Criminal Capital : Violence, Corruption and Class in Industrial India

151 Pages·2016·1.399 MB·English

by  Andrew Sanchez

‘Criminalisation of politics and corruption are by far the most discussed, but least understood,
topics in India. Andrew Sanchez has achieved a remarkable analytical tour de force in this
masterfully researched and sharply insightful study that convincingly alters the way in which
we conceive of the role of crime and the meanings of corruption in India’s contemporary
capitalism and democracy.’
Nandini Gooptu, Associate Professor of South Asian Studies, University of Oxford, UK
‘Criminal Capital tells an Indian tale of global relevance – what happens when economic
liberalisation encourages firms to focus on profit in an era of global competition. The result is
workers with little hope of security, and unions, companies and politicians with little sense of
obligation to anyone but themselves.’
James Carrier, Research Associate, Oxford Brookes University, UK
‘Class and labour are back in vogue. Andrew Sanchez’s rich local ethnography of Jamshedpur,
the quintessential company town around the Tata corporation, India, is shot through with
global comparison and universalizing insight. He shows how an ever more casualised local
working class explains its condition with ideas of systemic corruption, and why those ideas
make sense. A fantastic contribution to Indian labour ethnography as well as to global
comparative class analysis.’
Don Kalb, Professor of Social Anthropology, Central European University, Hungary
CRIMINAL CAPITAL
Criminal Capital explores the relationship between neo-liberalism, criminality and the
reshaping of class in modern India. It discusses how the political vocabularies of urban
industrial workers reflect the processes by which power is distributed across the region. Based
upon field research among a ‘casualised’ workforce in the industrial city of Jamshedpur, the
book examines the links between the decline of employment security, and criminality in trade
unions, corporations and the state.
This volume compares popular discourses of corruption against the ethnography of local
labour politics, business enterprise and debt collection and shows how corruption and
criminality consolidate class power in industrial environments. Using an interdisciplinary
ethnographic approach, this study interrogates the relationship between capitalism, corruption,
violence and labour politics in contemporary Indian society.
An important intervention in the study of Indian political economy, this work will be of
interest to scholars and researchers of Indian politics, social anthropology, economics, labour
relations, and criminology.
Andrew Sanchez is Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Kent, UK. He is a
specialist on the anthropology of class, labour and corruption, and has conducted ethnographic
fieldwork in urban India among industrial workers, trade unionists and entrepreneurs. Prior to
joining the University of Kent, he held positions at the London School of Economics and
Political Science, and the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. He is currently
conducting a study of the Indian scrap metal industry.
EXPLORING THE POLITICAL IN SOUTH ASIA
Series Editor: Mukulika Banerjee
Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, London School of Economics
and Political Science
Exploring the Political in South Asia is devoted to the publication of research on the political
cultures of the region. The books in this series present qualitative and quantitative analyses
grounded in field research and explore the cultures of democracies in their everyday local
settings, specifically the workings of modern political institutions, practices of political
mobilisation, manoeuvres of high politics, structures of popular beliefs, content of political
ideologies, and styles of political leadership, among others. Through fine-grained descriptions
of particular settings in South Asia, the studies presented in this series inform, and have
implications for, general discussions of democracy and politics elsewhere in the world.
Also in this series
THE VERNACULARISATION OF DEMOCRACY
Politics, Caste and Religion in India
Lucia Michelutti
978-0-415-46732-2
RISE OF THE PLEBEIANS?
The Changing Face of the Indian Legislative Assemblies
Edited by Christophe Jaffrelot and Sanjay Kumar
978-0-415-46092-7
BROADENING AND DEEPENING DEMOCRACY
Political Innovation in Karnataka
E. Raghavan and James Manor
978-0-415-54454-2
RETRO-MODERN INDIA
Forging the Low-caste Self
Manuela Ciotti
978-0-415-56311-6
POWER AND INFLUENCE IN INDIA
Bosses, Lords and Captains
Edited by Pamela Price and Arild Engelsen Ruud
978-0-415-58595-8
DALITS IN NEOLIBERAL INDIA
Mobility or Marginalisation?
Edited by Clarinda Still
978-1-138-02024-5
WHY INDIA VOTES?
Mukulika Banerjee
978-1-138-01971-3
CRIMINAL CAPITAL
Violence, Corruption and Class in Industrial India
Andrew Sanchez
978-1-138-92196-2
THE POLITICS OF CASTE IN WEST BENGAL
Edited by Uday Chandra, Geir Heierstad and Kenneth Bo Nielsen
978-1-138-92148-1
POLITICS, LANDLORDS AND ISLAM IN PAKISTAN
Nicolas Martin
978-1-138-82188-0
CRIMINAL CAPITAL
Violence, corruption and class in industrial India
Andrew Sanchez
First published 2016
by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2016 Andrew Sanchez
The right of Andrew Sanchez to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78
of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for
identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book
ISBN: 978-1-138-92196-2 (hbk)
Typeset in Sabon
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
This book is for my mother, Barbara Lee, who taught me to think critically, feel passionately
and speak plainly. None of this could have happened without her.
CONTENTS
Foreword
Acknowledgements
List of acronyms and abbreviations
Notes
Maps
PART I
Class and capitalism
1 Criminal capital
2 Dispossession and the class concept in industrial India
PART II
Power and enterprise
3 The political economy of criminal enterprise
4 The decline of collective action
PART III
Division and change
5 Ethnic violence and the daily politics of labour
6 Continuity and the casualisation of labour
Conclusion
Appendix: Positionality and the research process
References
Index
FOREWORD
Andrew Sanchez’s book could not have come early enough. In a climate of increasing changes
in the economic regimes in the world, his ethnography of a flagship ‘steel town’ in India
provokes a discussion of the real consequences of such changes. The study is located in
Jamshedpur, a town in the eastern state of Jharkhand, well-known for steel production. The
town is named after the industrialist, Jamshedji Tata, who set up this plant during the colonial
period to provide locally made steel for various British projects, most notably, the Indian
Railways. Jamshedpur is, therefore, synonymous with both steel and the Tatas, one of the
oldest and best-known business houses in India. Jamshedpur itself grew as a planned township
to house not only the steel and automobile plant, but to provide accommodation and services
for the workers and their families. It has been held as a successful example of a ‘company
town’ model in India. Unlike state-owned enterprises, Tata Steel made consistent profits from
the 1950s onwards. The plant attracted a workforce from far and wide, and their skills and
aptitudes were variously deployed for a hierarchical and highly specialised industrial
workforce. This heterogeneous labour pool was gradually given local stability through
hereditary employment opportunities for subsequent generations of workers and this created
an enviable loyalty to the firm. This loyalty, combined with the value placed on traditional
family work, has defined the Tata working class. As Sanchez puts it, ‘The tenacity of this
system is evident in the extent to which even casually employed Tata workers from company
families currently accept low wages and a high degree of job insecurity for many years: such
employees are inured to the value of Tata employment, and tend to build not only their
ambitions, but critiques around it’.
This book picks up the Tata story more than a decade after India’s economic reforms that
reconfigured relations between the state and economy were introduced in the early 1990s.
Until this point, Tata Motors had a virtual monopoly on the domestic automobile market, but
the neo-liberal reforms had allowed foreign competitors such as Suzuki and Toyota into the
automobile market and they were able to provide quality products at more competitive prices.
The only way in which that Tata could reduce their production costs was to casualise their
labour force. By the time Sanchez started his research in 2006, the casual workforce was
greater than 75 per cent – nearly three times higher than what it was before the reforms. In
order to achieve this extraordinary change, Sanchez’s data shows how criminality and
corruption were essential tools.
This fine-grained ethnographic work shows how neo-liberal reforms impact an industrial
workforce on the ground. It is a story about individuals and systems that demonstrate the
fallout of these reforms, the change they force in labour policies and the impact that these
have on particular families and communities. While the literature on the negative impact of
neo-liberal reforms on India’s rural poor is well-established, this path-breaking study charts