Corruption plots in an age of authoritarian populism

When, in 2014, we first started thinking about what eventually became Corruption Plots, India had just seen the rise of a major anti-corruption movement that had brought a rightwing Hindu nationalist government to power. The India Against Corruption (IAC) movement, as it was known, had successfully mobilised a mix of urban middle-class voters, public interest lawyers, and corporate heads against what was understood as the massive political graft of the previous Congress government. Meanwhile, we noticed a similar story unfolding in the United States. Here, too, a rightwing ethno-nationalist strongman and business tycoon, Donald Trump, had ascended to power riding a particular corruption plot. This is why it was so important to us to stress corruption storytelling and the ethics and politics at its heart – who tells the corruption story and how? Reading the reviews of our book, we were heartened to find that our humanistic take on corruption was noted and appreciated by all three reviewers, as was our goal of foregrounding the chameleon-like nature, political potency, and sheer messiness of corruption storytelling.