Corruption (durnīti) is a concern shared across all of these newspapers’ self-presentations as ethical participants in modern Odishan society. Scholars have described several features of corruption in India that apply to Odisha as well. One sociological approach has shared with citizens the project to identify the features of local political organization that produce corruption. Rather than seeing corruption as mere moral failure of the individual, this sociological approach has seen corruption as the result of incommensurable systems that undercut modern
commitments to the public interest. In this view, corruption results from the inherent the
weakness of the Indian state system, which “enshrined in the Constitution a value system which was never internalized, and which was external to the Indian ethos” (Williams and Bendelow
1998, 230). The actual Indian ethos, in contrast to the modern liberal expectations of the
Constitution and the state bureaucracy, is based on clientism, patronage, and especially kinship. Shiv Visvanathan and Harsh Sethi enunciate a popular reading of Indian corruption when they write that “in the nexus of state and family lie the problems of modern India” (1998, 38).
While relatively agnostic about the causes of the activities that constitute corruption, Parry (2000) points out that rather than the weakness of the public sphere or of the modern, rationalist bureaucratic imagination, the pervasiveness and conviction of corruption concerns, what he calls the “crisis of corruption,” demonstrate precisely the opposite. Instead, the concern about
corruption serves as a “testimony to the internalization of [the democratic state’s] norms and values”:
If corruption is the misuse of public office or assets for private interest, then the notion obviously presupposes a clear conceptual separation between the two. In the administration of the Mughal empire no sharp distinction was drawn. Many officials received, not a salary, but a share of the revenue; and dastur (‘custom’) and mamul (‘usual practice’) and other like payments that would today be
‘corrupt’ were taken as a matter of legitimate right… What I am suggesting, then, is that the idea of ‘crisis of corruption’ may be as much a product of a growing acceptance of universalistic bureaucratic norms as of its actual increase.
Corruption has seemed to get worse and worse not (only) because it has, but also because [it] subverts a set of values to which people are increasingly committed. (Parry 2000, 52-53).
While also interested in discourses of corruption, Gupta is much more concerned with how they are constitutive of social reality rather than indicative of already existing conditions (Gupta 1995, 2005). He has proposed that corruption is itself the media through which people constitute the state and relationships to the state, especially in situations of multi-strand power imbalances such
as those found in interactions between rural district residents and their administrative officers (Gupta 1995, 2012).
In Odisha, all of these interpretations seem applicable to the concerns with corruption that both motivate and threaten to undercut how newspapers and media producers present themselves as ethical. Two aspects of local discourse around corruption and the press are particularly
relevant to this context. First, there is the ideal project of the press, to “banish the demon corruption” as the Sambad cartoon put it. Idioms for this in English and Odia draw on visual metaphors—transparency, exposure, swachcha (clearness, whiteness), prakāśa (light)—that are found in the very phrase “to publish” in formal Odia, prakāśana kariba. The point here is that fighting corruption effortlessly maps onto basic understandings of the ideal ethical role of the press in Odisha. Of course, Odisha is not alone in making this association, but it is reinforced through particularly local histories and practices.
A second aspect of local corruption discourses is their projection of corruption’s
participation structure. Corruption does not just happen alone, to a sole individual. Corruption is a problem of relationships to others. This is well represented in Visvanathan and Sethi’s
statement about kinship, and anxieties that are explicitly about kinship are the focus of a later chapter. In general discourse in Odisha, this relational anxiety was framed in talk about “vested interests,” a phrase that is one of the most important elements of the vocabulary associated with corruption in Odisha, used in Odia conversation and in Odia writing. This term captures a whole range of potentially corrupting relationships: the influence of politicians or powerful local families, the influence of kin ties and patronage, the influence of multinational and national
industrial and mining corporations, or the influence of global bodies such as the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank. “Vested interests” is an especially useful term because it emphasizes the threat of forms of connection or relatedness but does not specify what those are.
A very typical example of what I heard in oral conversation is reproduced in this English- language article from 2009, published on the growing English-language but local news website, Orissadiary.com:
People in backward regions lack economic opportunities. They are deprived of fruits of developmental efforts. People in socio-economically depressed regions often carry a deep sense of frustration and discrimination against their better off neighbors. Poor and disaffected people are often easily manipulated by anti-social elements and powerful vested interests. These pockets of poverty breed serious socio-economic problems. There is corroborating evidence that the problems of terrorism, Naxalism, increased incidence of crime, law and order and social strife in many pockets are attributed to social and economic depression of such regions. (Manoj K. Das, “Orissa’s Lalgarh: Undivided Koraput,” Jul 28, 2009,
Orissadiary.com).
Here “powerful vested interests” isn’t meant to describe the interests of the Koraput’s residents themselves. Instead the phrase is a metonym for those unspecified others who have their own interests in mind—exactly not the interests of Koraput’s residents—but who influence and manipulate the residents. The idea of vested interests is so open as to even allow the most obvious example of a vested interest to use it. In 2008, an article in the English-language daily Pioneer quoted a press release by TATA Steel, one of India’s top steel producers:
Thursday’s shooting of Jogendra Jamuda, a villager of Chandia by miscreants is deplorable and we strongly condemn such anti-social activities near our project site… We apprehend that some vested interests are instigating and perpetrating violence to de-rail the discussions with the villagers and delay our project. We once again condemn all such anti-social activities. (Mar 7, 2008, The Pioneer)
These two examples show that the talk about “vested interests” shares with the scholarly study of corruption an emphasis on motivations that disregard the public interest. Yet, the language about vested interests leaves open the nature of that disregard. The lack of specification is what makes it so useful for casting aspersions on projects, political positions, demonstrations, and publications. It becomes a way of framing an action as motivated by a disregard for the
wellbeing of society without requiring that the complainant spell out the terms of that disregard. Even more than merely calling someone or something “corrupt”, the accusation of
involvement with “vested interests” increases the scale of the accusation. Corruption can be an individual failing, but in local usage, “vested interests” is always multiple. It is this multiplicity finally that is the source of the phrase’s power, for it suggests a hidden agency that is more powerful than any particular individual’s intentions but that is also unknowable. The implied hiddenness of the motivations, the unspecified multiplicity, enchant supposed acts of corruption with the power of secrecy (see Taussig 1999; West and Sanders 2003).
The Right to Information [RTI] movement and political activism around transparency and “anti-corruption” have been the dominant sites for organizing unmasking efforts at both at the national and state level (Khandekar and Reddy 2013; Mazzarella 2006). While some journalists were involved in these movements in Odisha, they are beyond the scope of this dissertation. As earlier noted, journalism itself has an implicit project of exposure or revealing corruption in Odisha that need not necessarily call on bureaucracies of transparency. Yet this is precisely complicated by the cultural figure of vested interests, which casts suspicion on the politically- affiliated Odia media with almost no effort. Indeed, I found myself remarkably susceptible to the
suspicions of those around me, and at one point in my research I thought I had stumbled upon an illegal conspiracy among some Odishan media producers. Only with the distance of a year could I see that the talk of suspicion itself had a hold on me, and that there were a handful of simpler and much more mundane explanations. The experience however made me attentive to how easily the Odia-language newspapers efforts at ethical self-construction can be turned on their heads. Indeed, “vested interests” seem to be outrunning the newspaper’s branding efforts in the dematerialization project: it is the corrupting forces of power that are “everywhere, and yet nowhere,” not the newspapers’ intended brand identities.