Its primary identity formed by the topos of the world-class city, Dubai and its iconic towers have been the setting of more than fifty movies from Hollywood, Bollywood, and beyond. Bollywood thriller Sarkar 3, for instance, displaces the locus of corruption from the titular strongman in Mumbai to landgrab crime boss “Sir” (Jackie Shroff) living in exile amid the skyscrapers and high-end luxuries of Dubai. As the camera luxuriates on Sir’s long-distance wheeling-dealing and his moll Theba (Fiza Ali) circling around him, the setting amid the world-class skyline and superelite amenities of Dubai tells us everything we need to know about both of them as the money and power behind a massive slum redevelopment scheme in Mumbai, mobilized through the phone at Sir’s ear.
Crime novelist Ravi Subramaniam similarly deploys an opening heist in the “largest and possibly most exquisitely designed luxury mall” in Dubai as a world-class thumbnail to quickly establish the transnational stakes of diamond-market corruption and Mumbai property speculation. It turns out the Wafi Mall spectacle is neither terrorism (the shoppers’ assumption) nor robbery (the investigators’ assumption); instead, it was the momentary emergence into visibility of an ongoing transnational struggle over money, power, and Mumbai land. Mobilised as a spectacle, the world-class zone asks viewers to cringe and jeer at the ridiculous excesses of amoral villains; at the same time, these images equally provide vicarious participation in forbidden pleasures without needing to reckon directly with the costs. The world-class zones imagined in film and literature join our ethnographic research in Mumbai and Bengaluru to express tensions and contradictions in conceptions of democratic publics; as Xuefei Ren writes, “aspirational urbanism is always contested.”
These corruption plots typically show elite informality and criminality in dubious transfers of land ostensibly serving the good of the nation and (directly or indirectly) its citizens but ending up instead lining the pockets of politicians, globetrotting elites, and mafia dons. They narrate spectacular conspiracies that equally reveal the everyday manipulations and conflicts surrounding the dazzling towers and complexes of the world-class city. We find that stories of corruption around world-class zones employ the degradation of the democratic process in the processes of globalised urban development. These plots decry hidden networks of transnational capital, developers, global crime syndicates, and public officials in every arm of government that profit from real estate bonanzas at the expense of the less powerful. In addition to fantasies of cosmopolitan consumer publics and capitalist ethics, corruption plots of world-class zones thus afford harmed and insurgent counter-publics associated with the humble middle- or working-class citizenry of hijacked democracies.
Central to the contested publics of these corruption plots is not only the question of who constitutes the demos of a particular public: whether its members are defined only in terms of their ability to buy into the processes of global capitalism (monetised demos), or in terms of their identity with a particular ethnonationalist vision, or in terms of a traditional liberal or social democratic baseline of universal rights and equality, or some combination of these features.
A related ethical concern is posed by political scientist Avia Pasternak in the question of “collective moral responsibility”: To what degree is a democratic public ethically responsible for the actions of its governments? The neoliberal public invoked by the capitalistic ethics and elite informality that underlie the putative legality of world-class developments like the “towers of secrecy” evades the moral scrutiny of Pasternak’s question. The counter-publics invoked by the corruption plots of activists, displaced residents, and investigative reporters, as we showed in this book, afford a counter-hegemonic ethics.
The battle over the terms of world-class development thus proposes a public counter to the one that world-class projects hail and purport to benefit. Like the Lodha billboard, right-wing nationalist parties claim world-class projects as a symbol of pride and arrival on the global stage for rightful Indian citizens. Such worlding gestures are deeply tied to what sociologist Smitha Radhakrishnan describes as the figure of the “global Indian,” an ostensibly democratic but also ethnonationalist public afforded from the Indian state’s promotion of business processing, finance, and information technology sectors of the global economy based in cities like Mumbai and Bengaluru.
The discursive rendering of the “global Indian” celebrates participation in the global economy, epitomised by the upper-middle-class, typically male, and upper-caste urban IT professional who replaces in both symbolic and material ways the poor villager and worker that were central to postindependence imaginaries of the demos.
As cultural anthropologist Purnima Mankekar argues, following Ong’s definition of neoliberalism as a mobile technology open to counter-worlding, the “global Indian” as an entrepreneur can also be reimagined through what we term grey ethics. In Mankekar’s example of the 2005 Bollywood comedy Bunty aur Babli (Bunty and Babli), a young provincial couple with big neoliberal dreams – to become a business tycoon and a fashion model – discovers instead that the best way to become rich and famous in a world-class India is as con artists and impersonators. Bunty aur Babli suggests, for Mankekar, “that it is not just acceptable to lie, engage in fraud, disobey and defy one’s parents, and flaunt conventional modes of behaviour, but that it is necessary to do so in order to succeed in one’s ambitions.” Although pursued across the nation and finally arrested by police commissioner Dashrath Singh (played by stalwart icon Amitabh Bachchan), the criminal couple is, in the end, reincorporated into the democratic public. First, Singh lets the apparently repentant couple go free, then, later, “rescues them from their mundane domestic lives by offering them to work for the nation thwarting the activities of other scammers.” Their illegal training in grey ethics is recuperated into an updated conception of liberal ethics.
More typically, the notion of the global Indian also permits right-wing parties and cultural movements to yoke globalised upward mobility to conservative religious and gender politics. Such ethnonationalist visions become associated with the topos of the world-class city and conjure upper-class (and often Brahmin and other privileged-caste) Hindus as the globalized national public who can vindicate the city qua nation in contrast to the backward, antinational Muslim or Dalit. Yet world-class zones have generally failed to adequately provide jobs or housing for the millions of poorer Indians excluded from or displaced by such projects in villages and informal settlements of cities.
The corruption stories discussed in this chapter illuminate collusions between the state and vested interests that facilitate fraudulent land grabs benefiting the elite in the name of the democratic public. Because the democratic publics and capitalistic ethics invoked by world-class zones tend to occlude the elite informality that drives their creation, the majority of corruption plots we discuss challenge world-class projects and disrupt exclusionary uses of “the public” by questioning the degradation of the democratic process and the systematic robbing of a demos that would be working-class, popular, or otherwise differently defined than the monetised global individual who dwells or aspires to dwell, only in world-class zones.
Excerpted with permission from Corruption Plots: Stories, Ethics, and Publics of the Late Capitalist City, Malini Ranganathan, David L Pike, and Sapana Doshi, Yoda Press.
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