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13 - Building on Sand? Criminal Markets and Politics in Tamil Nadu

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 September 2020

By
Barbara Harriss-White  and
J. Jeyaranjan
Edited by
Ajay Gandhi ,
Barbara Harriss-White ,
Douglas E. Haynes  and
Sebastian Schwecke
Ajay Gandhi
Affiliation:
Universiteit Leiden
Barbara Harriss-White
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
Douglas E. Haynes
Affiliation:
Dartmouth College, New Hampshire
Sebastian Schwecke
Affiliation:
Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta
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Summary

For the Comaroffs criminality has become a global idiom for social and economic life. Here, eleven case studies of criminal markets in India (Harriss-White and Michelutti, 2019) are found to support the Comaroffs’ global model in which state privatization generates contested jurisdictions and plural sovereignties. But distinctively Indian characteristics of criminal markets are also found. As suggested by Jha, these are preconditions for the funding of electoral democratic politics. The recent history of riverbed sand markets in Tamil Nadu on which urbanization and infrastructure depend reveals the capture and complicity of all levels of the revenue and regulative bureaucracy and of entire party political hierarchies. Profits and tribute resulting from rapid technological aggrandizement, the formation of regional monopolies, and of mafianized cartels in sand are the object of both competition and collusion. Resistance expressed through PIL results in un-enforced judicial decisions. Tamil Nadu’s famed populism coexists with predatory, pork barrel politics. The implications of criminalized sand markets for theories of actually existing markets and institutional change are discussed.

Keywords

marketscrimecorruptionsandconstructionminingcriminal politicsTamil Nadu
Type
Chapter
Information
Rethinking Markets in Modern India
Embedded Exchange and Contested Jurisdiction
 , pp. 343 - 364
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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