There is a parable (“Before the Law”) embedded in Franz Kafka’s novel, The Trial, which describes a countryman who comes seeking the law and discovers an open doorway guarded by a single gatekeeper. When he asks whether he can enter, the gatekeeper replies that admission is “possible, but not now”. The wait stretches into decades as the man lingers outside, offering bribes that are accepted without effect, awaiting permission that never arrives. Finally, as he nears his death, the gatekeeper informs him that the doorway had been meant only for him, and that it will now be closed.
Until recently, a whole generation of urban and educated South Asian youth had been compliantly waiting, like the countryman in Kafka’s absurdist story, for their belated admission into the formal economic and political systems of their respective countries. The anxieties of waiting were piqued by the window that social media platforms opened onto the curated lives of those who had entered the charmed circles, often through familial ties or clientelist political networks. Their disillusionment has now started to give way to anger. And so they have begun to batter open the gates and tear down the emblems of State authority, from presidential palaces to Parliaments. That is the crude snapshot of the three South Asian, regime-destroying upheavals of the last three years: first in Sri Lanka, then in Bangladesh, and now in Nepal.
The triggers for the revolts has varied from galloping inflation fuelled by a sovereign debt-crisis in Sri Lanka, to patronage-linked quotas in State jobs in Bangladesh, to a social media ban in Nepal. All, however, spring from the same taproot of disgust with a political system whose two primary faces are seen to be corruption and repression. The former denotes a pattern of crony capitalism where economic resources — capital, jobs, land — tend to be allocated not through impersonal markets but through oligarchic networks. The latter signifies a State whose impressive capacity for controlling and disciplining the population — boosted by cutting-edge surveillance technology — stands in marked contrast to its poor capacity to deliver public goods like decent schools, clean streets, and functioning public hospitals.
Another shared aspect of these upheavals has been the wholesale rejection of all mainstream political parties, not just the ruling one. That is because all political parties are seen to be implicated in a scramble for patronage networks, which are blamed for locking the economy in a skewed and unproductive development trajectory. As Richard Bownas, a political scientist specialising in Nepalese politics, told Newsweek: “The ‘deeper’ cause is what I have termed the ‘particization’ of society in Nepal, the way in which the big 3 political parties (Congress, UML, Maoists) have become de facto mafias, seemingly more concerned with rent-seeking from control of key sectors such as schools, labor agencies, hospitals, the tourist industry, business houses, the construction industry, etc., than in serving their constituents.” These clientelist party-society linkages arouse particular indignation from the educated cohorts of the middle class as they are typically seen to favour either ‘oligarchic’ elites (through contracts and rents) or the ‘parasitic’ poor (through protection and subsidies) at the expense of ‘ordinary people’ like them. Such righteous frustration can be seen, for instance, in the projection of Kathmandu’s mayor, Balendra Shah, a rapper-turned-politician, as a credible alternative among the Gen-Z crowd owing to his image as a decisive man of action, an image reinforced by his highly-publicised eviction of the city’s poor street hawkers.
These inchoate upheavals are best understood through the concept of “deficient revolutions” espoused by the political sociologist, Volodymyr Ishchenko: mass mobilisations driven by intense moral outrage against corruption or authoritarianism, but lacking even the rudiments of a programmatic agenda. Such uprisings have consistently proven ill-suited to the task of political transformation. While they do succeed in ousting incumbents, they usually fail to strengthen State institutions or nurture capable political parties. Instead, they tend to reproduce the very structural weaknesses that ignited the protests in the first place, leaving societies caught in cycles of unrest, disappointment, and renewed mobilisation. The current protests in the Philippines and Indonesia illustrate this dynamic vividly as a new generation picks up the Sisyphean struggle of confronting the refurbished avatars of corrupt and authoritarian institutions that the ‘People Power’ and ‘Reformasi’ revolutions, respectively, of the late 20th century had promised to dismantle.
The core defect of these “deficient revolutions”, one may argue, lies in their stunted political imagination. As Kafka’s aforementioned allegory reminds us, our tendency to submit to exclusive structures of State authority stems, above all, from an atomised and constricted imagination. The countryman accepts the illusory process devised by the gatekeeper, only to wonder at the end why he alone had been waiting at the gate. Since political and economic systems are often too complex to grasp in their entirety, individuals depend on ‘mental maps’ to interpret and navigate them, as the economist, Douglass North, argued persuasively. When it comes to the problem of corruption, a particularly distorted imagery — fixated on the figure of the venal politician — frequently misleads popular struggles down the wrong path. The solution, as we shall see, lies not in tearing down the gates of authority but in working patiently to dismantle those exclusive structures that embed gatekeeping.
How then should we conceive the problem of corruption? And what kinds of political action can be most effective at combating corruption?
On the first question, we can do no better than turn to Michael Johnston, one of the foremost scholars of corruption in developing countries. Johnston urges us to view corruption as a “systemic problem rather than as a discrete category of behavior”. This perspective directs our gaze beyond the visible venality of politicians and oligarchs to the deeper, collective-action pathology sustained by weak institutions, which lack the capacity to enforce rules in a predictable manner. As Johnston puts it, corruption consists of the ways in which “people pursue and defend economic and political gains in a setting of weak institutions, major opportunities, and significant risk”.
But what, concretely, do these institutional reforms involve, and how might we move toward them? Again, Johnston offers a guiding principle in what he terms “deep democratization”: expanding the stake of marginalised groups in formal institutions so that governance enjoys broad social ownership. As he emphasises, “(anti-corruption) reform is a matter not only of improved public management but of justice.” The true measure of institutional development, then, is whether previously excluded groups can assert their legitimate claims on ‘public goods’ without being driven to seek shelter under the protective umbrella of clientelist networks. “Without that sort of social foundation even our best reform ideas are unlikely to take root,” cautions Johnston.
Lastly, combating corruption requires the development of inclusive and programmatic parties. As the political scientist, Philip Keefer, argues, corruption flourishes in systems dominated by parties built top-down around charismatic leaders and mobilised through patron-client ties. These arrangements undermine “credible commitments” to public-goods-oriented programmes since party members lack mechanisms to hold the leaders accountable to their programmatic commitments between elections.
Only when corruption is framed in terms of political exclusion can we forge the social coalitions needed to advance inclusive institutional reform. Otherwise, we will remain trapped in a recurring maze — casting out the corrupt politicians only to enthrone theatrical populists who pose as “honest outsiders” before watching them metamorphose into the very figures they once denounced.
Asim Ali is a political researcher and columnist