Crime, Corruption, and Political Order in Nigeria and India

The subjects of crime and corruption remain perennially important for social scientists concerned with the nature of power, authority, and order. Steven Pierce's Moral Economies of Corruption: State Formation and Political Culture in Nigeria and Milan Vaishnav's When Crime Pays: Money and Muscle in Indian Politics present two very different approaches to the study of crime and corruption, both rich, complex, and lucidly conveyed. Pierce deals specifically with the concept of corruption, the most common definition of which implies the use of public office for private benefit. By contrast, Vaishnav's empirical focus is Indian electoral democracy's embrace of criminal politicians, those who stand accused of breaking civil or criminal laws. Despite this difference in the focus of each book, the two texts share enough theoretical and conceptual ground to make a joint consideration useful. As a scholar of South Asia, my approach in the essay is to use insights from Pierce to reflect on the methodological and theoretical choices in Vaishnav's account of India's criminal politicians. In discussing each author's contributions, rather than providing a comprehensive account, I focus on the parts of their arguments that are useful for comparative discussion.

Pierce's history of corruption in Nigeria begins with the British colonial period in the late nineteenth century and extends into the early years of the twenty-first century. His aim is not to forensically analyze claims about extralegality but rather to understand corruption as a discourse, or performance, as he puts it, that has unfolded over time and has both material and ideological consequences. Pierce begins by noting that Nigeria—the purported geographic origin of many of the twenty-first century's most famous internet scams—has a reputation for corruption, a reputation, incidentally, that India shares. It is the wide resonance of Nigerian corruption in the present that leads Pierce to interrogate the origins, meanings, and development of corruption as a discourse from a historical perspective.

A consistent engagement and signal contribution of Pierce's work is a careful attention to the multiple linguistic registers in which the English word corruption appears in Nigeria, and the emergence of this term alongside the many parallel and related terms in Nigerian languages. Some of these related terms are used to describe the same kinds of actions as those decried by the word corruption, but often they imply a different set of normative positions in that judgment. For example, many of Pierce's Hausa interlocutors, in their oral histories of twentieth-century politics, use the term zalunci, glossed as "oppression," rather than "corruption" in English to describe actions like bribe-taking, extortion, and embezzlement on the part of government officials. But the word connotes an understanding that government officials are supposed to act this way, and that to be a governed person is to also be subject to the forms of oppression that the status of officialdom makes possible. Pierce takes the nuances of these linguistic referents seriously. They are not merely deviations from a technocratic ideal that subjects of modern states are meant to hold dear, but rather are constitutive of a particular kind of political subjectivity that may be specific to the postcolonial Nigerian polity, one in which certain kinds of oppression and corruption are comprehensible and even expected.

The English word "corruption" and the discourse that surrounds it emerge in the context of a colonial Nigeria where these other kinds of political oppression already exist. In its earliest usages, the discourse of corruption, or the "corruption-complex" as Pierce terms it, emerges simultaneously with the imposition of expanding forms of British indirect rule in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, partly as a way of justifying this expansion by discrediting recalcitrant native power-holders. In the personalistic rule of precolonial politics, gift-giving to stabilize relations...