Prospecting for “Corruption”: Generating Political Value in Contemporary India

ABSTRACT This article examines the labor that goes into the categorization of practices as “corrupt” in the context of India's popular politics. Focusing on the rise of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), a political party that emerged from a widely publicized 2010s anticorruption mass movement in India, I introduce the term corruption prospecting to describe the often laborious methods through which leaders and volunteers probed for, labeled, and publicized actions as “corrupt.” The AAP's prospecting methods included informal surveys, sting operations, and helplines. It is these generative material practices that established “corruption” as a political resource for the fledgling party. “Corruption” as categorization accrued value not necessarily through eliminatory efforts but through the circulation and media amplification of corruption's purported discovery and exposure. Corruption charges have long been used to sustain political legitimacy. This article contributes to the anthropology of corruption by shifting disciplinary attention from discourse and representation to the work that goes into making a corruption allegation recognizable and actionable in an ever more mediatized and technologized context. A decade after its spectacular win in Delhi, the AAP found itself mired in corruption allegations, revealing corruption prospecting to be nonproprietorial, contingent, and multiscalar.