Internet X-Ray: E-Governance, Transparency, and the Politics of Immediation in India
Sting
Is it possible to cause a sensation by revealing something that everybody already knows? Certainly that is what seems to have happened in March 2001, when an up-and-coming Delhi-based Internet news Web site, Tehelka.com, broadcast videotaped evidence of corruption at the highest levels of the Indian polity. The tapes showed prominent members of the New Delhi power elite, some of them elected politicians, either discussing or actually receiving bribes from Tehelka journalists pretending to be dealers of military equipment. Tehelka, named for the kind of tumult that a sensation or scandal might produce, had already made waves the year before when it broke a story about match fixing in that holiest of Indian holies, cricket ( Bahal [2000] 2003). Its target this time, the defense establishment, was only marginally less sacred — particularly in the wake of the patriotic frenzy that had swept the mainstream media during the Kargil border war with Pakistan in the summer of 1999.
In retrospect, it is easy to be cynical about the importance of Tehelka’s sting, code named Operation West End. For a short while it looked like the government might collapse, as several key players — Defense Minister George Fernandes, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) president Bangaru Laxman, and Samata Party chief Jaya Jaitley — tendered their resignations. But soon it was back to business as usual. Fernandes was reinstated (he had in any case never been caught on video) and the commission instituted to investigate the sting dragged on and on, to waning public attention. Overnight media darlings, the team at Tehelka soon found their fortunes reversed as they were subjected to a labyrinth of legal and paralegal harassment.
The government, having recovered its footing, quickly exhumed the trustiest of Indira Gandhi – era bogeys, the foreign hand. Rumors were planted: Operation West End had been masterminded by the Pakistani secret service, the ISI; Tehelka was being directly bankrolled by the notorious Dubai-based gang lord, Dawood Ibrahim; Operation West End was part of a stock manipulation scam by a concern called First Global, which owned a chunk of Tehelka shares and which was, some claimed, a front organization for the Congress Party, then in opposition. Uncovering an apparent assassination plot against Tehelka’s editor-in-chief Tarun Tejpal allowed the Delhi police to put him under maximum security. The plot itself was read as a stratagem on the part of the ISI to discredit the Indian government. Tejpal, Mathew Samuel, and Aniruddha Bahal all received death threats in the months after the story broke, and the Tehelka offices were subjected to a dizzying good cop/bad cop oscillation of protection and raids. Writing approximately a year after Tehelka went public with Operation West End, Aman Singh (2002) estimated that the Web site had already been subjected to something like two hundred legal summonses and twenty-five police raids.
So, given that the mere revelation of corruption in India is hardly big news, how can we begin to explain both the extraordinary attention that the sting initially attracted and the intensity of Tehelka’s subsequent persecution? The public life of Operation West End generated and absorbed an extremely diverse set of narratives and commentaries. Some were ostensibly neutral and descriptive, such as this journalistic summary published the year after the March 2001 exposé:
Two journalists, Aniruddha Bahal and Mathew Samuel, posed as agents from a fictitious arms company called West End. They hawked a nonexistent product — hand-held thermal cameras — to the Defence Ministry, and paid money to the president of the [then ruling] BJP, bureaucrats and army men to push the deal through. They . . . captured all transactions on
spycam and exhibited the footage at a press conference. They had almost sold a product they didn’t have to the Government of India. ( N. Singh 2002)
I have already indicated the paranoid profusion of defensive interpretations that the sting generated within the government and its informational subcontractors. But Operation West End’s perpetrators, allies, and sympathizers were also busy telling stories. As we shall see, these ranged from dourly predictable proclamations about the moral responsibilities of the fourth estate vis-à-vis degenerate politicians to mischievous village projections of the Internet as a corruption-exposing X-ray machine that was striking fear into the hearts of national leaders.
My approach in this essay will be to push the analysis of Operation West End beyond the normatively staged confrontations between corruption and probity and between concealment and transparency. My aim is to explore how these binaries may be read as conventionalized symptoms of an underlying series of contradictions. These contradictions were, in turn, constitutive of an ideological formation that was coming into focus at the time of Operation West End and was known as e-governance. The discourse of e-governance (I will return to this theme in greater detail below) crystallized out of the 1990s global wave of high-tech euphoria. During this period, successive Indian governments had seized upon the relative success of Indian software services and Internet-enabled business-process outsourcing as India’s ticket to prominence in the global economy of the twentyfirst century ( Singhal and Rogers 2001; Vittal and Mahalingam 2001). With the dizzying infotech crash that followed the turn of the millennium, high-tech corporations found it increasingly attractive to hard sell national and provincial governments on the promises and benefits of e-governance — that is, the deployment of Internet-powered computing to bring about, in one fell swoop, more efficient administration and more directly democratic forms of public life.
An important part of the attraction of e-governance in India was that it promised to reconcile the central contradiction, produced by the move toward a more neoliberal consumerist order in the early 1990s, between the inclusive, populist ideal of national social development, on the one hand, and the invidiously exclusive lure of mass consumerism, on the other ( Mankekar 1999; Mazzarella 2003; Rajagopal 2001). To this end, e-governance had to be framed, first and foremost, as a boon to the disconnected and the unwired. In part, this meant redefining the hoary developmentalist category of “appropriate technologies” so as to accommodate high-tech innovations that were generally dismissed as inessential playthings of the rich. Here the notion of information as a kind of universal human right, and therefore also a necessary component of socioeconomic progress, was indispensable. On an ideological level, e-governance attempted to synthesize a political language of transparency with a corporate managerial vision. I will suggest that Operation West End, a sting that was ostensibly about a rather shopworn theme, corruption at the top, was in truth scandalous because this manifest narrative of corruption gave symptomatic expression to a series of constitutive contradictions in the project of e-governance.
To do this, I will consider several dimensions of the scandal: the narratives and images that comprised the sting itself, the discourses that refracted its passages through the public nervous system, its aesthetics, its ideological complicities, and its complications. On one level, I will be grappling with the problems besetting a politics of transparency in the public project of state legitimation — not least the paradoxical tendency of transparency measures to yield, in practice, new opacities. But ultimately this is an argument about the centrality of mediation to social and political life and, conversely, the seductions and short circuits of the great utopian figure of immediacy. E-governance is, it seems to me, one important avatar of a more general desire for what I am calling a politics of immediation — that is to say, a political practice that, in the name of immediacy and transparency, occludes the potentialities and contingencies embedded in the mediations that comprise and enable social life.
By mediation, I do not mean simply the conveyance of a datum from one domain or location to another. Still less am I referring to any harmonization of divergent interests or tendencies. Rather, I understand mediation as the ambiguous foundation of all social life ( Mazzarella 2004). Mediation involves the conceptual, technical, and linguistic practices by which the actually irreducible particularities of our experience are, apparently, reduced: in other words, rendered provisionally commensurable and thus recognizable and communicable in general terms. Needless to say, these processes are necessarily ideological. Social practices of mediation, often initially quite contested, are formalized as mechanisms, externalized as technologies, and naturalized as social orders. These are not simply impersonal, objective processes. Rather, mediation is (as Hegel knew) also the basis of self-consciousness and therefore of affect and desire. The gap between the concreteness of experience and materiality, on the one hand, and the conceptual generalization that social life requires, on the other, is the terrain on which we re-cognize ourselves in the paradoxical form of something outside ourselves. That this is a relation characterized by an anxious oscillation between identification and alienation is both crucial to acknowledge and so general a statement as to be almost empty of content.
My project in this essay, then, is to explore some of the contemporary political implications of this dynamic by interpretively linking three levels of analysis. At the most general level, I am postulating the kind of mediatory dynamics that I just previewed. At an intermediate level, I want to explore the ways that an ideological formation like e-governance activated these dynamics in often paradoxical ways through figures of immediacy, transparency, and even democracy. At the most particular level, I want to show how a publicly explosive event like Operation West End had, in some ways despite itself, the power to reveal the contradictions that structure such ideological formations.
The Indian incarnation of the information society did not just invoke both a new commodity fetish (sleek consumer computing) and a new human right (the right to information). Computers networked by means of the Internet or otherwise also appeared to offer a new weapon against that most ingrained of official infirmities: corruption. Beyond the way that interconnection implied access and visibility, the attraction was rooted in a naive notion of the inherent incorruptibility of digitized information, as opposed to the surreptitious modifications to which handwritten ledger entries were so manifestly subject. Thus far, Operation West End was largely complicit with the ideological assumptions of the government that it was ostensibly exposing. But the very closeness of this complicity was perhaps also the condition of its own reversal. I suggest that an important component of the scandal of Operation West End was that it used the very technologies upon which the new order of e-governance was going to be based — this polity without politics, these media without mediation — to show that, when it came to politics, opacity and transparency were more mutually enabling conditions than polar opposites.
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Notes
This paper began as a short presentation for a panel on censorship in South Asia at the 2002 American Anthropological Association meetings in New Orleans. My thanks to Thomas Blom Hansen, Matt Hull, Claudio Lomnitz, Joe Masco, Debbie Nelson, Danilyn Rutherford, Aditi Thorat, and the editorial committee of Public Culture for their graciously critical readings of subsequent drafts. Thanks also to interlocutors at the various locations in which oral versions of this paper have been performed: the University of Iowa, the University of Colorado at Boulder, Cornell University, and the University of Chicago. The research upon which this essay is based was made possible by the Committee for South Asian Studies at the University of Chicago and the Marion R. and Adolph J. Lichtstern Fund of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago.