Illiberal Politics and Its Corrupt Others

This paper offers a culturalist-constructionist approach to anti-corruptionism in India, examining its entanglement with the rise of illiberalism under the Bharatiya Janata Party. By tracing anti-corruption discourses alongside the ascent of Hindu nationalism since the late 1980s, I show how the meaning of corruption has shifted, from rent-seeking to crony capitalism, in ways that align with Hindu-nationalist politics. Two cases illustrate the link between anti-corruptionism and illiberal practices: the deployment of anti-corruption rhetoric to centralize campaign finance through the Electoral Bonds scheme; and the instrumentalization of anti-corruption bodies to weaken and suppress opposition parties. I argue that the Hindu Right has been present at each major mobilization of anti-corruption in Indian democracy, consistently leveraging it as a political tactic. And thus the Bharatiya Janata Party has achieved near-total capture of the state’s anti-corruption apparatus while sustaining a public discourse that casts the party as uniquely “non-corrupt” in the eyes of its supporters. The Indian case shows how anti-corruptionism can serve as a vehicle for illiberalism, with implications far beyond India.