Introduction
Changing public and governmental ideas about ‘corruption’ in India, as elsewhere, have for a long time been seen as a key interpretive interface for popular local perceptions of the everyday state.Footnote 1 Yet very few writers have attempted to historicize this popular perception to look at how, for example, notions of citizenship and the state in India, transformed in relation to discourses of ‘corruption’ over critical periods of governmental change, between the early 1940s and 1960s. Whenever a paper on ‘corruption’ is presented to an academic conference, or taken as a theme in a newspaper leader, there is strong tendency for writers and listeners alike to throw up their arms: What can be done or said about a phenomenon that is apparently so ubiquitous, pervasive, or politically entrenched? Unfortunately the suggestion that ‘corruption is everywhere’, or ‘inevitable’, does not help us to explain why political reactions to it have been uneven over time. Nor does it help to untangle the real ways in which ideas about permissible and non-permissible forms of public behaviour fundamentally alter, disturb or reinforce social and political hierarchies, particularly in relation to government.Footnote 2 If ‘corruption’ is an inevitable product of human organization, then we are faced with the question of how far its effects can be tolerated according to the ordinary workings of an organizational rules system, such as a public administration. At what point do the inevitabilities of corrupt behaviour, really mean ‘corruption’; at what point do those outside, or more loosely linked to transactions involving rule-bending, begin to label and critique such activities? Furthermore, if most are agreed that corruption is ‘inevitable’, the real issue is one not of ending corruption, but one of how far mechanisms for controlling or regulating it are effective.Footnote 3 These questions are particularly urgent in relation to everyday forms of interaction between state and citizen—perhaps the realm of ‘petty corruption’—since, on the one hand, most Indian citizens experience the state through lower level government servants, and on the other, representations of corruption are consumed through organs of popular culture and dissemination. The relationships between big business and powerful financial interests and government agencies are an important part of these representations (and easily identified everywhere),Footnote 4 but much less is known of how general views of government corruption percolate down to the street.
Building on recent work on the ambiguous nature of the ‘everyday state’ and citizenship in 1947–1948,Footnote 5 this paper will examine changing practices and representations of ‘corruption’ in Uttar Pradesh (UP), India, over independence, and look at how they affected notions of citizenship. It will look at the management and publicity of ‘corruption’, particularly in the food supply and rationing bureaucracy from the mid-1940s to the 1960s. The latter captures changing discussions about public expectations of government and narrates everyday urban experiences of the local state. In particular, the aim is to examine how the management and publicity of corruption was an essential outgrowth of very specific pressures of colonial transition. The first argument will be that there was a significant shift in representations of administrative corruption within UP government ‘anti-corruption’ planning around the late 1930s to early 1940s, which introduced a new sense of public accountability and responsibility for corruption control. This partly reflected changing ideas about the public and citizenship in UP in general—from a colonial stress on administrative authoritarianism, where corruption was presented as a regrettable but unavoidable facet of local power, to a sense of public accountability. At a basic level this was about the changing sense of culpability of the bribe-giver, compared with the bribe-taker. Whereas in both phases, the contacts between local power brokers and the local state were seen as inevitably leading to ‘corrupt’ transactions, for administrators of the earlier phase this could be tolerated to some extent by representing such transactions as ‘customary’. By the late 1940s and 1950s, governments elected on a popular, albeit limited mandate, began to envisage administrative corruption in terms of the practices of the colonial past. Citizens’ organizations were promoted by local governments and by dissatisfied or dispossessed subjects/citizens as a bulwark against what they saw as the inherited tendencies of police and administrative excess; anti-corruption ‘committees’ were established, and the press became a new kind of public mouthpiece for the exposure of scandals.
By the 1940s, too, with war time commodity controls accompanying rapid political change, opportunities for nefarious gain widened, and administrative rules and functions quickly became much more complex. ‘Corruption’, as a symbolic political weapon, was publicized in a way which now connected national, state and local level discussions of independence, citizenship and state authority. The changing meanings surrounding corruption cannot, however, simply be explained by the rhetoric of newly independent democratic states regarding governmental accountability. More significant were the specific reactions to local state structures that colonialism in UP enabled, as ambiguous layers of local state power where the nexus of authority and influence was uncertain. The combination of these factors—the specific pressures of the 1940s political transitions, and the on-going but now more complicated pockets of colonial administrative fiefdoms—eventually allowed ‘corruption’ to become a normalized part of everyday approaches to the state in the mid-twentieth century. Specifically, we will look at how the very nature of different types of corruption in the crucial sphere of controls and rationing brought about more developed forms of political protection and backing for the corrupt administrator—in particular, new types of clientelist networks in supplies and rationing which, in turn, encouraged new kinds of administrative/political networks, as shown by Kochanek for the 1960s.Footnote 6
The final section will look at how the dynamic meanings and publicity of corruption were complicated by ambiguities surrounding citizenship and citizen rights in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Full rights of citizenship were not guaranteed in the period of transition, particularly for those suspected of holding links with Pakistan, but also in an informal sense for a wide range of other dispossessed subject-citizens.Footnote 7 Shifting representations and practices of corruption over the mid-1940s and 1950s were critical in defining and redefining the permissible rights and responsibilities of such quasi-citizens on the one hand, and officers that came into contact with them on the other. Corruption became a discourse for representing the injustices and disqualifications of a range of communities pushed to the periphery of India's dominant national narrative, be they displaced refugees or urban poor. But also, from the point of view of governments, the policing and control of the dispossessed created the notion of social chaos, around which the idea of local corruption could be naturalised. Here, too, the issue of licenses for commodities and rations in the transitional years of the Second World War was crucial.
In connecting these three areas of argument—changing state representation, practices of corruption, and implications for the rights of ‘citizens’—it becomes clear that there was a duality in thinking about corruption among officialdom and in popular political discourse over the late 1940s and 1950s. This included a broad sense of its colonial roots, but also a kind of recognition that at a quotidian level it was something not easily reformed. This was because the very mechanisms of corruption allowed politicians, by the early 1950s, to protect themselves and their interests at lower levels of the state. In other words, there was a gulf between the upper level notion of how corruption related to colonial practices, and a developing use by political leaders of bureaucratic structures for their own careers and financial interests. But as we will see in the final section of the paper, this too was affected by the peculiar circumstances of post partition migration and the citizenship rights of Muslim minorities in UP.
The changing publicity of ‘corruption’
In 1938, the Congress government in UP, elected under the new rules of the 1935 Government of India Act, decided (following the resolution of Bishambhar Dayal Tripathi) to set up a committee to report on measures which would counter corruption within government services. The timing and scope of this report were significant. It was the first major official provincial-level effort to investigate, define and publicly expose corruption, before the Santhanam Committee of 1964. It was also the product of a unique situation—a popular government in waiting, still operating in a colonial context. In this sense, it appeared on the cusp of changing official attitudes towards administrative responsibility in relation to what the government saw as the UP public. The 1938 report did indeed devise recommendations which presaged a changed view of public responsibility in relation to government, when compared with the phase of dyarchy in the 1920s. Its recommendations included the establishment of local anti-corruption committees involving non-officials as well as officials; measures to ease the process of prosecution of charged officials in the courts—most controversially, requesting that the standard of proof on corruption cases be lowered; and a raft of more minor suggestions, such as a petition of complaints boxes in offices—a measure that was generally thought to be ‘too corruptible’ to work.Footnote 8 Although the 1938 report-writers, nodding to colonial ideas of esprit de corps, acknowledged that administrative corruption was ‘far less prevalent among gazetted officers than among the non-gazetted of clerical or menial staffs’, this new emphasis on corruption brought with it a serious commitment to public interaction in attempting to overcome or manage the problem. In this sense, the setting up of anti-corruption committees, with representatives from different walks of life, was a key proposal. The causes of corruption set out by the report also reflected this set of priorities. They included: the reluctance of the bribe giver, who has received his quid pro quo, to give evidence against the receiver; the comparative absence of a strong public opinion, especially against minor forms of corruption; the difficulty of securing adequate evidence of definite charges, partly through fear of consequences from the officer concerned and his external political sympathizers; and the existence of a large number of poorly-paid persons in the lower ranks of government service.Footnote 9 The last two of these points captured changing government approaches to corruption, and its centrality to public notions of citizenship and public responsibility. Firstly, the issue of retribution and ‘sympathizers’ linked to corrupt officers, described corruption as a complex network, involving a web of beneficiaries, many of whom might be linked to the officer around a range of different political, familial or business functions. Secondly, the mention of large numbers of poorly paid persons in government service pointed to the emerging problem of a huge, burgeoning state in which a good proportion of Indian families either had a direct connection through a family member, or aspired to have such a connection.
From the early 1940s, the effects of the colonial war economy on UP society and the local state changed the nature of publicity surrounding corruption again. This was not just the product of either official committees, as in 1938, or even new political freedoms although looking at the English and Hindi press over the period, a sense of political change was important. Of perhaps equal significance were the series of crises of the 1940s, the effects of the war on UP society (and the economic controls that went with it), in weakening the legitimacy and working of the state at all levels, and in creating uncertainty and opportunity in a phase of political flux. The central administrative function here surrounded rationing and licenses. This local state activity directly involved large sections of the UP population, at least in urban areas, via the town and district level supply and rationing officers who operated the Food and Civil Supply policies of the UP government between 1942 and the 1960s. By the end of 1946, there were 49 rationed towns in UP, with a total population of 56 lakhs, and a further 340 smaller towns with a population of 23 lakhs were being considered for rationing.Footnote 10 In its early stages in 1942–1943, in response to price increases, the food provisioning and rationing schemes, contained in the United Provinces Food grains Control Order 1943 aimed to keep food prices at a controlled level, and to support only the poorer 40 per cent of the urban population. The Food grains Control Order was accompanied by a whole host of other enactments for other commodities and orders controlling movement of goods.Footnote 11
These were not statutory controls on prices, but an attempt to keep prices down by issuing licenses to specific dealers and controlling movement of commodities. The control policy was severely constrained by the inability of the colonial state to monitor and control trade with its limited resources. From the outset, formal total rationing was ruled out, since it was believed that large sections of the population would continue to bypass it by buying direct from the countryside. Rationing and controls were therefore concentrated in the so-called ‘regulated large towns’ of the province—Lucknow, Kanpur, Allahabad, Benares and Agra, and 20 other big towns, while subsidiary schemes were set up in a further 39 towns. The idea was to slightly undersell the open market, to bring down prices. Nevertheless, it was still recognized from the outset that if controls were in violent opposition to economic forces, it would lead to abuses, black-marketing, and hoarding, again, leading to a lack of confidence. Such abuses were almost immediately recognized, even by officialdom, in the three most significant towns—Allahabad, Kanpur and Lucknow, as well as in Eastern UP generally, where there were sharp increases in prices during 1943, despite the control policies.
With India's political future uncertain in the mid-1940s, spiralling violence, and lack of manpower to run the byzantine food control bureaucracy, Food and Civil Supply was therefore easily open to abuse. Both policy-making and administration of Food and Civil Supply necessitated constant contacts between the local administration and the public at large, in a way that remained remarkably consistent during the move towards independence.Footnote 12 In 1942–1943, district magistrates were asked to set up advisory committees in every large town with representatives of various interests. They were to gather public opinion together against abuses, evasions, and hoarding and to remain aloof from party politics—something which turned out to be an extremely naïve hope. The UP government was throughout the period of controls fighting a losing battle in some obvious areas, for example the selling off of poor-quality grain: ‘In the hurry of early buying, we seem to have bought a good deal of earth’, wrote one official commentator about the mid-1940s food policy.Footnote 13 Other basic overarching abuses of the rationing system were more serious. Rationing was organized through the distribution of identity cards. In 1944, one officer in Kanpur reported that industrial workers took advantage of the ignorance and lack of resources of the management and secured rations for a large number of imaginary units and a large number of persons got rations on several different cards for the same person. One of the Town Rationing Officers for Kanpur in 1944 pointed out that ‘figures of population for Cawnpore went up from the 1941 census figure of 4,41,000 to over 8,00,000’.Footnote 14 A similar case of fictitious ration cards prepared by rationing staff were unearthed elsewhere too, for example, in Etawah.Footnote 15 The civic guards used to police the queues were reported, in Gorakhpur, to be seizing the opportunity to make extra money.Footnote 16 And the movement of goods provided rich pickings for policemen, of course, who around Bara Banki extorted regular levies on cartmen transporting grain.Footnote 17
Because controls and rationing involved such a large section of the population,Footnote 18 and were so emotive (being related for example to the issue of refugees and to the problems of price rises), they connected nearly all levels of governance and political activity in urban areas. Some prominent UP Congress leaders were drawn into it: P. D. Tandon was involved at high levels in the advocacy of Hindu Sindhi complaints against Muslim rationing officers at local levels. One of the first UP Food and Civil Supplies Ministers, C. B. Gupta, was embroiled in corruption scandals which linked high-level business deals with the complaints of men and women on the UP streets. The issue was a central one for all governments. For the period 1949–1951, the procurement and rationing of food grains was costing the UP Government the huge sum of about Rs. 2 crores every year and public debates were common around the issue of whether production could be best enhanced under a policy of control or decontrol.Footnote 19 Nehru considered the food situation, and the corruption associated with it, to be a general problem of grave proportions that linked in his mind to problems of law and order—creating a ‘spectre of famine and starvation’.Footnote 20 While touring UP in early February 1952 he found that people in Allahabad ‘generally were against the Sarpanchas and the Mukhias who, it was said, did not distribute the cloth properly and made money out of black-marketing’.Footnote 21
The rationing/trade licensing of food, cloth and building materials involved controversies that reached from the state government down into the locality. And it was in this area that the publicity surrounding corruption linked UP's urban poor and middle classes to higher levels of governance. As will be seen in more detail below, this meant that proactive citizens’ organizations emerged to expose examples of local corruption surrounding rationing and supply. These organizations used the local press and the mechanisms of the local state itself in their attempts to expose officers’ corruption. Unlike the late 1930s where critiques of police and administrative corruption, where publicized, were generally linked to specific anti-colonial movements and campaigns, by the early period of post-independence UP, corruption was now more widely discussed. Moreover, specific cases against individual officers were rooted out, publicized and disseminated more widely. The press was freer after the war, and citizens’ expectations were also clearly higher. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, administrative corruption was discussed in terms of older structures of power that ought to be reformed by a ‘modernizing’ state. However, as will be seen below, the new public critiques of corruption also became part of a complex mechanism of political protection of officers and local leaders themselves exposed to corruption scandals, and were used as a means of exposing rivals.
The politics of corruption and anti-corruption in the supply offices
A central focus of corruption scandals and complaints over the 1940s and early 1950s was the peculiar structure of the food and civil supply machinery, and in particular, the new hierarchy of administrative officers set up to administer the controls. These were headed by the District Magistrate, and a Regional Food Controller, and most importantly, involved the recruitment of temporary gazetted officers—Town Rationing Officers, Area Rationing Officers and District Supply Officers (hereafter ‘TRO’, ‘ARO’ and ‘DSO’). These administrators formed an important although ambiguous link between local administration of controls and public outrage surrounding it, and were at the heart of a complex range of controversies and clientelist networks across UP over the late 1940s and 1950s. DSOs and TROs received special rates of pay of Rs. 300, comparable with the India Career Services which at the time generally started at Rs. 350.Footnote 22 These officers were vulnerable, being constantly exposed to public controversy because their posts were temporary (and hence they did not have the same statutory protection as permanent civil servants). However, they also had significant local power. Licenses of dealers in controlled food grains could be suspended, pending complaints against them as reported by rationing inspectors. It was pointed out in 1946 that, ‘such a practice will encourage corruption on the part of the Inspectors as the suspension of a licence is a life and death question for a dealer. Such cases when contested in the regular court require about six months time to be decided. During this long period the entire business of a dealer is ruined and stocks get spoiled. . .’.Footnote 23 Indeed, the courts were often irrelevant to the powers of these officers. Under the UP Food Grains Control Order, 1945, the licensing authority could suspend or cancel licenses, irrespective of a court's decision.Footnote 24 The possibilities for additional remuneration for these officers were also vast. And partly because of this, there were several court cases in which the UP government had to defend against accusations of vindictive license cancellations and the like.Footnote 25
Most importantly, the TROs and DSOs from this period were nearly all immersed in some form of local factional network involving political, familial or business links, some going back generations. Such networks often financed local power bases of politicians by the early 1950s. In the first two weeks of November 1951, C. B. Gupta, the UP Food and Civil Supplies Minister, was accused of distributing ration shops and licenses to supporters in different towns, and handing out coal and fuel licenses to Congress sympathizers. Gupta nicely summed up the political intricacies of Food and Supply in a defensive letter to Nehru:
Unfortunately I was entrusted with some of the most ticklish and difficult portfolios like Food and Civil Supplies much against my will. But I can assert that I have seldom exercised my discretion in matters where powers of patronage could be used. It should be remembered that the number of licensees for various commodities in the Uttar Pradesh will be probably over two lakhs and the number of applicants who want this or that permit will run into several times that number. There must be hundreds of Congressmen who could be holding this or that permit but the accusers seem to have taken special pleasure in picking out a few Congressmen who are not associated with their group in the Congress, even though these persons have obtained their licenses through the normal channel.Footnote 26
Because of this kind of pressure from the top, or in order to maintain political protection for their own gain, DSOs and TROs sought out new income. Some benefitted from their clients’ black market activities. B. R. Sharma, DSO at Banaras in the mid-1950s, was allegedly involved in the appointment of favoured contractors, through networks of subordinates.Footnote 27 A petition signed from ‘the people of Gorakhpur’ claimed that Syed Ahmed, TRO/DSO of Basti, and later Gorakhpur, only granted licenses to powerful groups linked to his family, and ignored aam log.Footnote 28 Significant here were the accusations of communal or caste bias—something which had a special kind of purchase both just before and after independence. The complaints against K. S. Sirohi, TRO of Budaun, included his apparent appointment of co-religionists and lackeys into subordinate posts and the granting of licenses to particular Sikh families, which contributed to his deep involvement in the management of black market profiteering, especially in construction.Footnote 29 In many cases, there were accusations of party or factional favour in the granting of licenses. For example, in the file of the Lucknow Area Rationing Officer in 1948–1949, R. S. Jouhri, the character roll contained the very common type of statement—that, ‘His aptitude for intrigue and tendency to mix up in local politics prevent him from being as useful as he could be . . . there were certain complaints but nothing was substantiated as they were due to intrigues of local parties’.Footnote 30
Clearly, as was the case with the long and chequered career of the K. B. Misra, who worked as ARO across UP but was constantly seen in Lucknow mobilizing MLAFootnote 31 supporters, officers needed to have powerful political and business links in each locality, and such connections helped them in times of personal career crisis and public scandals.Footnote 32 These officers were therefore immersed in their own kinds of clientelist networks. And this was something which citizens’ organizations were often set up to combat. For example, a resolution urging the Banaras authorities to take drastic steps to eradicate corruption from government offices entrusted with the distribution of goods in the city was passed at a ‘meeting of residents’ on 4 January, 1948. The resolution asked local MLAs not to bring pressure to bear upon the Government and officials to suppress cases of corruption.Footnote 33 However, with the right kind of political support or cover, the bungling of procedures or rules became much easier. Very common was the acquiescence in rule breaking and creative accounting, for a cut (or ambiguous bribe). B. R. Sharma, a DSO already transferred to Allahabad for bad behaviour, profited in this way from one Sri Kesari Narain—a rationed retailer of Bharti Bhawan area. The latter allegedly misappropriated food grains up to 90 maunds by making entries on bogus ration cards and wrong (farzi) additions in the sales register. The case against the dealer was then sent to Sharma who, according to one witness, accepted a bribe of Rs. 1,000. Karan Singh Sirohi, while in Budaun in the early 1950s, allegedly used his rationing inspector in an elaborate scheme to collect bribes from licensees.Footnote 34 The UP newspapers were full of similar cases throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s, and the files themselves show how the interjection of local power brokers allowed such misdemeanours to be overlooked by departmental enquiries.
One activity which easily evaded complaint mechanisms and public censure due to high level political protection, was ‘partibandi’, or the dividing up of ill-gotten gains by the staff of supply offices. In 1950–1951, the supply office at Allahabad was the scene of an intricate, long-term embezzlement of infamous proportions, involving 18 officers, godown inspectors and dozens of outsiders, including MLAs and local party bosses. In total, Rs. 18,361 was misappropriated or embezzled and took nearly two years to fully unearth.Footnote 35 Political protection, financed by racketeers was also evident in Aligarh. In the file of Saraswati Prasad, it was noted that one contact had
been making tons of money by securing permits for sugar, steel and cement etc. from the District Supply Officer of Aligarh, and selling them in the black market. The local police and the present Distt. Supply Officer are openly in collusion with the said Goonda . . . and anybody can see him near the DSO's office everyday, obtaining permits on bogus names, and funnily he enjoys the patronage and support of Mr N. S. Chowhan MP.Footnote 36
The controversies surrounding supply, controls and rationing affected in a broad way, both the publicity surrounding corruption itself and popular discourses about the relationship between administrator and Indian ‘citizen’. In the face of potentially vindictive supply officers, those approaching the supply machinery sought to protect their interests informally. So in a very real sense, expectations surrounding administrative corruption involved the UP urban public in quite new ways from those of the 1940s. Twenty-four thick personnel files chart the careers of individual TROs and DROs in the Food and Civil Supplies Department in UP, and in all of them there were at least a few accusations against the officer's integrity. In fourteen files, the accusations and investigations are complex and take up most of the file. The work of DROs and TROs was naturally vulnerable to general public complaint and the ire of public lobby groups, usually couched in the new language of ‘public service’ and citizenship. This powerful anti-corruption discourse, as Jeffrey has shown for contemporary West UP, mobilised the Nehruvian and colonial ideal of the ‘servant state’. For example, Makhan Lal Sharma complained about the DSO of Banaras to K. M. Munshi, the Governor of Uttar Pradesh, on 24 July, 1952, through the Collector of Saharanpur. He had applied in 1950 for permits for Iron sheets and barbed wire to the District Supply Officer and was told that stocks were not available, but had seen that others had managed to get them. He claimed he had been harassed by Sharma, who, he complained, ‘had no right to do so with me when I am a citizen of Free India and got independence after endurance for years and years undergoing many cruelties of the British Govt. from time to time’.Footnote 37 Gopinath Singh, MP, Hariharnath Shastri Memorial Committee, wrote to Sampurnanand about Sharma on 19 April, 1956: ‘. . . it appears to me that the present District Supply Officer in Kanpur lacks the sense of courtesy that the members of the public have a legitimate right to expect from a public servant of his rank in a popular and democratic regime. . .’. Before 1947, most of these officers, coming from the deputy collector level of the services, were Indians. But Britons were also among those accused. For example, one Major C. J. O. Bradley was prosecuted in a bribery case surrounding house allotment in Lucknow.Footnote 38
The common expectation in these complaints that the Indian citizen could expect ‘public service’ from this part of the bureaucracy, was one that self-consciously connected notions of bureaucratic disregard for civic rights, to colonial times. In a number of UP towns, general complaints asserting the new democratic rights of the people against colonial-style local autocracies came from self-proclaimed citizens’ organizations. A letter from ‘the residents of Agra’ in August 1950, about the attitude of Hiranand Jhangiani, TRO, stated that he was objectionable and annoying. He had created terror in business circles, bringing business to a standstill. ‘He does not think himself to be a public servant. He has no courtesy for the public. He has the mentality of old type of Britishers’.Footnote 39 ‘The citizens of Ballia’ used a spokesperson to represent against the allegedly nepotistic activities of the DSO there, Shyam Swaroop Tandon, who purportedly helped family members to obtain all manner of permits. The complaint read that,
The present DSO. . .is so filthy in his talks and so rude in his behaviour with the public that we have become sick of him. In addition to all these he is thoroughly corrupt and has polluted the whole atmosphere here. The sooner he is shunted off from this place the better for the public of Ballia. The present District Magistrate perhaps hails from the same place as the DSO and this has made him all the more emboldened. . . and hence he thinks that nobody can harm him.Footnote 40
Clear in these complaints was the shift from emphasis on ‘good family’ as a qualification for public service, to a more general notion of citizenship. S. S. Tandon's recommendations for service in 1936, described him as coming from ‘a very respectable and loyal Tandon family of Etawah. . .’. By 1960, he was being targeted by the Faizabad Zila Congress organization as nepotistic and profiteering, in collusion with a particular Tandon family in Akbarpur.Footnote 41
Quite a lot of the reporting in the press was born of frustration with the inadequacies of the supply machinery itself. As the District Magistrate of Agra reported in 1959, in defence of the Supply Office, ‘People requiring a major share have to go back disappointed as small issues do not satisfy their needs. These people have to satisfy themselves through press reports’.Footnote 42 This meant that DSOs and TROs had to be masters of publicity management themselves. In Moradabad in 1959, Karan Singh Sirohi, TRO, was faced with a virulent smear campaign in the weekly Parvatiya, leading him to propose legal action against the editor. An apologetic letter later appeared in the paper, which satisfied the TRO. It then transpired that Sirohi had privately concluded an agreement with the editor who, the District Magistrate felt, probably had some information against him. One note on this file pointed out that some other officers had been actually paying small fees to the editor of the paper, to protect their reputation.Footnote 43 Then, when in the late 1950s, Sirohi was called to answer departmental charges against him, he once again used the press to protect his reputation, by favouring another editor.Footnote 44 The DM of Azamgarh pointed out that, ‘Sri Sirohi has quoted one single cutting, which refers to his popularity. I know the particular correspondent who sent it and he might have been pleased with Sri Sirohi at a particular time because of some particular favour.’Footnote 45
By 1948 at the latest, rationing and supplies had become by-words for corruption and black marketeering in UP. And it was well understood that this was by no means a clear cut case of public victimization, but that such forms of corruption were so creative, precisely because they highlighted the ambiguous nature of the local state in relation to citizen lobbies, refugees, business interests and political organizations. This was an area in which local reputation and political capital could be manipulated through the press, especially when larger corruption scandals regarding supplies were regular fodder for the hack, such as the Kanpur Municipal Board cement misappropriation scandal of January 1948.Footnote 46 It is possible to see this in detailed practice in many of the TRO files: how officers and those accusing them of corruption used the idea of public opinion and public disgrace, to highlight irregularities in administration, or to generate political capital. In particular, the discourses of corruption were tied up to other notions of public morality. B. R Sharma, for example, at Allahabad was ‘. . . being talked [about] on the street[s] of Allahabad and everyone is amazed to see how such debauched, dishonest and corrupt officers are retained in the department’.Footnote 47 In this politics of corruption and anti-corruption surrounding civil supply the TRO/DRO had to become a master of publicity, as well as a figure who could manoeuvre between an array of political interest groups in the city or district.
Corruption, citizenship and the Muslim government servant
In the aftermath of partition and the controversies surrounding evacuee properties, notions of corruption interacted too with charges of ‘communalism’ in the press. Following the assassination of Gandhi at the end of January 1948, the RSS was banned and any accusation of involvement in a communal controversy over the 1940s could be potentially damaging for career politicians. This extended to Muslim leaders and officers too, although here the implications were different. In the first years following partition, the issue of Muslim ‘loyalty’, particularly within the civil services, became a means of defining the rights and responsibilities of Indian citizens in relation to Pakistan, particularly in areas like UP. As such, where allegations of ‘communal bias’ were directed against Muslim officers, the implications went beyond simply involvement in controversy in India. A whole range of anti-corruption moves against Muslim TROs and DROs, made reflections on how their actions for personal gain also threw doubt over their loyalty to the state: corruption was easily associated with the idea of Pakistan, particularly where claims were made about the basic provision of housing, and controlled items to co-religionists.
The ‘potentially untrustworthy’ Muslim officer was an easy target. Syed Ahmed, TRO/DSO of Basti and later Gorakhpur, was hounded through a Hindi press campaign by his own staff who complained, among other things, about his alleged Muslim bias, and his supposed sexual advances towards Hindu and Christian girls.Footnote 48 The complaints against another DSO of Kanpur in the early 1950s, Nawab Syed Mohammad Hasad Khan Nawab, were spearheaded by the local Congress organizations. Khan allegedly lived a luxurious life with two wives and two first class motor cars for his pleasure trips, and, according to the complainant, was not just a ‘Nawab’ but a ‘double Nawab’. He was described as ‘a communal minded officer’, of ‘League mentality’. His lifestyle, the complainant argued, was maintained by the organization of bribes and black market activities through one of his Muslim inspection officers. He allegedly used his driver as a middleman for illegal exactions from petty illiterate dealers. When this corruption was about to be exposed, the DSO managed to send the driver to Pakistan.Footnote 49 The Hindi press image of the UP Muslim, especially civil servant and policeman, as potential evacuee and ‘Pakistan sympathiser’ was important here. In some cases, the failures of particular departments were blamed on Muslim evacuees—this was the case in the supply office in Allahabad, during the huge embezzlement scandal of 1948–1952, where a Muslim TRO had migrated.Footnote 50 And in the ‘efficiency drive’ of the early 1950s, supposed links to Pakistan were used in other departments as a pretext for rooting out useless officers. Mohammad Mobin Khan, a Kanungo of Mainpuri, was alleged to be in illegal possession of the Sir land of an evacuee, Nawab Nasiruddin Khan, and was described in his character roll as ‘lethargic and useless. He is also said to have close contacts with Pakistan . . . His son-in-law who formerly lived in Aligarh has gone to Pakistan. Although he says that he has no touch with him, yet his loyalty to the Indian Dominion cannot be said to be beyond doubt’.Footnote 51
The ambiguous nature of citizenship and citizens’ rights in the late 1940s and early 1950s politicized the corruption surrounding rationing and civil supplies in a new way. A sense of uncertainty surrounding rationing for refugees and the policing of the new immigrants on UP's streets was clearly apparent in the press. On the front page of the Lucknow National Herald on 6 January, 1948, two adjacent headlines appeared. The first, ‘Work as Protectors of the People’, reported on the speech of the UP Governor, Sarojini Naidu, to a police parade in Lucknow, in which she declared that those who worked for the freedom of India were no longer the ‘badmashes’. But alongside this article, another headline read, ‘Refugees tear gassed in Delhi’—the police had used tear gas on refugees who had attempted to take possession of houses in Phatak Habish Khan, vacated by Muslims.Footnote 52 Similar kinds of conflicts were also taking place in Lucknow, over the municipal ban on street vendors, leading to a demonstration of refugees in the city, and the rumour of organized communal conspiracies to allow refugees to grab Muslim properties in January 1948.Footnote 53
The conflict between the rhetoric of public service and the realities of post-partition on the streets, were echoed in the highly charged areas of housing and rationing. Importantly, the food and civil supply situation linked to the issue of refugees to and from Pakistan, since not only did many of the poorer refugees qualify for rationing, but also the same officers in charge of food and supplies, viz. the District Supply Officers and Town Rationing Officers, were also responsible for rent control in relation to evacuee properties. DSOs and TROs as ‘Relief and Rehabilitation’ officers, or rent controllers were again in the spotlight and because of the refugee situation their work was easily tied into the political rhetoric of communalism. As mentioned above, Muslim DSOs and TROs were particularly vulnerable to the accusation of communal bias, but such accusations were made all the easier by the extensive local power and discretion that evacuee property rules allowed the officers themselves. P. D. Tandon, the champion of Hindu rights over independence, received a number of communications from Sindhi refugee organisations, complaining about Muslim bias in the actions of rent controllers. For example, on 29 January, 1950, the Sindhi Hindu Refugee Panchayat complained to Tandon, ‘That 4 rent controllers are appointed here for reducing the rents of the houses in which the refugees live. But they take the side of the landlords and harass the poor refugees and they dismiss the application of poor refugees.’ A list of Muslim government servants was also supplied by the Panchayat, who had allegedly kept evacuee properties in their hands and were collecting the rents. The Sindhi Hindu Refugee Panchayat claimed that refugees were dying of hunger and that the rent controllers were killing them, since ‘they do not get the houses from the Custodian owing to the interference of the influential persons and responsible authorities’. The organisation demanded that the evacuee property ordinance be put into force immediately and that steps should be taken against Muslim officers who were ‘disloyal to the government’.Footnote 54
But these kinds of complaints about ‘corrupt’ or ‘communal’ decision making were possible precisely because so much local power had been given to supply officers and rent controllers.Footnote 55 In some places, TROs and DSOs held up the renewal of trade licenses and rations as a kind of local sanction against displaced persons who had illegally occupied vacated Muslim properties. And, although it was not officially sanctioned, policy surrounding evacuee properties in UP in the first two years after independence certainly encouraged the situation. The UP Custodian of evacuee property made it clear that officers on the ground could make up their own minds about such properties:
As I mentioned to you we want to be fair in the administration of the law. We have no intention of penalising the Muslim nationals of India. But the Pakistan Muslims cannot be treated leniently. If the District Officer, after making summary enquiries, is morally convinced that a person is an evacuee as defined by the law, that person's property must be taken over . . . We do not want long drawn out legal proceedings, and have, for that reason, cut out all interference by the courts. If we ourselves start entrusting the administration of the law not to administrators, but to judicial officers, we shall be defeating the purpose of the Ordinance. Apart from peculation and corruption that will spring up, proof will be exceedingly difficult.
The Custodian pointed out that the UP government could not allow people to just turn up and claim that they are not evacuees but loyal Indian citizens, as has happened in Delhi. ‘If he is not here, he cannot turn up, and that is the best proof of his being an evacuee and his property being evacuee property.’Footnote 56 The actions of those administering such properties in UP's cities and elsewhere were as deeply immersed in local political networks, as those officers, described above, who controlled rationed goods. It is, therefore, easy to see how the personal motivations of Muslim officers, in potentially lucrative, corrupt transactions, were often publicly associated with political disloyalty, particularly when such accusations suited the purposes of an officer's political opponents.
Conclusion
For most of the late colonial period in UP, intricate webs of influence built through the local state existed as entrenched ‘customary’ pockets of power, where the question of corruption was highly ambiguous.Footnote 57 As Raj Chandavarkar has shown, this situation was tolerated partly because the British needed to cement conservative alliances in the countryside, and were unwilling to upset existing fiefdoms, beyond maintaining gazetted officer esprit de corps.Footnote 58 They also lacked money and manpower. These weaknesses were magnified once war threatened to upset relative economic and political stability. The supply and control policies of the mid-1940s effectively created a system of rules and under-manned bureaucracies which opened up all kinds of new financial opportunities for those able to use their existing local contacts. Later, this provided rich pickings in a system of factional one-party dominance, which depended (as Paul Brass's work shows, footnote 5) on personal and factional alliances, linking locality to district and state, and increasingly on the mobilization of political funds. The systematic exchange nexus and black money of licenses and permits, already there in the crisis years of 1942–1943, provided an ideal source. These were linkages which formed a kind of pre-history to the business-Congress links that went along with permit-license-quota raj, as shown by Stanley Kochanek (footnote 6).
What this paper has begun to demonstrate too, though, is how this situation changed the experience of the local state for UP citizens. And this is where the supply bureaucrats form a crucial focal point. Managing the publicity of corruption certainly became more important. Posing oneself as ‘anti-corrupt’ was already seen as a cunning plan in the face of constant public controversy, and the sudden emergence of ‘citizens’ organisations’ directed by local Congress bodies became a new political ploy. The representation of corruption also changed over the 1940s and 1950s, presaging new ideas about the Indian public and their rights vis-à-vis the local state. Like never before, ‘corruption’ could describe a whole range of social ills: the instability and violence of the mid-1940s, the predicament and ‘rights’ of refugees, and the sensitive accusations of communalism. ‘Corruption’ or bhrashtachaar became a descriptive term with a richer content, a problem which redefined the challenges and limits of Indian citizenship, and an idea which later would come to be seen as a natural function of the everyday state.
The changes in the representation of corruption between the late 1930s and 1950s, related to the increasing responsibilities of the state, and the impact of local officers in the everyday lives of ordinary Indian citizens. Food and Civil Supply was a crucial area, which administered rationing for UP's urban poor, and controlled the supply of key industrial and manufacturing inputs. The development of the state machinery in this area coincided with three crucial political changes. Firstly, it came about at a time of increasing party political competition, when the roots of the ‘Congress system’ were forming. Secondly, it emerged when ideologies of the state were increasingly influenced by ideas about ‘modernization’ and ‘development’. Finally, it took place around the time of one of Asia's largest mass migrations, and most widespread episodes of communal violence.
As a result of these political intersections, as we saw in the first section, the idea of ‘corruption’ became more than just a description of administrative or political morality. It also connected to debates about how a ‘modern’ state might emerge from colonialism. Political and media discussions about corruption (compared with the interwar period) were now widely publicized and more clearly part of everyday gossip from the streets, right up to the assemblies. Corruption was also now represented in the press as a blight which affected increasing numbers of Indians as ‘citizens’, as they attempted to adjust and make sense of their political freedoms. As the second section explored, reference to the ‘corruption’ of others became a peculiarly useful political tool, in the new context of local political competition leading up to the first general elections: the strategies of UP's many factional contests frequently made use of the involvement of opponents in corruption scandals, particularly those linked to civil supply. Finally, as the final section of this paper showed, ‘corruption’ was also a part of political discourses which marked out issues of loyalty to the state. Here, the relationship between India and Pakistan, and specifically, the ambivalent position of Muslim government servants in the aftermath of partition, was crucial. More than ever before, ‘corruption’ scandals became a means of marking out the rights and duties of ‘citizens’ rather than ‘subjects’ of the Indian state. However, alleged involvement in the scandal of corruption could pose problems, for some Indians at least, in how far their rights as citizens might be enjoyed.
