Addressing corruption through visual tools in India: the case of three civil society initiatives and their Facebook pages

Abstract

In the past decades, several grassroots movement organisations across the world have tackled the issue of corruption with the aim of mobilising knowledge on this widespread problem. In our paper, we look at three bottom-up civil society organisations and collective actors fighting for greater transparency and curbing of corruption in Indian society, highlighting how they employ visuals to debate on these issues and to communicate their mission to their audiences. The focus is on how the initiatives employed visuals to discuss a particular anti-corruption policy of the central government. In particular, our paper sheds light on the dynamics between the three initiatives and the government especially at a time when democratic credentials of the country are in decline. Inspired by Rodriguez and Dimitrova’s four levels of visual framing, we propose a revised schema for visual framing analysis, taking into account contextual dimensions, in our study of visuals as tools enhancing public debates on corruption and anti-corruption practices.