Empowerment, Corruption, and Anti-Corruption Efforts in India

Sylvia and Aaron chat with Anu Sharma about her work on corruption and good governance in India, including that country's "Right to Know" movement and related Transparency of Information legislation. We discuss the relationship between anti-corruption legislation and women’s development and empowerment in India. We discuss the category of “techno-moral assemblage”  key to Anu's oeuvre and the related limitation of liberal models of corruption. We talk about the Left-Right valence of Indian anti-corruption discourse and how anti-corruption efforts in India shift their institutional frame from NGO to social movement to political party-- often to overcome government resistance to real anti-corruption transformation.

Below are some of Anu Sharma's corruption-related publications:

 Logics of Empowerment: Development, Gender and Governance in Neoliberal India. 2008. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

“Epic Fasts and Shallow Spectacles: The ‘India Against Corruption’ Movement, its Critics and the Re-Making of ‘Gandhi’” 2014. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 37(3): 365-380.

(with Erica Bornstein) “The righteous and the rightful: The Technomoral politics of NGOs, social movements, and the state in India.” 2016. American Ethnologist 43(1): 76-90. 

“New Brooms and Old: Sweeping Up Corruption in India, One Law at a Time.” 2018.  Current Anthropology. Vol. 59, Supplement 18. S72-S82.