers” (Chadha et al., 2010, p. 3). By 2017, scattered sources across different media suggest that the number has increased to 40 million. The same report claimed that there were “652.42 million” mobile phone connections in the country at the time (ibid., p. 11)—a number that, by 2016, had crossed 1 billion. Sundaram helpfully sums these tendencies up in arguing that
“the digital” was part of a larger destabilization of the media form in India beginning with cassette culture in the 1980s. Since then, more often than not, contemporary media was considered as a bad object which materialized in unstable assemblages that do not fit conventional accounts of media and modernity. (2009, p. 11)
It is at this juncture that we must locate the 2001 sting operation by Tehelka which inaugurated what is often theorized as a peculiarly digital moment in the history of media exposés. To use Kochanek’s summary, “Posing as arms dealers, Tehelka.com journalists videotaped the president of the BJP and other coalition party leaders accepting bribes to facilitate the prospects of obtaining a defense contract” (p. 370). Dubbed “Operation West End,” the revelations caused a sensation and captured the public imagination about what new media could enable. The details of the sting, its aftereffects, and varied public reactions have been documented and interpreted at great length by Mazzarella. He suggests that both central government and Tehelka were bought into a utopian narrative of e-governance where technology would offer total transparency without mediation, whereas the fact is that “when it came to politics, opacity and transparency were more mutually enabling conditions than polar opposites” (2006, p. 477).
That condition notwithstanding, technocratic faith in transparency does not quite explain why Operation West End ended up as a nonevent. It does not get us much closer to understanding the recuperative mechanism by which the state managed to regain coherence or stabilize itself. For that, we need to look more acutely at corruption than at technical fantasies of its eradication. Now, think, in this context, of the range of definitions of corruption I rehearsed above. From Kochanek to the World Bank and the United Nations, all agree that corruption represents private incursions into the public. But the words “public” and “private” are themselves not subject to any scrutiny. Their borders seem visibly distinct. In this reading, corruption emerges as a peculiarly self-evident category, the boundaries of which can be clearly drawn (private interference in the public); and the effects of which are entirely top-down (the elite preying on the masses). The medial narrative of Operation West End—the ideology of e-governance, the mutual imbrication of opacity and transparency, and the Tehelka journalists’ use of honey pots to lure politicians into taking bribes—shows, however, that these assumptions are deeply problematic. The era of sting operations and surveillance cameras does not inaugurate a new paradigm for privacy so much, as it reveals the fault lines within the old paradigm which assumed it knew where the lines between public and private were drawn. 5 If this is the case, then we have to reassess corruption as a form of systemic knowledge or a set of management practices which throws categorical assumptions into crisis.
A different account is found in Akhil Gupta’s work, where narratives of corruption are taken to provide privileged points of analytical access to popular imaginations of the state. Extending anthropological engagements with the state, Gupta argues that “the materiality of files, orders, memos, statistics, reports, petitions, inspections, inaugurations, and transfers, the humdrum routines of bureaucracies and bureaucrats’ encounters with citizens, is the stuff out of which the meanings of states are constituted” (2005, p. 28). Not only do these infrastructures, institutions, and practices make the state a palpable entity in the lives of ordinary people but they also point to the ways in which corruption proliferates within the social body through enduring forms of structural violence (ibid., p. 29). Gupta’s approach to corruption narratives thus emphasizes how invisible forms of violence embedded within systems of government continue to exert influence, even as the idea of the state as a monolithic behemoth is fractured by popular representations of corruption.
This view also finds support from a different angle in Shiv Visvanathan’s writings on what he calls “the necessity of corruption”—a phenomenon which, he argues, challenges dominant understandings of the modern state. His work contains tantalizing hints about the transitory, interstitial spaces that everyday forms of corruption inhabit. His restrained enthusiasm for everyday corruption rests on several critical observations: that corruption makes permeable the boundaries between the commons and the state, that it “domesticates power” by making it approachable, and that it “extends families into the state” (2011, n.p). Visvanathan suggests persuasively that in societies like India, corruption might be thought of as a kind of knowledge economy—often called “tactic knowledges” in other disciplines (Collins, 2010; Elyachar, 2012)—which gives specific individuals or communities access to power, once they learn to read the language of governance. Within such a framework, corruption and the system it corrupts are, to a large extent, contiguous. By suggesting that corruption “is the entropy created by a tiny modern system as it corrodes the rest of the world,” Visvanathan argues that the most intriguing aspects of corruption have to do with the interface between publics and abstract systems. Thus, “To understand corruption one has to understand organizational illiteracy. Most citizens … need modes of negotiation which enable them to live in and with these systems” (ibid.).
The formulation of “living in and with” is useful to stay with because it eloquently critiques neat distinctions between elites and masses, the public and the private, while simultaneously defamiliarizing notions of the state as a singular entity. The idea of corruption as a narrative, or as a repertoire one develops to learn to live with, indicates that systems might in fact hold themselves together by allowing spaces of corruption to flourish. This is part of the strategy for shock absorption, I mentioned earlier. On a certain register, it might appear as if the recent turn toward studying the materiality of bureaucracy—in the form of paperwork, memos, folders, etc.—complements Gupta and Visvanathan’s analysis. Gupta’s references to files, memos, reports, and practices gesture in the direction of such a point of alliance. Matthew Hull’s work on Pakistani bureaucracy, where he discusses documents by focusing on the “problems raised by the recognition of the relative autonomy of objects” (2012, p. 5) is an exemplary case in point. The moves made in this emerging field are indebted to Mazzarella’s claim about the permanence of mediation and the impossibility of unmediated forms of transparency. Objects, here, become mediators of social relations and must, therefore, be studied on their own terms. Hence, for Hull, attending to graphic artifacts—documents, files, and notations—becomes a critical way of thinking “materially” about bureaucracies.
As Federico Pérez writes in an important intervention, this approach suggests that “the material qualities of documents, their circulations and inscriptions, actively shape governmental practice by projecting authority, diffusing individual responsibility, and enabling the formation of coalitions around them” (2016, p. 216). In other words, a material approach to bureaucracy inherently conceptualizes corruption as the product of a messy system constituted by objects, actors, and networks of various sorts. Within this optic, people become nodes within a wider network of human–nonhuman alliances that invariably dictate the life of a system. I follow Pérez in cautioning against this view because, as he argues, “the scholarship of bureaucratic materiality and technicalities risks blurring the distinction between agency and reification by overlooking the ways in which social actors themselves mobilize discourse about the power of objects” (ibid., p. 217). Pérez is right to insist that by analyzing the unruliness of documents and material objects, one unwittingly accepts bureaucracy’s “own strategic attempts to portray bureaucracy as an unruly system” (ibid., p. 218).
In other words, if we cannot go along with Kochanek, the World Bank, and the United Nations in their inattention to the slipperiness of the public/private distinction, we also cannot fully submit to Hull’s vision where materiality ironically, papers over the complexities of how institutions perform a sense of self-identity. Let us put this less verbosely: Gupta and Visvanathan correctly keep their eyes on the state, even if in fragmented form. The need to develop modes of cohabiting with systems points, implicitly, to the enduring importance of those systems. If we take the unruliness of documents to be synonymous with the fracturing of administrative power, we actually take an institution at its own word. This is exactly the moment where shock absorption comes back into play. Corruption is not a moment of excess or evidence of the messiness of bureaucratic apparatuses. It is, on the contrary, a form of shock absorption. Lack of control, mess, incompletion, and unruliness—these are all techniques by which abstract systems like administrative entities represent themselves. Only a perfectly functioning system can be understood as breaking when a catastrophic event explodes. If that system already claims the status of a certain amount of brokenness, then it never actually fully crumbles. The miasma of bureaucratic practice, the apparent haphazard nature of its material life, is, therefore, part of its coping mechanism—something which allows it to survive when a really threatening leak or overflow does occur.
Corruption, then, is not merely that which allows disempowered people access to powerful structures. It is also a mechanism which gives systems the means of surviving without falling apart. Corruption is a panacea for regimes which want to control their populations but do not have the means to do so. In this sense, Mazzarella is not entirely correct. E-governance is not a fantasy that does not recognize its own status as fantasy. The dream of transparency without mediation is understood to be a dream. That is the condition of the state’s ability to absorb shocks to the system—to not labor under the false delusion that it can somehow achieve total technocratic control. In fact, quite the opposite: knowing full well that it will never be able to realize some utopian horizon of e-governance, the state performs a certain logic of completion which scholars like Mazzarella end up taking on face value. Therefore, one need not be surprised when newspapers report that 3 lakh peoples’ biometric data has gone missing (Lewis, 2013), or that although one can get Aadhaar cards with ease, deleting dead people from the database is a considerably tougher process (Devulapalli, 2016). These are not necessarily failures of an ideal condition of smooth governance, but the recognition of concessions governments must make in the service of an unrealizable fantasy. It is the system in a mode of permanent preparation for shocks.
From this point of view, Niira Radia’s tapes must be understood as one node in a longer itinerary of political corruption, not as a radical rupture with the status quo. Historicizing the tapes is important so that we might remain attentive to the fact that there was nothing particularly novel either about the exposé or about the information contained therein—at least for the public at large. When the Radia tapes exploded onto the scene nine years after Operation West End, critics often latched on to them as examples of the political power of leaks—an argument analogous to the one Hull makes about documents. This tendency, I will suggest later, was a product of that particular historical moment when leaks and data dumps suddenly appeared to offer the pos-sibility of political transformation. Their response also overemphasized the leak as a valuable form of political subversion without realizing that, in the longue durée of corruption I have sketched in this section, leaks are not unaccounted for. They function as a technology for governing ever-shifting and unstable boundaries between the formal and the informal, the state and its subjects, and the public and private spheres. Leaks, excess, and overflows might be necessary for systems to maintain a sense of self-identity and control without needing to monitor every aspect of their functioning. 6
Tapes/Leaks
The connection between what Mazzarella identifies as the ideology of e-governance and the Radia tapes, therefore, turns more around concepts of privacy, opacity, and transparency than with strict continuities between the earlier moment (2001) and the present one (2010–2017). Which is to say that by 2010, notions of e-government were perhaps no longer as innocent as they had been at the onset of the millennium. 2010 was the year when, beginning in February, WikiLeaks dropped a bombshell on the world by releasing a trove of documents related to the American war in Iraq, including the by-now infamous “Collateral Murder” video which showed soldiers killing unarmed civilians in cold blood. A few months later, in November, Open Magazine and Outlook—two prominent Indian weekly news magazines—published the contents of a series of wiretapped phone conversations between Niira Radia, a corporate lobbyist, and a number of government ministers, politicians, journalists, and captains of industry. As I mentioned at the outset, these conversations were part of a massive archive of recordings (in excess of 5,000 conversations), resulting from the Income Tax Department’s concerted effort to monitor Radia’s phone between 2008 and 2009.
Both the WikiLeaks data dumps and the publication of the Radia tapes drew on the ideology of transparency Mazzarella discusses in relation to e-government. By their very nature, leaks—whether by conspiracy-theory buffs like Assange or by establishment-oriented outlets such as Open and Outlook—turn to transparency in search of a moral justification for the act of exposure. The rhetoric of transparency underpinning interventions in this mode relies on the denial of mediation, a condition where those transmitting the news produce themselves as mere carriers of information who do not frame that information in any way. As we will see presently, Open and Outlook deployed such arguments repeatedly in defense of their actions. Assange too believes exactly in this kind of data-oriented campaign—a fact that becomes clear when we juxtapose his style of information war to Edward Snowden’s more measured and considered revelation of intelligence documents a few years later. In India at the time, however, the Radia tapes and WikiLeaks combined to raise the possibility of a radically dissensual form of politics premised on subversion, sabotage, leaks, and excess; power would be unveiled by the extraction of that which it could not contain. This, many believed, was the central lesson of a new landscape of info-politics.
Needless to say, transparency conceived of in such a manner is deeply problematic, as many commentators have pointed out (Birchall, 2014; Han, 2015; Pasquale, 2015). Sophisticated arguments in defense of the need for secrecy (Birchall, 2011; Horn, 2011; Schudson, 2015) and the right to opacity (Blas, 2016; Demos, 2009; Villiers, 2012) have sufficiently complicated the naïve idea that full transparency is either desirable or possible—or that the agent of transmission is ever simply a messenger. Nonetheless, the Radia tapes were received by the public a few months after WikiLeaks arrived on the global stage, and a new phase of euphoria about digital circulation and the political possibilities of the leak captured the public imaginary. 7 The proliferation enabled by digital media was not incidental to this account, where the most significant thing about the Radia tapes appeared to be the technical infrastructures they revealed or leveraged: from USB sticks, which were required to circulate massive amounts of data, to editing technology, which made the permanent recombination of this data into new patterns easy. In such a view, the Radia tapes appeared as a watershed moment, or as a particular kind of crisis event that exposed the deep malaise within Indian media, corporate, and political culture. Digital infrastructure and the politics of virality often took center stage in analyses of the event (Chadha, 2012; Chadha & Koliska, 2016; Mudgal, 2015; Nayar, 2014).
For instance, in a short but provocative 2012 essay, taking off from the Radia tapes, called “How to Feel a Leak,” the Mumbai-based artist group, CAMP, suggested that leaks—infrastructural and informational—require cultivating new modes of affects and engagements. “Leaks are the exact opposite of a system’s ability to translate everything into its own terms. It is when something internal escapes such terms altogether, and can produce unforeseen relations and operations, that it is said to leak,” they argue (2012). Leaks can potentially overwhelm and undermine the normal functioning of systems. CAMP was careful not to valorize the leak beyond a certain threshold, pulling back immediately after making the suggestion above by arguing that, of course, in practice, systems have figured out how to reintegrate leaks. The crucial thing for them is not the leak itself, but how it is interpreted and felt. Deploying the image of a fog catcher, CAMP argued that the mere presence of leaks—information or effluents—is like a gathering of clouds without rain, a fog. We need interpreters who can help us figure out how to feel a leak, how to read its presence in an environment. Importantly, the flipside of the fog-catcher image was the implicit sense that neither critique nor celebration was sufficient responses to leaks. Something else—something entirely novel—was necessary. I am struck by how this rhetorical strategy to take leaks seriously requires heavy investment in certain (seemingly) transparent propositions about the exhaustion of criticality, the vibrancy of matter, and the constant desire for the generation of “new” methods of sensation or interpretation.
Moreover, this sentiment about leaks is not CAMP’s alone. In a range of works on infrastructures, medial, or otherwise, leaks are held up as byproducts of a system’s routine functioning. In some of these cases, leaks are harnessed for their political possibilities (cf. Anand, 2015; Coleman, 2013). The obvious fact of the initial observation about the ontological incompleteness of infrastructure notwithstanding infrastructural works on leakage function with a strange aporia that is discernable in both CAMP’s provocation and Nikhil Anand’s meticulous ethnography of water infrastructures in Mumbai. Throughout one essay, Anand makes two claims which are, on some level, incompatible with one another. On the one hand, he argues that state engineers tasked with repairing the city’s water infrastructure have to know “both how to repair leakages and when to ignore them” (2015, p. 308). On the other hand, he consistently takes the unrepaired leak to be evidence of “gaps of authority and control” (ibid., p. 326). How can one hold both positions simultaneously? How can the state be both knowingly ignorant and ontologically incomplete? Following exactly the track that Pérez critiques, Anand resolves the contradiction by suggesting that the state, in this context, neither exercises total control nor is it an effect of discourse. It is, in fact, “a social-material assemblage, an unstable process of relations” (ibid., p. 325).
The call for novelty in CAMP’s text and the production of the assemblage as an explanatory framework in Anand’s are troubling because they appear to end at the point where one must begin. As if merely stating the “need” for “new” methods and “feelings” is enough; as if simply describing an “assemblage” of “heterogeneous relations” can excuse the hesitance to pin those relations down. Both are clarion calls for someone else to pick up on and develop. My slightly polemical response here is that the desire for the new, the lunge for a vocabulary of assemblages, and the faith in the exhaustion of criticality, all produce their own forms of circulating theoretical currency that move across objects as viral media does across screens. So, regardless of whether the “matter” under consideration is nuclear waste, municipal water, or encrypted data, calls for the development of novel modes of interpretation are assumed to provide a sufficient response, but the response itself remains forever suspended in an indefinite future.
In my reading, I have been suggesting that leaks might actually allow a corrupt system to function and maintain a sense of coherence, imbuing its apparatus with strategies for shock absorption. To interpret the leak is, then, to focus too intently on the event without recognizing that in and of itself no scandal in the history of Indian public life has led to any long-term transformation of the system as such. It is to take the apparent evidence of leakiness, disorder, or unruliness at face value without realizing that these might be part of a system’s repertoire for self-maintenance. This is why I am insistent that neither the valorization of leaks nor the relentless critique of e-governance can fully account for the failure of political scandals. In the former case, one diagnoses incompletion and ends up with an assemblage. In the latter, one takes the state to task for not recognizing the impossibility of transparency. In both cases, the interior life of systems remains peripheral as specific actors’ accounts are taken for what they appear to be.
Now, I cite CAMP here because I want, somewhat cheekily, to read CAMP against themselves in what follows, by juxtaposing their almost-utopian faith in leaks to an audio–visual-textual piece of theater they produced around the Radia tapes called Hum Logos. But to gauge the full import of the work, we must first understand the main axis along which public debate unfolded when the tapes were published.
The tapes provided ample testimony of the nexus between media groups, politicians, and corporations in the country. Some of Niira Radia’s conversations (with political heavyweights such as N. K. Singh and Kanimozhi, daughter of DMK chief M Karunanidhi) pointed to high level jockeying for political positions—including the placement of cabinet rank ministers. Other extended conversations, which inevitably bled into talk of ministerial positions, occurred between Radia and prominent industrialists. These gestured to the nefarious ways in which oil and gas policy was being fixed, and how Radia herself was implicated in the way a massive scam played out around the allocation of 2G spectrum. The tapes allowed the public—perhaps for the first time on such a scale—to eavesdrop on internal discussions between the powerful related to, for instance, strategies by which intercorporate rivalries could be presented to the public as a matter of public interest. They gave people at large auditory access to the corrupt functioning of a political elite that is in cahoots across the board. The mutual lubrication by which a system functions, the backroom deals where law and politics occlude their methods of operation, were starkly laid bare over the course of many recordings. The tapes raise several intriguing questions worth discussing—from specific points of policy to ethical cultures of public life. But I want to consider briefly how both sides—the publishers and the accused—reacted to the tapes to show how in the public debate around the Radia tapes scandal, transparency was mobilized as a term that rendered corruption invisible.
Those who made the effort to listen to the conversations online realized that the hours of material contained in the tapes consisted of both relevant and vast quantities of irrelevant, private tête-à-têtes that had no real bearing on matters of legislation or public policy. Nonetheless, these bits and pieces of gossip—touching on fashion accessories and possible sexual relationships between the recorded parties—were as much a part of the “evidence” the tapes contained as discussions of petroleum policy, telecommunications, and the fixing of ministerial positions within government. Consequently, it is easy to position the Radia tapes as artifacts which speak to voyeurism and public fascination with the private lives of well-known people. Famous personalities, political bigwigs, and celebrity journalists were all made intimately familiar in these recordings—through their mobile phone ringtones, their unselfconscious speech patterns, and the consistent use of their first names, as only friends or loved ones are wont to do. While these insights are important, privacy is not necessarily the most productive framework for understanding the function of the tapes in the public imaginary, since ideas like voyeurism can account for one kind of interest (in eavesdropping on the lives of the rich and famous) but not others (like horror at the manipulation of bureaucratic norms of propriety). Rather than violation of privacy, I want to focus, therefore, on the reasons why the tapes were released in the manner they were.
This had to do, in large part, with the infrastructural logic of storage media. Once in possession of thousands of hours of sensational conversations, the editors of Open and Outlook decided to release these recordings as “raw data.” In effect, they claimed that the information they were offering the public was both transparent and unmediated. Beginning with the wesbites of these two magazines, the conversations were uploaded to numerous other websites, transcribed in part, and accessed by users in the form of clips without any decisive point of origin or end. On the other side, those recorded—especially figures like senior journalist Vir Sanghvi, who was accused of writing biased opinion pieces on an important corporate struggle around oil pricing and policy—argued that forensic testing had shown (with 99 percent certainty) that his voice on the tapes could have been edited (2011). For the accused, the tapes were not raw, but had been thoroughly cooked in such a manner that conversations were distorted, and therefore unrepresentative. In effect, the public debate on the Radia tapes was centered less on the content of the tapes themselves than contestations over whether the data contained in the tapes was genuine or constructed. Sanghvi, like others affected by leaked information or sting operations in different cases, maintained that because the tapes were edited and not transparent, they gave the impression of corruption even where there was none.
What is notable about this back and forth is the rhetoric of malleability deployed by people like Sanghvi in speaking about digital data. For them, it was crucial to play up a commonsensical imagination of digital inscriptions as impermanent, ephemeral, and unstable. By doing so, it could be “proved”—at least on the level of television studio debates—that what was being labeled as transparent, and in the public interest, was actually opaque and mired in interpersonal rivalries. Similarly, when the editors of Open and Outlook claimed that they were simply presenting raw data, they propagated the myth of the digital as a domain of pure transparency where information speaks for itself (Gitelman, 2013). In effect, the public discussion of the scandal was invested less in disentangling the difficult minutiae of corruption than in putting forward a particular fantasy of transparent access based, in large part, on a polarized understanding of digital information. The framework of malleability envisioned digital data as inherently fragile, open to corruption, and therefore, unreliable; whereas the optic of raw data fetishized that same information as pure, unmediated, and (to some extent) beyond interpretation.
There is a case to be made for attending to the infrastructural basis of these claims by accommodating the forensic turn in legal and cultural theory (Forensic Architecture, 2014; Keenan & Weizman, 2012; Weizman, 2012). One could, in this vein, argue that both parties vulgarized and oversimplified the forensic and evidentiary weight of digital data—by either portraying it as too open to manipulation or presenting it as forever being in a moment prior to mediation. We know by now, through the work of numerous scholars, that digital information has far more complex dynamics than either of these positions allows (Blanchette, 2012; Kirschenbaum, 2008). But I would suggest that forensic materiality is not helpful for understanding the political contours of the Radia scandal in longue durée. Where Vir Sanghvi argued that corrupted information had ensured no one could have transparent access to the “real” content of his calls, the magazines countered that the transparency of the tapes exposed the “reality” of corruption. In the ensuing noise of television debates and public commentaries, what fell through the cracks was the very question of corruption as a system constitutive of Indian public life. Paradoxically, the clamor for transparency rendered corruption opaque. Here, then, I turn to Hum Logos for another angle on events.
Ringtones
In a work nominated for the 2012 Skoda Prize, CAMP presented the Radia tapes in the form of a screenplay and audiovisual theater, titled Hum Logos (see Figure 2). The product of a year’s labor spent listening to, transcribing, editing, and annotating the tapes, CAMP’s work was displayed at the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi in the early 2013. Presented in the form of both a printed screenplay and an audiovisual piece running on loop, CAMP narrativized one of the many threads of corruption running through the Radia tapes. In their retelling of events, Vir Sanghvi returned as a prominent presence. Sitting in the gallery and listening to the tapes, I was struck by the fact that even though I knew the conversations I was hearing had been edited, they retained a certain evidentiary power. In fact, their evidentiary stature was oddly enhanced through artistic intervention which effectively excised signal from noise—or made the disentangling of the two easier to discern. In spite of the presence of the specter of editing, what stayed with me—and other visitors too, I suspect—was not CAMP’s authorial presence, but the revelatory power of the tapes. With each scandalous remark, with each new plot twist, and with each new corrupt alliance, the plot thickened and excitement built up. A narrative of corruption that one knew to be true prevailed over what was, unambiguously, edited material.
CAMP’s narrativization of evidence in the Radia tapes remained quite close to the question of forensic materiality—the very thing that was up for grabs in the disagreement over the malleability and transparency of data. CAMP exploited the infrastructural capacities of storage media to turn the debate on raw versus constructed data on its head. By openly admitting that they had edited the tapes, and by turning the tapes into theater, CAMP suggested that they were interested in moving beyond the binary of transparency and malleability. Their theatrical reworking questioned the very idea of rawness and unmediated data. Data is never transparent; it is either framed by those who release it into the public (through narrative or reportage) or by the public itself (that accesses that information in a nonlinear, haphazard manner online).
Obviously, if subjected to forensic analysis, CAMP’s work would be revealed as untrue, manipulated, and edited. However, it was precisely this subversion of the forensic that allowed the evidentiary content of the Radia tapes to take center stage in their performative iteration. Presented as audiovisual theater, the burden of authenticity disappeared because anyone listening understood that a theatrical work would, naturally, follow a certain narrative logic. In announcing the centrality of editing software to their operation, CAMP forced viewers to really listen to the content of the tapes without getting distracted by claims about in/authenticity. In some ways, their intervention was nothing more than a successful attempt to recapture the ways in which individuals accessed the tapes in the first place. How one read the information contained in the Radia tapes depended entirely on which tape one played first, whose voice one wanted to hear, and how one wanted to link the different conversations together. The mobile logic of information and the individualized capacity to download, store, and play this information back at will ensured that users edited the information they heard and stitched together a narrative.
In “Act II” of the work, now available on YouTube, 8 CAMP provides what might be the clearest rationale for their intervention. Conversations between the protagonists are spliced with annotations that explicate bureaucratic acronyms, and a narrative thread which gives viewers a chance to understand the artists’ role as authors. Two intertitles slipped into the piece are worth attending to.
For Aristotle, rhetoric had three modes—ethos (moral authority of the speaker), pathos (emotional state of being of the listener), and logos (the argument being presented),
We could add to this—vicari-os (via a third, or indirectly), voraci-os (ruthless, driven by competition), and vir-os (hoping to influence a whole population).
The last of these, “vir-os,” is obviously a playful reference to Vir Sanghvi and his blatant attempts to publish in his national columns, opinions that were privately dictated by Niira. The title of the piece, Hum Logos, even more playfully combines the central message of the work: the Hindi word hum (“we”) attached to a mangled pluralization of the word log (“people”), approximates not only the democratic motto “We the People” but also the name of Barkha Dutt’s flagship program aired during primetime on Sunday nights on NDTV. At the same time, “logos,” the first intertitle informs us, refers to the argument being presented. In this case, we might ask which argument? Those made by Radia and her compatriots or the ones forwarded by CAMP?
The question is not an innocent one, as the artists well know, since the entire edifice of the argument rests on the other two factors—the moral authority of the speaker and the emotional state of the one(s) listening. Eyal Weizman’s forensic theater rears its head at this juncture because, of course, one of the most crucial arguments he makes (often overlooked in the rush to adjudicate on the materiality of forensic objects) concerns the forum. As he points out throughout his work, forensics is not merely about the speech of objects. It is, perhaps as importantly, about the space where the object in question is presented and who speaks on its behalf. The argument, therefore, is part of the forensic apparatus; and the moral authority of the speaker is integral to how the object is received by the public—the object, in this case, being either the tapes or CAMP’s version of them.
The second intertitle serves to clarify matters a little bit. Unlike the first, which actually adopts an ambiguous stance in relation to the speaking voice (leaving us to wonder whether the person making the argument is the voice coming through the screen or the editor who arranged that voice in sequence), the second intertitle is adorned by clarity: the clarity of critique. If what “we” are adding to the Aristotelian formulation is “the third,” “ruthlessness,” and “influence,” then it is pretty clear who “we” are referring to. The Vir or vir-os here stands in for Barkha Dutt, N. K. Singh, and all of the other voices as the presenter(s) of the argument in question. Through the back door, almost unseen due to its playfulness, critique has silently reentered the fray. From hum logos, we have moved to a “virus” inf(l)ecting the whole population.
There is, in this intertitle, a perfectly useful and reasonable comment on the permanence of mediation—not only in the invocation of thirds (mediating forces) but also in the “os” which might very easily reference operating systems. Operating systems in turn might refer—to follow the logic of this mise-en-abyme—both to the power of computational media “and” government as an operating system. Is it not that the main thrust behind the claim of a vir-os influencing the whole population is how a government formats its subjects? Somewhere, between the first and second intertitles, between Aristotle and universal computation, we have slipped from the precarious ambiguity of aural experience to an implicit critique Noam Chomsky might be proud of. The viros—that almost violent image of mind control and brainwashing—emerges, then, as the apotheosis of leaky politics. The exhaustion of critique and the celebration of excess ends up reinforcing the critical impulse with almost caricatured force.
But I am nonetheless drawn to this work, despite the specter of manufactured consent; still taken in by it, and held mesmerized as a listener. So, I want to insist on reading CAMP against CAMP. I want to insist on editing out the second intertitle and staying a bit longer with the implications of the first. The point is not to dissect Aristotle but to unpack the significant implications of triangulating speaker, listener, and argument. Because let us remember that the mediating factor—the “vicari-os” third—in the equation between speaker and argument is the listener. And what do CAMP (through Aristotle) alert us to about the listener? Her emotional state of mind—something which, in this case, extends from the interior self of an individual listener to the affective inner life of the public as such. If the speaker’s moral authority and the veracity of the argument must be refracted through the affective condition of the receiver of that speech, then we might say that in the final calculus neither morality nor veracity counts for much. It is public mood and public affect that determines how an object is received in the forum and the impact it has—regardless of the speaker, be it Vir Sanghvi, Niira Radia, or CAMP. The mediator determines how it will incorporate what is being transmitted. The vir-os cannot influence a public that does not already invest in a certain narrative of the nation and its economic future. Writing evocatively about narratives of “total corruption” in the Argentinian context, anthropologist Sarah Muir begins to pick at this knot a little bit:
The diagnosis of total corruption marked a historical stance widely adopted within the post-crisis Buenos Aires middle class. That stance inverted the familiar idea that national history is a teleological progression toward a better future. In twentieth-century Argentina, as in so many places, that generic narrative, with its accompanying civilizational and racial imaginaries, had long posited the middle class as the protagonist of a national project oriented toward the telos of modernity. At the turn of the twenty-first century, the economic collapse seemed to many the death-blow to that long faltering project. (2016, p. 130)
Doubtless, we cannot fully square the Indian experience with the Argentinian one. But at the same time, it does not take a gigantic leap to suggest that a certain loss of futurity, a certain sense of exhausted repetition defines the Indian public’s relationship to organs of the state. The frequent deployment of religious rhetoric to goad communal sentiments—the very racial and civilizational tropes Muir invokes—guards exactly against this predominant sense of exhaustion; an exhaustion that accompanies the constant mobilization of tacit knowledges to navigate how one lives in and with systems. From another direction, Lauren Berlant has called this form of life “cruel optimism” (2011) and Elizabeth Povinelli has connected such modes of existence to the distribution of authority within the regime she refers to as “late liberalism” (2011).
I want to hold on to these insights: to take them seriously and ask what we might discern about the relationship between publics and states (mediated vicari-osly by corruption), if we accord the listener her place as an emotional subject. At this point, the question of forensic materiality comes apart ever so slightly and opens out in other directions where—legal arguments notwithstanding—the reception of an object depends far less on the conditions of its distribution than the forms of life it plugs into. In Hum Logos, CAMP holds the door ajar for us to glimpse into this precise arrangement of things: how “we the people” receive an argument. And just as on Barkha Dutt’s often meandering and frequently superficial primetime show, the argument being presented dissolves in an outpouring of (sometimes meaningless) public emotion.
This is not a fancy way of saying that what appears as argument is actually an address to emotion. Quite the opposite, in fact: I am suggesting that the perennially blurred lines that render the separation of reason from emotion untenable underwrite a condition where the public and the private—especially in hypermediated times—cannot be held apart. CAMP holds the door to this possibility ajar, but quickly shuts it in the face of a triumphant virus. By contrast, I want to remain with them on the first intertitle: a moment when, by shattering the distinction between private and public, reason and emotion, and speech and reception, they ably show how much one misses the mark by theorizing corruption as Kochanek, the World Bank, and the United Nations do. That version of corruption where clearly private interests bleed the public dry holds on to a utopian moment that was prior to such contamination—prior to the invention of the vir-os. But if the Indian operating system was already corrupted when the East India Company was at the helm of affairs, then what point of origin are we in search of where the public and the private were not always already fused together?
The circuit between listener, speaker, and argument indexes the exhaustion of a modernist project oriented toward a historical telos, where prosperity would rain down on everyone. What has changed between Jawaharlal Nehru’s time and ours is not the nature of corruption (which has evolved along its own historical axis). What has evaporated is a certain sense of faith in the state as an institution one could still manipulate toward one’s interests. Niira Radia’s India is an India of the exhausted many; those who listen to the tapes and revel in its gossipy details, but who cannot even be bothered to be influenced by a vir-os like Vir. Their internal storage capacity is taken up by too much other stuff to care about Mukesh Ambani or his machinations. This situation forecloses both the future as a horizon of utopian action and the state as an object one could potentially turn in another direction. What remains at the end of the 5,000-odd phone calls, the singular memory any listener walks away with, is Niira Radia’s ringtone. It is the most pathetically apt critique of our contemporary condition: ‘Pal pal pal pal har pal har pal/Kaise katega pal har pal har pal’ (How will this moment pass/how will any moment pass?).
Ponzi Schemes and Fried Chicken
Much of what I have said in the previous pages draws (at least partly) on the recent work of Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, who make a decisive case for the criminalization of the state form under the conditions of what they have previously called “millennial capitalism” (2001). In their most recent book, they write of “the ‘corruption’ laced seamlessly into the fabric of the state” as a “systemic feature of contemporary political economy,” which has “obfuscated, perhaps more than ever before, received distinctions between conventional business practice and organized crime, brokerage and bribery, franchising and racketeering, proprietary rent-taking and piracy, legitimate and illegitimate force-for-sale, venture speculation, and Ponzi-style skullduggery” (2016, pp. 32–33). Long ago, in the shadows of the collapse of the Soviet Union and dire predictions of the “end of history,” John Comaroff wrote this fragment which, today, resonates with the sentiments offered earlier:
Is it sacrilegious to recall here Malcolm Bradbury’s Doctor Criminale, a novel about a mythical postmodern philosopher, a fictional fusion of Foucault and Derrida? At a crucial moment in Bradbury’s story, the ex-Hungarian ex-wife of the hero, one Gertla Riviero, reflects, upon the fin de siècle transition to democracy and free market economics in Central Europe and Latin America (Bradbury 1992:276): “Democracy, the free market,” she asks, “do you really think they can save us? … Marxism [was] a great idea, democracy just a small idea. It promises hope, and it gives you Kentucky Fried Chicken.” (1994, p. 34)
The diagnostic about democracy (and Marxism) underlying the latter essay is less important for me than the feeling that the greatest gift democratic transformation offers is Kentucky Fried Chicken. If scandals, scams, and media events—the virtual criminalization of the state—is the real telos of democratic progress toward a prosperous future, then Kentucky Fried Chicken is the consolation prize. And no mean prize at that.
This juxtaposition between the Ponzi scheme state and banal commodification is my entry into Niira Radia in 2017—Niira Radia as parentheses and nonevent. The itineraries of transparency and corruption, I have attempted to trace earlier, mitigate against valorizing leaks or excesses as moments of subversion. The eventual futility of every major media or corruption scandal cautions against fixating on events as the ultimate objects of political analysis. As nonevent Niira Radia provides less the evidence of corruption than the evidence of what corruption can do to the body politic. How it can exhaust the social body, stretch it thin, and wear it out. Once again, it appears that Niira Radia’s interlocutors knew this affective intensity better than most artists or social theorists who have tried to grapple with the matter. Cecilia was, at the time, personal assistant to Krishna Kumar, director of Tata Sons. Her phone rang for the caller to the tune of a song by the winner of American Idol in its fourth season, Carrie Underwood. Another devastating comment on the loss of agency and the bartering of ordinary life to higher powers in late liberalism: “Jesus, take the wheel/Take it from my hands/‘Cause I can’t do this on my own.”