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Martin Webb
University of Sussex

Activating Citizens, Remaking Brokerage: Transparency

Activism, Ethical Scenes, and the Urban Poor in Delhi
Based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out with transparency activists in Delhi
between 2006 and 2007, this article explores their attempts to help Delhis poor
engage with the state as active citizens claiming their rights to welfare. Drawing
on Lawrence Cohens recent writing on ethical publicity I argue that the work of
transparency activists is directed at producing an ethical scene in which their poor
clients are encouraged to understand themselves as potentially empowered citizens
of a nation wounded by corruption and bad governance. However, this ethical scene
is partly framed by exclusionary middle-class discourses about corruption, dirty
politics, and brokerage that problematize the need for the urban poor to negotiate
their existence in the city through informal mediated connections to political and
bureaucratic power. The same mediated connections between political society
and the local state which transparency and accountability activists work to expose
and reform. Furthermore, my ethnography shows how the process of promoting and
implementing transparency mechanisms in the social and political context of urban
India produces new relationships of brokerage between activists and those who seek
their assistance as expert mediators with the state. [Transparency, India, Right to
Information, RTI, brokerage, Delhi, active citizenship]

In this article I look at how activist groups, emerging from the middle class in Delhi,
employ legal mechanisms for transparency as pedagogical tools in their attempts to
engage the urban poor as active citizens in projects designed to audit and discipline the
local state. My aims are twofold. The first is to open up a view of the emergent ways
in which transparency, conceptualized and codified through legal norms, is translated
into everyday practice in local contexts. The second is to interrogate assertions about
the links between transparency, empowerment, and civil society activism and the
ability of citizens to engage in a relationship with the state unmediated by socially
embedded relations of power and brokerage (Baviskar 2010:142; Mander 2003; Raj
Kumar 2003:6162; Singh 2011:26). Through my ethnography, I detail some of the
ways in which legal mechanisms for transparency, interacting with everyday power
relations and social contexts, are woven into and remake the brokerage on which the
lives of Delhis urban poor depend.
I begin my argument with a brief outline of the relationship between the urban poor,
the local state, and the transparency activist groups in Delhi. I describe the political
PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, Vol. 35, Number 2, pps. 206222. ISSN
1081-6976, electronic ISSN 1555-2934. 
C 2012 by the American Anthropological Association.
All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1555-2934.2012.01199.x.

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context of the emergence of transparency activism and legislation in India before

detailing two case studies from Delhi that ground the argument ethnographically.
Indias national Right to Information Act, passed in 2005, is a transparency mechanism presented in a publicly accessible form: as a citizens right. In theory, any Indian
citizen may use it to access and to reveal information about the state within the parameters set by the act. However, in everyday practice, for the poor and marginalized
sections of Indian society, access to the formal rights which citizenship is supposed
to confer, including the right to information, is limited. Factors such as social, cultural, and economic capitals; gender; or literacy affect peoples ability to engage with
bureaucratic systems. The substantive citizenship (Desai and Sanyal 2012:7) of the
urban poor emerges out of the negotiation of complex social and political relationships with officials and elected representatives at the lower levels of the state that help
to secure unofficial work and residence in planned urban areas. These relationships
are characterized by informality, brokerage, and a flexible approach to bureaucratic
procedures. The opaque and informal conduits and connections of political society or the everyday state (Chatterjee 2004:4041; Fuller and Benei 2000; Ghertner
2011:508; Harriss 2007) identified in popular media, and the rhetoric of anticorruption movements, as being the root of corruption and bad governance, are essential to
allow the urban poor to survive in the city (Visvanathan 2008). With up to 45 percent
of Delhis population living in slums, squatter settlements, or unauthorized colonies,
and with more than one million people living below the official poverty line (Shiva
Kumar and Government of NCT of Delhi 2006:4), these informal arrangements involve significant numbers of people. Activists recognize that these factors influence
poor peoples ability to operate and value formal mechanisms for transparency and
accountability. To promote these mechanisms as anticorruption tools, they must work
as advocates, facilitators, and mediators to encourage people to engage with the state
through formal channels rather than through informal clientalist connections.
As I have shown elsewhere in my work on rhetoric and the dissemination of success
stories (Webb 2010), transparency activists in India have approached this task in
two ways. The first is to promote the use of the Right to Information Act 2005 as a
means by which communities might collectively hold the government accountable
by obtaining information on local spending, comparing the data to what exists on the
ground, and holding organized public hearings to reveal discrepancies. The second is
individually, by using the act to intervene with personal bureaucratic problems (Webb
2010:297). In this article, I focus on the second approach, which has emerged from
activists close understanding of the role of mediation and brokerage in the lower
levels of the bureaucracy in India.
In the cases detailed below, I concentrate on activists attempts to assist people on low
incomes who, marginalized by class and caste identity and illiteracy, face difficulties
accessing subsidized wheat, rice, and kerosene from the Delhi governments Targeted
Public Distribution System (PDS). The PDS has become notorious for corruption
and embezzlement with some ration shop owners falsifying the records regarding the
amount of welfare disbursed to individuals, refusing poor and illiterate people access
to the rations due them, and reselling supplies intended for the PDS on the open

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market. In response to this, activist groups in Delhi organized a series of campaigns,

outlined in the article, to institute mechanisms for transparency and accountability,
including the use of the Right to Information Act in the PDS system (Baviskar
2010:138139; Pande 2008:5253).
I argue that the use of these mechanisms is important to activists for two reasons. The
first is instrumental, attempting to bring discipline to the PDS system and helping
the urban poor to access that system. The second is pedagogical, teaching people
the benefit of claiming their rights through legal and procedural interactions with the
state. The aim of accessing information, as promoted by the activists, is directed at
producing transparency and subjecting the state to audit. It is also intended to offer
the urban poor a means by which they might participate in what John Harriss calls
the new politics of voluntarism and civil society: to be empowered and visible as
active rights-bearing citizens making legitimate claims on paper, rather than making
appeals to an old and dirty politics of parties and patronage (2007:2717). Mechanisms for transparency are being used to attempt to enrol the urban poor as ethical and
moral actors in a scene framed by both neoliberal governance paradigms of individual participation and empowerment (Kamat 2002:9) and by rights-based approaches
to development that place responsibility for providing public goods onto administrations. This latter frame particularly emphasizes mechanisms for transparency
and accountability that might help citizens to guarantee their rights (Cornwall and
Nyamu-Musembi 2004:14171418). In both frames the state is supposed to enable active citizenship and civil society by providing the politicolegal framework through
which rights can be claimed (Chandoke 2003:243), thus reducing the need for the
urban poor to make claims through informal collective approaches within political
society (Chatterjee 2001:177).
Writing on India, Lawrence Cohen provides us with a useful framework with which
to think about these processes of engagement. He argues:
Many of us, in much of the world, come to know or feel ourselves to be
moral or ethical subjects in our being addressed as a public. Constitutive
of that address that leads us to be aware of ourselves as publics is what
we might call an ethical scene. [2010:256]
He delineates two types of scenes. In the first, people come to know themselves
as ethical by addressing the suffering of others. In the second, people understand
themselves as ethical because of wrongs that have been done to their group. These
wrongs are mediated through moments of address such as news reports of corruption
or violence affecting a group, or wounds to the sentiments of a community, followed
by calls for censorship of publications, such as occurred with Salman Rushdies The
Satanic Verses (Cohen 2010:270).
Both types of scene are at play in the work of middle-class transparency and accountability activists as they come to understand and identify themselves as ethical actors
doing social service for clients from the urban poor, and as they attempt to develop an
ethical scene in which their clients can understand themselves as potentially empowered citizens of a nation wounded by corruption, bad governance, and the failure of

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the bureaucracy to guarantee citizen rights. An example of this work is a slogan originally developed by the Delhi-based transparency activist group Parivartan, which
was used in public presentations and street speeches in low-income areas of Delhi
during my fieldwork:
We all pay taxes. Even a beggar on the street pays tax. When he buys
anything like soap or a matchbox, he pays taxes in the form of sales tax,
excise duty, etc. This money belongs to us. It does not belong to any
politician or bureaucrat. It belongs to the people of India. The people are
the masters. Government exists to serve them.1
Following Shore and Wright, Cohen (2010) points out that these ethical scenes are
articulated through processes of audit and accountability, of ethical publicity, in
which the public identifies with and participates in public inspections and disciplining
of wrong doers. By looking at the historical development of the Right to Information
Act by activist groups in India, it can be seen that it has taken precisely this course.
In turn, much of the academic and policy literature on the emergence and application
of the Right to Information in India focuses on, and often celebrates, these practices
(for examples of work on the organization of public hearings by activist groups,
see Baviskar 2010; Corbridge et al. 2005:222; Goetz and Jenkins 2001; Jenkins and
Goetz 1999, 2003; Kirmani 2007; Mentschel 2005; Pande 2008). Scholars, however,
have not detailed the practice or implications of employing a Right to Information in
the manner I describe here, nor do they highlight two significant contradictions that
emerge from activist attempts to help the poor become active citizens.
The first contradiction is that this ethical scene is itself partly constituted or framed
by middle-class discourses about dirty politics, civic beautification, and good governance (Ghertner 2011; Harriss 2006) that problematize the ability of unofficial
groups, such as slum-dwellers, to perpetuate their existence through informal bureaucratic and political connections: the very practices that activists work to expose
and reform. The claims that members of the urban poor may be able to make as
individual citizens through the Right to Information Act relate only to those parts of
their lives that intersect with the legal and bureaucratic processes of the state. Thus,
while these claims can make differences to the lives of the urban poor by increasing
access to welfare payments, subsidized food grains, or education, they do not help in
securing unofficial and informally organized livelihoods and residences. Using the
act may make people momentarily visible on paper as individual citizens, but they
remain in the unofficial margins of the city. This leaves them subject to many of the
same constraints as before: partially engaged in an ethical scene in which they are
themselves constructed as a social problem.
The second contradiction is that in the process of helping people engage with mechanisms for transparency, particularly where those people are excluded because of a lack
of social, cultural, or educational capital, the brokerage and mediation of the everyday
state and political society is remade in the very practice of eliciting transparency. New
relationships of brokerage, formed between activists and the people who seek their assistance as expert interlocutors with the state, emerge specifically from the promotion
and application of transparency mechanisms within the social and political context of

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contemporary urban India. The ethical rhetorics of participation, empowerment, and

state reform produced by transparency activist groups are familiar to poor clients who
come to them for assistance, not least because they encounter these through contact
with the many NGOs and development actors who work in low-income areas of the
city. But it remains the case that in everyday practical engagementfrom the point
of view of the urban poora middle-class-led transparency activist group offering
help in interactions with the local state appears most clearly as a potential patron and
mediator emerging from within the local political field.
To develop the argument further and to set social, political, and historical context,
I offer a brief introduction to the emergence of Indias transparency legislation and
the Right to Information Act. I then present two sets of ethnographic data drawn
from fieldwork carried out during 2006 and 2007 with grassroots activist groups in
Delhi; the data include accounts of public meetings and of a street outreach camp
that engaged with ration issues.
Activists and the Right to Information
The campaign for a Right to Information Act in India has already been well described
in the work of other scholars (see Baviskar 2010; Corbridge et al. 2005:221224;
Goetz and Jenkins 2001; Jenkins 2007; Jenkins and Goetz 1999, 2003; Kirmani
2007; Mentschel 2005; Pande 2008). Instead, I focus on the work of some of the
sangathans (local activist groups) that I encountered during my fieldwork that were
involved in the development of the Right to Information Act and other transparency
and accountability mechanisms related to the PDS. In character, these groups conform
to what Sheth terms movement groups, that is, a genre of social movements, often
labelled grassroots, that pursue a long-term goal of democratizing development
and transforming society (2004: 45). Technically, movement groups distinguish
themselves from professional NGOs because they are not formally registered, do
not accept institutional funding, have members (not employees), and are guided by
a discourse of personal commitment and sacrifice that Morris-Jones terms saintly
politics (1963:140141). However, in practice, the boundaries between movement
groups and NGOs are often blurred (Kamat 2002:18). This fuzzy quality comes into
its own from the Hindi generic term andolan (the movement), used by Right to
Information activists to describe the loose coalition between movement groups and
established NGOs working on similar issues within Delhi and around the country
and with the national lobbying group, the National Campaign for Peoples Right to
Information (NCPRI). As a leading figure in the NCPRI told me, the overall aim of
the movement is to persuade people that they must take responsibility for the state if
they want to change it (personal communication, December 8, 2006). Ideologically,
these organizations are not oriented toward reducing the size of the state but toward
disciplining the state and ensuring that it functions properly.
The Delhi-based activist groups that I discuss in this article are part of what Rob
Jenkins calls the second wave of anti-corruption activism that developed around
the new millennium as concerns over corruption arose in the administration of
Indias antipoverty programs (2007:6162). Delhi-based groups followed the lead of

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organizations such as the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (Labourers and Farmers
Power Organisation; hereafter MKSS) in Rajasthan, in which the Magsaysay awardwinning activist Aruna Roy plays a leading role. Formed in the late 1980s, the MKSS
is best known for its struggle to monitor state-run work guarantee and minimum wage
programs for the rural poor. The groups seminal campaign in the early- to mid-1990s
contributed a great deal to the recognition of the need for people to be able to formally access government information about the use of funds for these programs. The
MKSS demonstrated the efficacy of obtaining government expense records on public
works and organizing collective analysis of the documents at jan sunwai (public hearings) attended by villagers, local administrators, and leading figures from the civil
society scene (Jenkins 2004:223224; Jenkins and Goetz 1999, 2003:127; Mentschel
2005).
The MKSS-led struggle and public agitation contributed to the passing of a statelevel Right to Information law in Rajasthan in 2000. However, this process happened
against the backdrop of the neoliberal reform of the state and a broader recognition
of a requirement for some sort of public access to information. Right to Information
laws were passed in Tamil Nadu and Goa in 1997, in Karnataka in 2000, in Delhi
in 2001, in Maharashtra and Assam in 2002, and in Madhya Pradesh, Jammu, and
Kashmir in 2003. Although these laws were limited in scope, they did offer nascent
activist groups opportunities to test the legislation and to develop strategies from their
experiences and local social contexts. A national Freedom of Information Act was
also drafted and passed through the Indian parliament in 2002 but was never enacted
(Singh 2011:1).
When the Delhi Right to Information Act was passed in 2001 (Government of the
National Capital Territory of Delhi 2001), groups in the city began to promote the
state act as a way for people to gather information on which to base complaints
against government agencies, as the MKSS had in Rajasthan. This built on strategies
that Sampoorn Parivartan (Complete Change), an activist group of middle-class
professionals concerned with corruption in the revenue department, had already
developed. The group included Arvind Kejriwal, now better known for both his role
in the current India Against Corruption campaign and for his association with the
social activist Anna Hazare2 (Sitapati 2011). At the time, Kejriwal held a senior
role in the revenue department. Sampoorn Parivartan had been getting involved with
day-to-day grievances between members of the public and government departments
and attempting to persuade people not to pay bribes either directly or, more often,
through a dalaal (middleman) to get work expedited (Baviskar 2010:138; Jenkins
2007:63).
As their work developed, the group, now simply named Parivartan (Change) after a
split among the original middle-class membership, began seeking new avenues and
constituencies and began to be more involved in targeting government departments
that distributed welfare to the citys poor. Further campaigns focused on monitoring
the system of fair price ration shops that distributed subsidized food and fuel
to families through the PDS. Parivartan organized a verification exercise in which
more than 300 people used the Delhi Right to Information Act to apply for records

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concerning the PDS in East Delhi (Right to Food Campaign 2003). This campaign,
organized with groups working in other areas of the city and with the involvement
of nationally prominent activists from outside Delhi (including Aruna Roy of the
MKSS), in 2005 persuaded the Delhi Food Commissioner to institute a framework
that allowed for regular public inspections of PDS records to check for fraud or
embezzlement (Pande 2008:5253).
Although nine states had passed Right to Information laws by 2003, an India-wide
campaign for a national Right to Information Act continued. The victory of the
Congress-led United Progressive alliance (UPA) over the center-right National Democratic Alliance (NDA) in the 2004 national elections provided an unprecedented opportunity. To set out its aims in government the UPA produced a National Common
Minimum Programme (CMP) which included a pledge to provide a government that
would be corruption-free, transparent and accountable at all times (Government
of India 2004:3). Crucially, the UPA victory also brought into play the social and
political networks of senior activists in the Right to Information movement to whom
the politics of the NDA administration had been an anathema.
The UPA set up a National Advisory Committee (NAC) to oversee implementation
of the CMP, including NCPRI members Aruna Roy and Jean Dreze, a development
economist and social activist (Baviskar 2010:145). The first task that the NAC undertook was to draft amendments to the earlier and weaker Freedom of Information
Act of 2002, which had not yet been enacted (Kirmani 2007:15; Roy 2004). The
amendments were drafted with the support of expert members of the national Right
to Information campaign; after almost a year of lobbying and reworking the amended
bill, it was approved by parliament as the national Right to Information Act 2005. Key
amendments were the penalty clauses in section 20 of the act, threatening large fines
for officials failing to provide information within proscribed time limits (Government
of India 2005:17).
While the passing of the national Right to Information Act 2005 was a great success for
those involved in the national Right to Information campaign, it did not significantly
change the work that movement groups such as Parivartan were doing on the ground
in Delhi. They were already monitoring the implementation of the Delhi Right to
Information Act of 2001, using it strategically in their campaigns on other issues and
attempting to popularize the use of transparency mechanisms amongst the general
public, including the urban poor. This continued to be the case with the national act,
which superseded all of the state acts that stood in 2005. I now turn to examples of
this advocacy work by two Delhi-based activist groups, which I will label sangathan
1 and sangathan 2.3

Teaching Poor Women to be Civil

On the morning of the June 20, 2007 a group of approximately 25 people, the majority
of them women, sat together on mats on the cement floor of a large basement room
located in a lower middle-class area of Delhi. This was one of the many weekly
meetings held by sangathan 1 that I observed during my fieldwork in which activists

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would help people from nearby slums to deal with problems accessing government
welfare schemes such as the PDS, or obtaining supporting documentation legitimating
access to municipal services. The sangathan was conceived in 2003 by a group of
professional upper-middle-class women with backgrounds in the NGO, development,
academic, and legal sectors. Two of the women had previously volunteered with
transparency and accountability activist groups and wanted to extend the grassroots
use of the Right to Information as an anticorruption tool in their area of the city. On
this particular day, one of these women, Simrita, an internationally educated human
rights lawyer, sat as the focal point of the group on an old sofa cushion with her
back against the whitewashed wall. Next to her sat Anand, the day-to-day manager
of the sangathan and a resident of Durga Camp, the nearby slum neighborhood from
which many attendees had come. He was a paid worker for the sangathan since its
inception, recruited to be an essential initial contact in the poor communities with
which the middle-class founders of sangathan 1 wanted to engage. Also present
were paid sangathan community mobilizers Padma, Savitri, and Shalini, who were
middle-age female residents of Durga Camp and who had that morning called upon
people to attend the meeting about ration supplies. Their job was to contact particular
people identified during the week as having a problem with which the sangathan
might be able to help, and these people often brought along friends to the meeting.
The mobilizers also worked through networks of friends or relatives; as a result,
the women attending were frequently of similar caste background or from the same
religious community.
The sangathans publicity material highlighted that it empowered individuals to fight
corruption and the arbitrary exercise of power and to participate in the effective use
of public funds and advertised itself as assisting people to gain their rights as Indian
citizens vis-a-vis the state. The work of the group was framed by metanarratives of
citizenship and participation, the polysemous nature of which allowed contributions
to the group by members of different social backgrounds to suggest empowerment,
local agency, and social change (Mosse 2005:160).
The focus of the meeting changed from week to week but nearly always had the
same purpose, which was promoting the use of formal grievance channels, backed
by social auditing using the Right to Information Act, to solve a wide range of
issues such as basic sanitation, education, bijli and paani (water and electricity)
supplies, and complaints against the police or other government departments. Meetings might include a lecture from a leading member of the group on the uses of
the national RTI Act and how it might be applied in cases such as the withholding
of rations or refusing admission of slum children to good local schools. Sometimes activists leading the meeting would encourage those assembled to repeat the
phrase Soochna ka Adhikar do hazaar panch (Right to Information two thousand
five), almost in the form of a mantra, to be used when confronted with recalcitrant
officials.
On occasion, meetings would showcase the long-term work that the sangathan had
been carrying out, with findings presented to the audience. The data used to support these findings was collected through RTI requests and analyzed by educated

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middle-class members of the group. Sometimes the findings prompted anger among
those attending, as one campaign to obtain the records of funds spent by councillors on local amenities did. But angry reactions from women attending that meeting
on February 21, 2007, and calls to gherao (blockade) the councillors offices or to
physically attack them was met by assertions from those leading that meeting that it
was the lack of transparency in the system that was the problem, not the councillors
themselves and, rather than making personal accusations, the system needed to be
monitored and audited by citizens groups, such as by their sangathan.
Requests for people to engage with rational procedures rather than appealing directly
to political representatives were often made, such as during the meeting on June 20,
2007, when Simrita discussed the quality of food rations supplied by the local PDS
shops. The Food Supply Office is required to supply grain samples for comparison
with the grain that the PDS shops supply, so that people can ensure that they are getting
the correct quality. Women attending the meeting had complained about the quality of
the food grains being supplied and suggested that the sangathan collectively petition
the local Member of the Legislative Assemby, a state-level political representative,
to get the issue resolved. Simrita disagreed:
We cant rush to political leaders for everything. . .. Why do we tend to
forget the basics? [Savitri passes a sample of the PDS grain to Simrita,
who holds it out to the meeting]. What is the meaning of this sample? Is
it just there for show? Or should one get the same type of things? The
law says that one should get the same type of ration. You people should
complain if you are not getting the same quality, and in writing!4
When Simrita referred to the basics, she was asking people to follow legal and
bureaucratic procedure to make complaints in writing because they then become
documentary evidence in a process of audit and accountability. She was arguing a case
for participation in the well-structured principled and constitutionally sanctioned
relations between the state and individual members of civil society (Chatterjee
2001:178). This is a depoliticized, or at least antipolitical, civil society as might be
understood by policy advisors at the World Bank in their arguments about good
governance (Harriss 2005a:4). The idea of civil society that the Anglophone middleclass activists that John Harriss spoke to in Chennai contrasted with the dirty river
of party politics (Harriss 2006:462463). Simritas instruction was an exhortation to
become part of the ethical scene of a civil society that disciplines the unruly local
state through audit processes and inspections and complains when formal procedures
are found lacking.
However, many of those attending these weekly meetings are not literate and therefore
cannot draft a complaint in writing, making it impossible for them to engage in an
unmediated way with bureaucratic paperwork. In fact, one of the key services that
groups such as this sangathan offer to their clients is the preparation of paperwork
and advice on how to submit it; in other words, the knowledgeable mediation of
the expert dalaal (middleman) with state processes. Part of the legitimacy of such

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sangathans for the urban poor rests in their potential to act as a big man might, a
benefactor who can make things happen and get work done (Mines 1994:3536). This
vernacular understanding of the role of such groups led to some potential clients being
disappointed when sangathan workers refused to help them bend rules. Something
that I observed when people requested help in falsifying an income certificate or
other supporting documentation that, in turn, would allow them to obtain a particular
type of ration card (fieldnotes, June 27, 2007).
Even though it may not have been the intention of the upper-middle-class women
that started sangathan 1, when viewed using quotidian forms of political common
sense (Hansen 1999:137) that emerge from the everyday experience of the urban
poor, this is how sangathans may be understood by many: simply as one avenue
through which to solve a problem (Harriss 2005b:1043). For the ordinary people
from slums such as Durga Camp, notional membership of an ethical civil society
constructed around a politics of transparency and accountability may be of little
relevance. What is valuable are connections outside of the slum, potential new routes
of mediation with the state system that provide possibilities previously unavailable
to them and at reduced moral and financial risk than attempting to use a paid dalaal,
or becoming involved in a relationship of obligation with a local pradhan (political
leader within a slum community). Thus, in the work of this sangathan, we see new
forms of brokerage5 emerging out of the practice of transparency activists: practices
that are shaped by the differences in social, cultural, and economic capital between
educated middle-class activists and members of the urban poor. Taking this idea
of the remaking of brokerage in transparency initiatives, I now turn to my second
case.
Do-it-Yourself Brokerage
Section 20 of the Right to Information Act 2005 sets out penalties for public officials who do not provide information within proscribed time limits or for reasons
that are outside exemptions outlined in the act (Government of India 2005). Because of this, a practice has been promoted by transparency activists in Delhi in
which citizens employ the RTI act as a tool with which to expedite delayed bureaucratic work. This strategy has been targeted toward particular government departments that are known for delays, including the department responsible for the PDS
system.
Activists noted an effect that was almost like magic (interview with Arvind Kejriwal, August 27, 2007) when officials were presented with Right to Information
requests: asking for detailed information as to the whereabouts of delayed work, the
name of the officer on whose desk the file might be sitting, the names of other citizens whose paper work had been done out of turn, and the reasons why officials had
not been disciplined for not completing the work within the official deadline. These
were questions drafted with expert understanding of what activists call the ground
realities of the local state in India, and with the knowledge that the officials could
not possibly answer them.

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The intention of such information requests is to prompt the officials under scrutiny
to quickly complete the delayed work. Officials do this in the hope that the original
request for information about the delay will not be followed up. In examples of the
practice that I followed, this was often the case, with informants saying that they
were satisfied that the work had been done and that they were not interested in taking
the request for information further.
By 2006, this strategy had become part of everyday activist practice among transparency and accountability activist sangathans in Delhi, including sangathan 1. The
most visible example of this was a national campaign organized in 2006 called Ghus ko
Ghusa, advertised as Drive Against Bribes6 in English. The campaign was organized
by Delhi-based activists in concert with NDTV, a leading news channel, and a number
of national and regional newspapers. It explicitly focused on using the RTI with the
slogan: You need not pay bribes any more in this country. Now you have an effective
alternativeRight to Information. Use RTI. Often, it works faster than bribes.
Even after the campaign was over, the strategy continued to be part of activist outreach
practice, promoted at events such as the one day camp that I attended in Delhi in
late September 2007, set up by a group of transparency activists (sangathan 2) based
in a working-class area of the city. This group of highly experienced, lower-middleclass activists had recently split off from another well-established sangathan, after a
dispute over group management and direction. The group had secured some funding
and was seeking to establish a name for itself as a local player in the transparency
and accountability scene. The camp they organized consisted of a brightly striped
square tent large enough to hold approximately 20 people, and it was set up against a
wall at the intersection of two streets. Across the front of the tent, banners were hung
proclaiming the name of the organization and its partners and explaining in Hindi
that this was a ration ke mudde par camp (camp for ration issues). Inside the tent,
sitting at folding tables, were young, educated middle-class activists experienced at
helping people with bureaucratic problems. People attending the camp presented the
activists with problems that they were having in accessing the government of Delhis
welfare schemes targeted at the economically weaker sections. When people had
to make fresh claims for welfare or fill in documentation, perhaps in cases where they
had recently migrated to the city, activists would help to fill out the correct forms
and direct them to the relevant government office. When people had already made
claims but were suffering delays, activists prepared a pro-forma Right to Information
application, similar to the ones used in the Drive Against Bribe campaign, which
requested details about the reasons for the delay.
The camp was busy with people making complaints, and busier still when two
officers from the local food supply office arrived. The officers had agreed to attend
at the request of the activists to help process documents and to show the public
that officials were trying to work in the public interest. In the end, their stay was
shortened as some visitors became angry at the officials inability to respond to direct
petitions or to solve their cases immediately. The officials retreated to their office. The
activists kept the camp open until late in the afternoon, filling out forms and writing
Right to Information applications. Again, the pedagogic intention of the camp was

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clear: persuading people to use formal channels to make individual claims on the
state, and where these had been delayed, to apply the Right to Information as a lever
to see what result might be gained.
In this use of the Right to Information Act, we see a legal mechanism, originally
designed to foster transparency in the government, being used to threaten lower-level
officials. It is not particularly directed toward visibility and revelation (Garsten and
de Montoya 2008:3) but rather toward the achievement of a very specific end. Officials cannot risk providing the information requested, and, in any case, the requestor
may not necessarily want the information. Instead, with the assistance of skilled
transparency activists, individuals are being shown how to use the Right to Information to replace the role of paid broker or mediator working with the bureaucracy.
Yet mediation and brokerage remain. As with sangathan 1, rather than attempting to
use a paid dalaal to get bureaucratic work done, people are seeking out activists to
help them. In turn, the activists strategy emerges directly from a close understanding
of the role of brokerage and mediation in the everyday state and society in India
(Corbridge and Kumar 2002; Ruud 2000).
Activists promoting this strategy defend it against criticisms that it is not really
in the spirit of transparency and accountability by arguing that the legislation has
been provided and thus citizens may use it as they wish. However, some government
officials have expressed support for the strategy. In an interview on July 27, 2007, with
two officials overseeing the training of government officers in implementing good
governance initiatives and the Right to Information, I asked whether they thought
this an appropriate use of the Right to Information Act. Its OK with us, said the
more senior of the two, before going on to repeat a story that he had heard of how
the strategy had helped with a delayed passport application. Then he added, Where
an aam admi (common man) files an RTI and gets his work done, why should he feel
the need for the information as well? The RTI can be used as a grievance redressal
mechanism; why not?7
Almost paraphrasing Foucaults arguments about disciplinary technologies and
surveillance (1977:183184), activists argue that if enough people become active
citizens and use the Right to Information in this way, then over time familiarity with
the practice will cause the public and officials to discipline themselves to stop giving
and receiving bribes. With this in mind, the yardstick by which activists measure the
success of interventions, such as the one-day ration issues camp, is not by problems
resolved but by counting the number of individual complaints or RTIs filed during
the day.
Objectively, it is not possible to know if this disciplinary potential will ever be realized; however, through this innovative strategy, a legal mechanism for transparency
becomes part of a local practice that emerges from a wider politics of transparency. It
is not directed toward the release of information per se but rather is intended to teach
people the value of engaging with the state through formal procedures and to participate as individual citizens capable of asserting a legal right, even though that assertion
requires a relationship of brokerage involving activists with expert knowledge and
their clients.

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Conclusion
The politics of transparency and active citizenship in India asserts that the relationship
between citizen and state, and with it the state of governance, can be remodelled
through the application of mechanisms for transparency that allow citizens oversight
of the state and that provide exit options from a discredited politics of brokerage and
connection. Transparency mechanisms are presented by middle-class activists as a
means by which the urban poor might participate as ethical actors in a scene in which
the local state is presented as corrupt, degraded, and unruly and yet as the potential
guarantor of rights if citizens take responsibility for disciplining it. Brokerage is
a significant issue for activists in Delhi because it is these opaque and informal
relationships and arrangements that characterize the problem of bad governance
in the city. Conversely, brokerage also allows the urban poor, those the activists
are trying to help, to maintain livelihoods and necessary connections to power. In
these examples, I have shown how activists promoting mechanisms for transparency
among the urban poor have to work through and ultimately remake relationships of
brokerage. Transparency mechanisms and activists, like the local state they seek to
reform, are embedded in the social context of the city. Access to rights, including
the right to information, are, like access to so many other goods and services in the
city, mediated through power relations and connections between social classes and
political actors. Thus, claims for a direct relationship between the use of transparency
mechanisms and the production of active citizens working to discipline the state may
be illusory. For the urban poor in Delhi, the apparition of transparency manifests
more as a familiar politics of connection than as new politics of voluntarism.
Notes
In this article I have drawn upon ethnographic data collected during my dissertation
fieldwork in Delhi in 20062007, where I interacted with transparency and accountability activist networks based in the city and surrounding states. I am grateful to all
whose hospitality and patience made my research possible and for the research assistance provided to me in Delhi by Kamal Misra. I am also grateful to my anonymous
reviewers for their insightful comments, and the faculty and postgraduate students of
the Department of Anthropology at the University of Sussex for their comments and
discussion of an earlier version of this article presented at a Sussex Anthropology
research seminar. In particular I would like to thank Filippo Osella and Raminder
Kaur Kahlon for the conversations and suggestions that have shaped the final version
of this article. I would also like to thank the Economic and Social Research Council
in the United Kingdom and the Wenner Gren Foundation in the United States for
their generous financial support and assistance during my fieldwork.
1. This statement was in use by Parivartan before 2006 and spread across numerous
transparency and accountability activism websites in India. Arvind Kejriwal, the
originator of this statement and now a leading member of the India Against
Corruption campaign, still uses a version of it in campaign speeches (Vashishta
2012). For similar examples of this type of address, see Webb (2010).

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2. Hazare is leading a campaign to persuade the Indian parliament to adopt a civil

society draft of anticorruption legislation, known as the Jan Lokpal (peoples
ombudsman) bill.
3. All names given for personnel associated with these sangathans are pseudonyms.
4. Translated by Kamal Misra from Hindi from an audio-recording of the meeting
and supported by contemporaneous field notes by both Martin Webb and Kamal
Misra.
5. It is worth making a distinction between what I refer to as brokerage (i.e., the way
that a sangathan helps poor clients who come for help accessing the state) and
longer-term reciprocal patronclient relationships existing between the uppermiddle class and slum-dwelling workers within the sangathan.
6. For more information on this campaign see General Understanding on Logistics of the Campaign, at http://right2information.wordpress.com/category/
antibirbery-campaign/page/4/ (accessed July 29, 2012).
7. This interview was carried out in English but not audio-recorded. Quotes are
taken from written notes taken during the interview. The officer used the Hindi
term aam admi to mean common man as quoted in the text.

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