New Brooms and Old

Abstract

Arvind Kejriwal is an anti-corruption crusader in India whose technomoral mission is to transform governance through the law, rendering it transparent, noncorrupt, and participatory. He was actively involved in the fight for the Right to Information Act, which became law in 2005. Dissatisfied with the workings of this law, however, Kejriwal organized the India Against Corruption movement to demand a new anti-corruption bill, which failed to pass. This essay focuses on the public discourse on corruption in the wake of the Right to Information Act and the India Against Corruption movement, and it puts law-focused anti-corruption strategies under critical scrutiny. I reveal the difficulty in delimiting corruption as well as the limits of the law in tackling it. A lack of consensus over what counts as real corruption and where its source lies complicates legal remedies. Indeed, as I argue, the law and corruption are inverted mirrors of each other. Where one is a symbol of rationalized modernity, the other reflects its dangerous underside; where one extends a formal economy of rules, the other refers to unruly practices of rule bending. Corruption transgresses and questions the very dualisms—public and private, state and society—that liberal law embodies. If the law produces corruption as a constitutive outside of the modern order, then using laws to dismantle corruption becomes a paradoxical undertaking that is bound to fail at its limits.