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DOI: 10.1177/0921374008096310

2008 20: 213Cultural DynamicsSimanti Dasgupta

Governance and Citizenship in the Indian Silicon PlateauSuccess, Market, Ethics : Information Technology and the Shifting Politics of

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20(3): 213244. [DOI: 10.1177/0921374008096310] http://cdy.sagepub.comCopyright 2008 SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore)

S U C C E S S, M A R K E T , E T H I C S

Information Technology and the Shifting Politics of Governance

and Citizenship in the Indian Silicon Plateau

SIMANTI DASGUPTA

New School for Social Research, NYC

ABSTRACT

The global success of the Information Technology (IT) industry in India isnarrated as an unprecedented episode. The rhetoric of success, however, isneither limited to economics nor the IT industry alone. In their collaborationwith middle class non-governmental organizations (NGO) it has generated aparallel ethico-political narrative on the failure of the state to alleviate Indiafrom the disgrace of a developing country. Drawing on ethnographic work I

conducted with IT professionals and their partner NGOs in Bangalore in thisarticle I argue that the ethico-political narrative has initiated two emergent waysof recasting the state and citizenship: first, it has established the indispensablevalue of the market; second, the IT corporate governance model now offersa blueprint for reforming public governance and citizenship in contemporaryIndia. This dual process, I contend, are crucial ways to understand how theamorphous ideas of neoliberalization are concretely shifting the notion ofthe nation state from a socialist redistributive model to one based on the market.

Key Words citizenship ethics governance India informationtechnology market middle class non-governmental organizations

On reaching Bangalore1 in the summer of 2004 for my extended fieldworkI started looking for an apartment to rent. Renting in Banglaore involvesconsiderable financial commitment, given high rents in the city and also theadvance security deposit (ten-months rent) required to secure a lease. Onmeeting several prospective landlords, I was struck by a specific questionmost of them asked, Do you work in IT (information technology)? My an-swer was Not quite, but well, I will be working with Infosys to do my doctoral

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214 Cultural Dynamics 20(3)

research. Thats good, as long as you are with Infosys, thats important.Infosys Technologies Limited, the site of my ethnography, is a leading in-

formation technology company in Bangalore, the city alternately known asthe Indian Silicon Valley.2 I faced a similar question while applying for aphone connection with a private operator. Before I could explain the specificnature of my involvement with Infosys as a non-employee, the salespersonafter a cursory glance at my Infosys identity card started preparing the docu-ments necessary to approve the phone connection that same evening.

A month into my new apartment, I asked my landlord, Why was my workin IT important? Because, it tells me that you are able to financially committo pay me rent and also you are an educated and good person with a good

job. That applies to a lot of other sectors, does it not? I wanted to know.Not like IT, nothing is as good as IT, he responded, Things have changed alot since the 90s. Its not only about money though; the IT people are well-offbut they are also honest; they are not corrupt like the government people. Iwas curious. But you worked with the government yourself. He explained,Yes, thats why I can say this with such confidence. He also reminded me thatwhile finalizing the lease contract he did not request any documents to provemy involvement with Infosys because your word was enough. An associationwith an IT company was both necessary and decisive to formalize a lease or

secure a phone connection. The association reflects financial solvency as wellas ethical integrity of those who belong to the IT sector. Nevertheless, whatstruck me was not the question itself, which is a common social practice amongmiddle class Indians as a way to determine an individuals class. Rather, I wasstruck by the clinical relationship consistently drawn between IT and ethicsby various individuals.

The Indian IT industry is usually revered as an unprecedented economicsuccess for a developing nation like India in the global market. The successof IT is endorsed as the evidence of the irrefutable merit of economicliberalization for India instituted as a set of policy reforms in 1991. That yearis generally considered a watershed in contemporary India.3 The economicreform policies adopted by the Government of India opened its economyto significant foreign investments for the first time since Independence in1947 and inducted India into the present-day circuit of globalization. Theliberalization policies also removed myriad internal bureaucratic con-straints such as licensing and taxation to help Indian companies trade moreeasily in the global market (Sachs et al., 1999).4 The industry that undoubt-edly benefited the most from these reforms is information technology (IT).Since the early 1990s, IT has established a robust global trade in software

development work outsourced mostly from businesses in the United Statesand Western Europe (Grieco, 1984; Moore, 2000).5 So consequential were



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Dasgupta: Success, Market, Ethics 215

these reforms that Narayana Murthy, co-founder and mentor of Infosys,likened them (2001) to the winning of economic freedom, on the lines

of the securing of political freedom from British rule in 1947. He furtherremarked that the policies changed the Indian business context from one ofstate-centered, control orientation to a free, open market orientation, at leastfor hi-tech companies (2001). An Economic and Political Weekly editorial(2001) notes

The sterling performance of Indian software professionals and entrepreneurs in Silicon

Valley has convinced the world that India and Indians have an edge over the rest when

it comes to IT. Consequently, developed country capitals have, for the first time, started

viewing India as a potential partner.6

However, in this article I argue that the success narrative of IT, if limitedto its economic success, presents a partial picture of the eminence of the in-dustry in the contemporary national imagination. The narrative is also oneof ethical success: financial success achieved without resort to corruption.Success is situated in contradistinction to the alleged failure of a corruptstate to elevate India from the disgrace of a developing country. Further, thesuccess story also legitimizes a new kind of class politics. Given the prevailingmiddle class composition of IT, the narrative exemplifies the triumph of whatis perceived as the exclusive middle class value of honesty vis--vis a generic

corrupt state. Corruption, as Gupta points out, is something tremendouslyimportant in social life in India since it reveals a socially established narrativeform (Gupta, 2005). In my conversation with him, Murthy asserted that thewealth we created is different, we did not pay anybody any bribes and neitherwill we accept any. He referred to several incidents where Infosys did notcompromise in paying bribes to state officials even when their business couldhave been jeopardized. One of the key corporate values of Infosys, The softestpillow is a clear conscience,7 Narayan Murthy explained was arrived at afterextended deliberation as how best to convey our contempt for corruptionbecause it is important for people outside as well as for our employees.

The metaphor of the softest pillow congeals an ethical stance that allowsone to seamlessly retire for the night and wake up to another day being as-sured of ones ethical integrity. The pillow normalizes the practice of ethicalveracity in routine social transactions. Ethics ceases to be an intermittent andextraordinary human virtue and provides a base for everyday practice. Byeveryday practice I specifically focus on the various transactions between thestate and the citizens that constitute the task of public governance, such as taxpayment, infrastructural services, provision of basic amenities, etc. Further,ethics here has a specific class affiliation, that of the middle class. Narayan

Murthy clarified the specific role of the middle class in this reformation: itis our lack of interest in the government as middle class citizens that make



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room for corruption. If as educated and diligent people we cannot make thegovernment accountable to us for what they do, who else will?

Barrington Moore has long famously argued the centrality of the middleclass in a democracy: No bourgeoisie, no democracy (Moore, 1993: 418).Moore explains social change to industrialization through comparative eco-nomic history, bourgeois-capitalist democratic, Fascist and Communist eachbased on its own form of severe exploitation and violence. He specificallyargues that India failed to industrialize successfully because it espousednone of the above routes, but chose a direct democratic path. However, in hiscritique of Moore, Rothman noting the limited nature of Moores comparativeanalysis that ignores cultural uniqueness of values argues that The valuesof a given social class may be determined by its economic position, but thisdoes not prove that these values necessarily involve the maximization ofits opportunities for exploitation (Rothman, 1970: 62). Neither are thesevalues static nor is the social class that is associated with them; they arerepeatedly co-constructed with the prevailing economic paradigm. If successof the IT industry is at the core of the formation of a new middle class anda corresponding set of new values that align with the market ideology, onefirst needs to unravel the nuanced use of this success itself. Here I show thatthrough multiple articulations of their success, the IT entrepreneurs offer adual ethico-political critique: first, of the entrenched corruption of the Indian

state and second, the disengagement of mainly middle class citizens frompublic governance which in turn enables corruption.

I call this critique ethico-political for it offers the possibility of a newnormative and political space of engagement between the state and the civilsociety on one hand and between the middle class and the remaining civilsociety, especially the urban poor, on the other. While normativity offers anoverall guideline distinguishing the moral right from the moral wrong, ethicson the other hand is a shifting space. Ethical postures shift with the exigenciesof what Fisher has called the emergent forms of life. The emergences index

the contemporary globalized world that defies long-established heuristicmodes of knowing and living (Fischer, 1999). Central to my analysis hereis a detailed ethnographic understanding of the ethics of the liberal marketinitiated by the success of IT and the shifts in the imagination of India that itprecipitates. In one of our conversations, Nandan Nilekani, a co-founder andthe chief executive officer of Infosys, confidently stated:

IT, that is we, have put India on the map. The world is here and we have to make the

best use of it. We have to tell the world that we are not only good in coding software but

also a country capable of ridding ourselves of corruption and practicing ethics.

I wanted to know: And how do you propose to make the change from cor-ruption to ethics? His swift response was, By adopting market values.Nonetheless, a lot depends on what one means by the market and who one



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thinks is equipped to participate in it. I asked: When you say market, howdo you understand it? He explained:

By market, I mean accountability. Only if you work ethically you will be rewarded; youprovide good services and you will gain, its not otherwise. If you cannot supply water,

then you cannot collect water tax and also you should answer us why you could not. The

market brings in accountability.

The idea of the market as a panacea to corruption is quite a discourse. Thepower of the market economy, Mitchell contends, reveals itself not onlyin transforming peoples lives and livelihoods but in its influence over theway we think (2002: 244). Like in most developing countries, it is the neworthodoxy of development and a new hegemonic process in India (Scrase,

2006). Besides, the supposed neutrality of the market distances it from thealleged quibbling among political parties considered to impede good gov-ernance in India. As Kantola notes, the market also becomes an ethicalimperative . . . the market works against unfair alliances and coalitions,oligopolies or unions, and it would seem to give everyone equality of oppor-tunity (2003: 207). The market empties the task of public governance ofcompeting political ideologies and introduces a technique that makes profitand loss or comparably, the provision of basic amenities or its failure legibleand immediately determinable and calculable.

The IT ethico-political narrative of reform is articulated in the languageof corporate governance through terms such as stake, performance,transparency, and accountability. When transferred to the domain ofpublic governance, this set of terms seeks two changes: first, it limits thelong-established welfare approach of the state; second, it recasts citizens asconsumers holding a stake in the performance of India as one holds a stakein the performance of a publicly traded firm. The IT narrative attempts to re-engage citizens with the state following a period of apparent disengagementsubsequent to the phase of nation building in the 1950s and 1960s. Theproposed re-engagement is cast in the rhetoric of citizens as stakeholdersof India that I argue borders on transforming citizens into consumers ofstate services. Analyzing similar changes in citizenship in Finland, Kantolaopportunely reminds us that voting as an activity differs from purchasing.Yet Schoolman argues that it is this kind of flexibility between citizenshipand consumerism that distinguishes neoliberalization from other forms ofeconomies, specifically classical liberalism or welfare economies (Schoolman,1987). The classic tension of liberalism between the community and theindividual is resolved in the idea of partnership that arises between the publicand the private domains. Schoolman argues that In the partnership relation,

the distinction between the public and private spheres is blurred, as is thedistinction between civic (for instance, welfare state) policies and marketdynamics (1987: 213). Further, in the case of India, the emergence of iconic



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figures such as Narayan Murthy, make this flexibility and partnership a middleclass achievement and privilege.

In 2006 Forbes magazine listed Narayan Murthy and Nandan Nilekani, andK. Dinesh, another co-founder, among the top 40 richest Indians.8 NarayanMurthy and Nandan Nilekani originated from middle class families, attendedprominent state engineering schools like the Indian Institute of Technology,and following initial salaried employment succeeded in founding their ownIT company. In the Indian context, where business is usually associated eitherwith inheritance, lack of quality education or amassing illicit wealth, thefounding of Infosys by a group of middle class professionals based solely ontheir education and ethics is upheld as an unprecedented phenomenon. The

possibility that one can benefit from ones education and transform it intowealth without compromising ones ethical principles is a unique experience.The achievement of Infosys has influenced the imagination of the middle classbecause it marks a moral departure in the creation of wealth. Infosys thus actsas a metaphor for success exemplifying the ethical standard and professionalcompetence exclusively of the middle class in India. This new fusion haselevated the likes of Narayan Murthy as the icons of a new India.

I further locate in my ethnography that the success narrative is enhancedand justified in a network established between the IT industry and some non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Bangalore. Similar to IT, these NGOsare overwhelmingly middle class in their composition. The effective extensionof the narrative beyond IT, which following Charles Taylor can be thoughtof as redaction, is both richer, intense, and demanding within the civilsociety (Taylor, 2004). Noted as the third force by James Heitzman, theseNGOs now work in tandem with the IT entrepreneurs to reform governanceand renew citizenship (Heitzman, 2004). It is in its very proliferation into civilsociety, I argue, that the narrative gains an impetus as well as the legitimacyto confront and reform the state.

I draw on extensive fieldwork conducted between 2002 and 2006 in

Bangalore with Infosys Technologies Limited and one of its partner NGOs,Janaagraha, Center for Citizenship and Democracy. Infosys TechnologiesLimited, established in 1981 by a group of seven middle class IT professionals,is one of the leading IT companies in India. Other major IT companies suchas Tata Consultancy Services and Wipro Limited are larger than Infosysin terms of revenue and employees. However, I was drawn to Infosys for aspecific reason: more than any other IT corporation, Infosys is consideredthe symbol of a new India. While Fuller and Narasimhan (2007) refer toNarayan Murthy as a modern legend, Peter van der Veer locates the magical

belief that has come to denote the Indian IT success story (van der Veer inFuller and Narasimhan, 2007). Infosys embodies the dream of middle classentrepreneurship and the return of supposed quintessential middle class ethics



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of honesty and diligence. Prominent members of the upper management ofInfosys like Narayan Murthy and Nandan Nilekani are actively involved

in civil society initiatives that range from reforming public governance toimproving infrastructure in Bangalore. They are regularly invited by the mediato express their knowledge of globalization, opinions about the condition ofthe Indian state, and prescriptions for reform.

Janaagraha is one of the civil-society partners of Infosys. RameshRamanathan, the founder of Janaagraha, was closely involved with NandanNilekani in reforming public governance in Bangalore as members of theBangalore Agenda Task Force (BATF). BATF was established by the thenchief minister of Karnataka, S. M. Krishna, to reform urban governance.9

It was motley group of professionals in various fields, headed by NandanNilekani, who were keen to elevate Bangalore as a world city. Ramesh andhis wife Swathi Ramanathan returned to India from the USA, sacrificingtheir thriving careers, and founded Janaagraha in 2001 after the subse-quent chief minister, Dharam Singh, dissolved BATF. Janaagraha is acombination of two words, jana meaning people and graha, force, i.e. the lifeforce of the people. The name was inspired by Gandhis use of Satyagrahaduring the Independence struggle to signify the force of truth.10

Janaagraha means the Life Force of the People: it stands for a positive, constructive

firmness to allow citizens to engage with their government on specific issues. To provide

a platform that creates the day-to-day successes that we need. To remove the cynicism

from our minds. To re-instill hope in our ability to build a great country.11

Referring to the increasing role of NGOs in current era, Fisher invites us tothink how technologies of control affect both the personal and the politicaland to examine changing relationships among citizenry, association and thestate (Fisher, 1997). However, I have a caveat to offer about Janaagraha andits specific relevance in my analysis as a NGO. The founders and volunteers ofJanaagraha were reluctant to see their work as typical of a NGO in a devel-oping country dealing with isolated issues such as literacy, health, poverty, etc.As one volunteer explained to me on my first day:

We are about reform, about fundamental reform about how the government thinks

about us and how we think about the government. Its not about building a school here,

and giving jobs and food to the poor. It is more than that. We are about change.

This idea was well captured in their Gandhian maxim, Be the change youwant to see.

Similar to Janaagrahas distancing itself from NGO work, the reforminitiative of Infosys is again not about corporate social responsibility (CSR).

The Infosys CSR, called Infosys Foundation, is supervised by NarayanMurthys wife Sudha Murthy and is different from the ethico-political nar-rative I am analyzing here. The commitment to reforming the fundamental



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premise of organizing and imagining the state and society as a whole, ratherthan isolated efforts, brought Infosys and Janaagraha together. My parallel

ethnographic work at the two sites helped me coalesce a critique of the stateand citizenship that would otherwise not have been apparent had I confinedmyself to Infosys alone. Infosys and Janaagraha are drawn into what Stoler(in her analysis of colonialism) has usefully termed the circuit of knowledgeproduction (Stoler, 2001). In this contemporary circuit, I show how knowledgeof the market, governance and citizenship are experimented with, produced,and disseminated through a specific link of actors and practices.

Stake and the Politics of AccountabilityNarayan Murthy explained the functioning of the IT industry vis--vis theIndian state thus: There are three things that one needs to follow in orderto run a company: fairness, transparency and accountability . . . all of theseare very low in the government. These three terms are used with unfailingregularity in workshops and seminars Infosys organizes; they are used todescribe the ethical pillars on which Infosys is governed as a corporation.Murthy stressed that he definitely sees a strong parallel between governinga corporation and governing a nation because as much as the Infoscians 12

are stakeholdersin this company so are the citizens of India, they are stake-holders of the country as well.

The notion of the stakeholder is relatively new even in the corporate world.Till the early 1980s, the term shareholder was in use referring to peoplewho have invested in shares or stocks of a particular firm. In 1984 with thepublication of Edward Freemans Strategic Management: A Stakeholders

Approach, stakeholder was introduced to include not just stockholdersbut other groups, such as employees, consumers, suppliers, and the localcommunity. Freemans advocacy of this revision from stockholders tostakeholders was driven by an ethical urgency that each of these stake-holder groups has a right not to be treated as a means to some end, andtherefore must participate in determining the future direction of the firmin which they have a stake (Freeman, 1994: 66). Stake points to somethingof value, some form of capital, human, physical or financial, that is at risk. . . something to gain or lose as a result of its activities (Clarkson, 1998: 2).Value and its associational calculation and reversal of risk are at the core ofthe notion of stakeholder.

In the rhetoric of stake, India thus has a value and the state and the citizensare its equal shareholders as in a market. While the value of a corporation iscalculable in economic terms, one wonders about the value of a nation. But



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how does one ensure that the stake will be honored in a nation as it is for acorporation? As a member of the management at Infosys explained to me:

It is the market that will make it possible, something like the invisible hand. It is notabout money alone, it is the value. So if I am paying for water, I have to get a reliable

service. The government has to assure me of that. The value is beyond money but just

because it is the government, we cannot let them go. They are accountable to us as much

we are accountable to the stakeholders of Infosys. Where is the difference? And if you

are doing your job, what is the fear? The government officials know that they always

have something to hide, thats where the issue of corruption comes in. We have nothing

to hide; its all transparent.

Thus the actual price of water in this market discourse is of partial value. Thereal value lies in the mutual trust between the state and the citizens where

both share and value the collective stake in the nation.My everyday schedule at Infosys was a mix of conversations, interviews,

attending meetings, and observing software-programming, sitting next tothe developers working on a given project, discussing the work being done.One such morning, I was with Srinivas, a software architect, who was helpingme understand a program design that was being used for a current project.During the conversation I noticed a small window pop-up towards the bottomright-hand corner of his computer screen. What is that? I wanted to know.Its the Quality Assurance folks monitoring our progress with this project.

They track the projects and let us know if we are running any kind of risk.Well, you should talk to Kumar if you want to know more. A few days laterI met Kumar; he heads the Quality Assurance (QA) division of Infosys.Kumar explained the task of the QA division: We have teams dedicated tomonitor different projects in terms of their commitment to clients, if they areadhering to the norms. Non-confirmation leads to escalation of the risk andimmediately shows up on our system.13 The ethical rhetoric unmistakablyunderscored Kumars description of his labor with risks:

When I know that a project will finally go into critical risk, I immediately brief Nandan

(Nilekani) before the client even gets a hint. But first we try for an immediate mitigation,

if that fails; the question is do we inform the client? You know that one of the values of

Infosys is transparency, so we are always upfront with the client.

This could be a difficult situation for the company. I said. Yes, it is difficult,but we believe that we owe it to the client. They have believed in us and wehave to keep their trust was Kumars response. Finally he said, We aresome sort of a conscience for the whole of the organization when it comesto quality. I am the custodian entrusted with the job of gate keeping.I keep the ethical integrity in place.

Accountability is the ethical responsibility corporations have towardstheir stakeholders and transparency indicates that all aspects, particularly



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the financial condition, of the business be declared to the same. Interesting-ly, the recent shift from the basic corporate management to the more

comprehensive term corporate governance provides a template to rethinkpublic governance as well. Practices of transparency and accountability willestablish a space for citizen participation to counter the closed system ofgovernance seen as the root cause of corruption. In the private sector, oneof the managers at Infosys explained to me, the system operates on a trans-parent method. We announce our quarterly results publicly; it is audited andis available for anybody to review; I mean all stakeholders of the company.Transparency is defined by equal access to information by employees andinvestors as equal stakeholders. Transparency forecasts accountability, which

in turn ensures effectiveness.The combined discourse of value, stake, and citizen participation turns ona politics of accountability between the state and the citizens. Economicsacts as a metaphor to confirm the value of the nation. Introducing stake in theimagination of the nation points to an effort to make the state accountableto its citizens and simultaneously equip citizens to hold the state account-able to them through active involvement in governance. Parallel to Andersonssuggestion of an imagined community the prescription for reform imaginesa community of citizenry able to invest in the working of the state and hold

it liable. Charles Taylor describes social imaginary as the ways peopleimagine their social existence that is both factual and normative; that iswe have a sense of how things usually go, but this is interwoven with anidea of how they ought to go, of what missteps would invalidate the practice(Taylor, 2004: 234). IT entrepreneurs are invested not only in identifyingthe missteps but also in erasing the source of the missteps stemming fromcorruption. Thus social imagination in this case does not grow in the spacebetween the factual and the normative, but in the struggle to annul the cur-rent administrative practices and the institution of a new set of norms ofgood governance.

The stakeholder notion, transparency, and accountability have beengaining prominence in the development sector, particularly with NGOsand international donor agencies. A United Nations publication, BuildingPartnerships for Good Governance: The Spirit and the Reality of South-

South Cooperation, lists different kinds of multi-stakeholder partnershipsor MSPs it has established with civil society, states, industries across thedeveloping world. MSPs are by and large promoted as the best practice toreform governance and enhance civil society participation (Malena, 2004).However, what is unique about Bangalore is its embeddness in the epicenter

of liberalization in India owing to the success of IT. It is definitely arguablewhether one can export the corporate notion of stakeholder to organizethe politics and the ethics of a nation state. Nor does the issue of inequality



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concern the IT professionals, which has been a primary source of con-demnation from various activists and social critics in Bangalore. However, the

stakeholder notion taken as a model and a blueprint to reform governanceis of ethnographic significance. Therefore rather than questioning its viabil-ity, it is more productive to analyze its conditions of possibility in present-day India.

Multiplier Effect

In my continuing conversations with Narayan Murthy, he stressed the urgentneed to reform the bureaucracy in order to ensure the progress of India,

while recounting the difficulty his company faced in the early 1990s whenthey had just started contracting with clients in the United States onoutsourced software development jobs. Most of this had to do with red tapeand also with the cavalier nature of the administrators. He is glad that alot has changed since the 1990s with new state policies that not only easedthe flow of goods (in the case of IT, software and hardware) and humanresources in and out of the country, but also a significant change in attitudeof government employees: Now I can pick up the phone and get the jobdone.14 As I was silently settling into a happy story being handed to me by

none other than the guru of the IT industry, he proceeded to add a word ofcaution: But remember, Simanti, we are not a good example, you shouldtalk to people, outside. By outside he implied outside of Infosys and tounderstand it in a broader sense would mean outside of the IT industry. Hisuse of the word people here is also effective. The generic use of this peopleagainst Infoscians also brings in a coupled demarcation: the outside of IT ispeopled amorphously whereas the inside is comprised of an exclusive set ofpeople, with a definite nomenclature, Infoscians.15

The conversation with Narayan Murthy disturbed my tidy fieldwork plan;it certainly revealed that the research could not simply be contained withinthe limits of Infosys. It was imperative that I find a site that contained boththe inside and outside of IT and was physically beyond Infosys. The needwas further corroborated in my meeting with Nandan Nilekani. I enteredBuilding 1 which is the corporate headquarters of Infosys. After announcingmy arrival to the receptionist I took a seat browsing through IT magazinesplaced on the coffee table in front of me. Suddenly I heard someone call outLights, Camera, and automatically turning in that direction saw Nilekanisitting on a chair with his face flooded with dazzling golden light, attentivelyanswering a reporters queries. Later in our conversation, Nilekani explained,the interview was for a major TV channel to be aired on a primetime talkshow, where he would be heard talking about Indias global IT trade withthe West, and the promise it holds for a developing nation like India.

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Taking a clue from the relations he explicated among IT, India, and theWest, I wanted to know how he understood IT as a specific domain from

where change can be generated. Is it related to your global success becausenow India has definitely made a mark as the IT destination? His responsewas as follows:

The IT industry is pivotal in terms of creating an outlet for aspirations of young people, it

is pivotal in creating a niche for India in the global economy, for generating revenues and

growth, IT is also an instrument for social development, there are so many dimensions

to this that it is fascinating . . . this has such a multiplier effect of what we are doing and

particularly for those of us who are saying what we need to do to make India a better

place to live.

Narayan Murthys emphasis on the outside unmistakably reverberated inNilekanis choice of words- social development, India, and a niche in theglobe. It is important to see how a discourse on the success of IT auto-matically activates a discourse on India, and specifically its standing in thegeopolitical order.

Nilekanis biography is not limited by technology alone:

I am very passionate about my work in IT because this is what I wanted to do, cutting-

edge work. However, we cannot forget that IT has the potential to modernize the society

and make India a leader among nations. IT has a multiplier effect.

When you say, multiplier effect, are you referring to the spread of computerliteracy in India? I wanted to know. He corrected me, No, its more thanthat, change is not only about learning to operate a computer. Its about anation changing. The stakes are high for us. What are the stakes? I asked.

So many things can go wrong . . . India has a huge role in the knowledge economy to be

global supplier of wide range of services that has a potential to drive economic growth

and this can go wrong if we do not give it adequate support, and become complacent and

lose out in competition with other countries.

He paused for a few seconds and looked to the lush green lawns across the ex-

pansive glass windows. Gathering himself again he spoke in a poignant voice:Simanti, Infosys did not always look like this. This is not only about IT but how we can

use the model of our business to change society. You know I was leading the BATF,

but now its no longer running. But now I am involved with other NGOs in the city, like

Janaagraha in something we call PROOF. It is a platform to hold the city government

accountable for its finances. In fact we have a public meeting soon, maybe you should

come by and see what we want to do. My secretary can give you the details.

The link Nilekani and Narayan Murthy establish between IT as a tech-nological domain and the outside is both familiar and unfamiliar in the Indian

context. It is familiar because science and technology have been powerful toolsto imagine the Indian nation state beginning with the nationalist project toovercome colonial rule. Gyan Prakash has argued that The emergence and



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the existence of India is inseparable from the authority of science and itsfunctioning as the name for freedom and enlightenment, power and progress

(Prakash, 1999: 3). Therefore the connection Nilekani draws between IT andthe image of India is not new; it has established genealogical roots. Yet, itappears that he is alluding to something different that has happened with IT.On one level, the difference is obvious: the preceding modes of science andtechnology were fundamentally dedicated to infrastructural work of nationbuilding, while IT is a direct conduit to the West. In other words, sciencewas a device and a stanceforthe nation and now with IT it is ofthe nation.However, at another level, Nilekanis use of the word model also indicatesthat the success of IT is perceived as the success of a way of life. IT provides

a blueprint for reforming society economically, politically, and ethically.In this idiom the IT industry is the centerfrom where the critique of thestate is generated emanating from civil society. However, IT also demarcatesan inside and an outside: there is an inside of IT where the transactionwith the state has already undergone significant revision and an outside ofIT where the same transaction may be continuing in the old colonial legacyof bureaucratic arrogance and outmoded procedures of administration.Narayan Murthy urged me to look into this in order to capture the changingcontours of the statecivil society dynamics. The rationale underlying the

processes and practices inside IT proliferates to the outside. The outsidecarries added political significance for Murthy for two reasons.First, the IT industry perceives that their terms of exchange with the state

has relatively transformed over time, but the actual work of this transformationwhere citizens are deemed equal stakeholders of the nation is unfinished.Second, recalling Taylors notion of redaction, it is in its diffusion outsideIT that the ethico-political narrative gains legitimacy and intensity. However,given the celebration of the success of IT as an unprecedented global event,the outside is nonetheless germane to authenticate the critique of the state.Rather than perceiving it as an isolated attempt by the IT industry to demandmore freedom from state control for their business, the outside validates theinside demand for a change in the governance model altogether.

The Site of Success

Infosys is located on Hosur Road, 18 kilometers south of the city of Bangalore,at the southern limits of the IT Corridor. Given its location on the fringes,Infosys provides bus services to its employees that ply on several routes

covering most of the city. After my research was approved, Infosys allowedme to use their bus service. I was traveling on one of the Infosys buses fromthe northeastern part of the city, Cox Town, where I lived. The bus negotiated



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the early morning city of joggers, flower vendors, and temple-goers, stoppingon the way to pick up Infoscians from their scheduled stops. As we headed

out of Koramangla, an upscale neighborhood that marks the southernlimit of the city, the surroundings gradually started changing. The opulentbungalows, the towering high-rise apartments yielded to shanty huts orderelict concrete constructions on either side of Hosur Road.

However, the presence of colossal billboards, rising high above non-descript buildings, made this change of scenery uneven. They advertised newgated residential complexes, latest car models, current fashions, upcomingdepartmental store sales. Nearly all of these advertisements display contentwhite families of parents and children. Distant as the images may seem they

in fact signify the image of the good life concurrent with the perceivedstatus of Bangalore as the affluent Indian Silicon Valley. The everyday buscommute to Infosys is not just another commute to work; it is an exclusivespace for the production and validation of the elevated status of the IT industryand its employees in the wider society. The juxtaposition of the leather-interiorInfosys bus with everybody seated and the overcrowded public buses, whereone would be fortunate to secure a seat during the rush hour, is symptomaticof the divide. The entitlement to dedicated space in the bus is not a marker ofcomfort alone, but also the differential value human lives have in the rush totransform Bangalore into a world city.

The bus finally leaves the dusty and chaotic Hosur Road, through a con-tinuous journey of separation, to enter the serene and orderly ElectronicsCity, an expansive 330 acres dedicated to IT companies, complete with allthe basic amenities and state-of-the-art infrastructure. Winding through thebroad asphalt roads lined with different IT companies such as Wipro andHewlett Packard we reached Infosys. My name was already on the visitorslist on the first day and the security officer welcomed me with a smilereserved for first-time visitors. I signed in, had my picture taken and obtainedan identification badge that I would have to wear all the time within the

Infosys City. The surveillance ritual also applied to Infoscians, whose bagsand IDs were checked specifically for compact discs (where software can becopied) before they were allowed inside as well as on their way home. Fora company in the business of hi-tech, such methods of surveillance seemedblatant and incongruous with the panoptical forms of power that we think ofin Foucauldian terms as markers of modernity. However, this is not to suggestthe absence of panopticon modes of power, which are otherwise extensivelyused to organize and monitor work.

Unlike my initial visits in previous years, when I returned for extended

work in 2004, my badge had a rubber stamp saying Infy City. This grantedme access to all the buildings within Infosys at any time during my work withthe company. In 2002 like most new visitors I was given the official Infosys



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Tour. The tour guide drove me around in a motorized cart, pointing out animpressive array of concrete and glass buildings spaced across green lawns

dedicated to different kinds of work related to software development. Thoughsome buildings were identified with their specific activity, such as Headquartersor Education and Research (E and R), every building had a number pro-minently engraved in an orange color close to the roof. At the time of myresearch there were 28 buildings in all and more were under construction.The pride in his voice was unmistakable when my tour guide looked aroundto say, This company is very different, isnt it? As we approached the maincafeteria, he warned that If you want to eat here, make sure you arrive in time.Breakfast is served between 7 and 9 and lunch between 1 and 2. In between

you may not find anything to eat. I looked at my watch; it was eleven in themorning and the cafeteria wore a deserted look only broken occasionallyby the clanking of steel utensils caterers were arranging to set up the buffettables for that days lunch.

Every building had a clocking-in device at the entrance foyer whereInfoscians swiped their ID cards four times dailyin the morning beforebeginning their work, in the afternoon on the way to lunch and back, and finallywhen leaving in the evening. The magnetic strip would record their hoursof work and breaks taken in between. These are usual corporate practices ofcontrolling labor in relation to capitalistic logic. In analyzing transitions tothe industrial notion of time, E. P. Thompson has called this the time-thrift(1967). He writes, In mature capitalist society all time must be consumed,marketed and put to use. It is offensive for the labor force merely to pass thetime (Thompson, 1967: 901).

The precise organization of time at Infosys also signified a separation. Itwas underscored by their conscious dissociation from the way the Indianstate thinks of time as a fluid and abundant category. Or more generally,with the sardonic twist of the Indian Standard Time or IST as Indian Stretch-able Time in the common parlance, where time flows endlessly undeterred

by limits. Allegiance to a restricted spatio-temporal notion reflected both thework ethic of Infosys as well as their accountability to stakeholders. Even,Janaagraha had a rule where anybody arriving late for the weekly Mondaymorning meeting was required to pay a fine of 5 rupees. A plastic box wasreligiously placed at the center of the table, where latecomers wouldquietly deposit their fine. Coming late is almost a national character for us,Ramanathan once observed, we need to change this, like they do in the West.They are never late, how come? Maybe I should increase the fine. Time-thrift, as Thompson noted further, is not limited to the processes of industrial

production alone, but to an entire recasting of social living.Sassen has argued that place is central to many of the circuits through

which economic globalization is constituted. One strategic type of place for



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these developments, and the one focused on here, is the city (2001: p. xix).She suggests that the city is the place that is deployed by capital as an

organizational commodity which results in the denationalization ofurban space and the formation of new claims and involving contestation,raise the questionwhose city is it? (Sassen, 2001: p. xx). However, thedenationalization of urban space and the formation of new claims are notnecessarily tied to transnational corporations alone as Sassen proposes. Thecentrality of Bangalore as the place and face of globalization in India ispropelled by the success of an industry that prides itself in being Indian.The transnational factor crawls in differently, that is, through the corporateimagination of Bangalore as a world-class city qualified to handle global

capital. Globalization brings with it impulsive references, especially for citiesin developing nations vying for a world-class status.The erstwhile Science City of the Nation was poised to emulate Singapore

as a model world-class city. The aspiration was popularized as Lets makeBangalore into Singapore. Central to this reimagination was the BATF.Urban planners from Singapore were contracted by the Bangalore Develop-ment Authority (BDA) to review the Comprehensive Development Plan(CDP) of the city. Jurong, the consulting firm, proposed the IT Corridorthat stretches from the Electronics City in the south to the Old Madras roadin the north-eastern part of the city (BDA, 2004). Janaki Nair has accuratelypresented the vision of the IT Corridor: the final plan would lay down whatwould come where: the idea is to prevent encroachments and haphazarddevelopment of the area (2005: 334).16

Although critiques of the state by civil society appear timeworn andwell known. What I contend here is not a mere opposition of the two, but afundamental realignment of the terrain where state and civil society intersectevery day. Thus it is not only re-engaging citizens with the state they hadknown since 1947, but also re-engaging citizens with a reincarnated state.Moreover, by reincarnation of the state I allude to the selective induction of

the civil society within the folds of the state. The narrative in effect explainshow lives of citizens are imagined not just as free from state control but alsoin their ability to control the state in turn.

Return of the Middle Class

I was attending a citizens meeting with Ratnamma and her neighbors, whoI met during my fieldwork in the slums of Bangalore. The meeting was

organized by Janaagraha to resolve water supply problems for the urbanpoor in the city. The proposed water project was upheld as an innovationin public infrastructural financing that included a citizen contribution as



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stakeholders and a partnership between the Government of Karnataka,Water and Sanitation Programme of the World Bank and Janaagraha.

Janaagraha was involved as a civil society organization to specifically mo-bilize the urban poor and educate them about the necessity of the waterproject, particularly its design where citizens have a role as stakeholders vis--vis their monetary contribution. In other words, the project was designedto create a water market, where water ceases to be a public good and is re-worked as a commodity for consumption.

Soon after the meeting started, Ratnamma looked at me a few timesfrom across the hall; she did not look happy and gestured me to come over. Icarefully waded through the crowd to talk to her. Whats wrong? I asked.

Nothing, I thought this was a place to talk about my problems, but they did not allow meto talk about those stray dogs that keep entering my house; all they needed to know was

when and how I was getting water. And what is that boxed thing up there? Why do we

have to fill that up? Can we not just talk about our problems?

While I wanted to explain to her that this meeting was about water supplyI recognized her resistance to the chart (that she refers to as the boxedthing) on the white board.

The chart that Ratnamma so disliked was carefully prepared by Janaagrahafor this particular meeting to focus solely on the condition of water supply to

the urban poor. It tabulated various sources of water supply, such as borewells, public fountains, tanker supply, the hours of water supply during theday and week, the quality of water, the cost of water. Janaagraha called it thegrid. The purpose of the grid, as I gathered from meetings I attended atJanaagraha:

. . . is to make the problem of water clear and usable for citizens to participate in a con-

certed manner. We do not want any hazy ideas because that will stop us from helping the

poor people from engaging with the water board in a focused way. And also we have to

remember that since they do not have education, the grid is the only way they can talk

about their problems, we have to make good use of it.

This resonates with the connection Murthy drew between middle class, edu-cation, and their apposite role as reformers. Comparable to Steven Shapinsanalysis of the 17th-century English relationship between birth, wealthand virtue and the depiction of truthfulness as a circumstance of integrityand free action (Shapin, 1994: 656), we see an emergent relationship be-tween success and the middle class ethics of integrity and possession of truthof what India now requires and deserves as perceived IT entrepreneurs.

Thus when Ratnamma, as a member of the urban poor, wanted Janaagrahato address the problem of stray dogs, the grid failed her; there was no spaceallotted for stray dogs, just water. As one volunteer told her. No, you haveto pick from the options we have, but only water, not stray dogs. The grid



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was a ubiquitous element in all Janaagraha meetings, whether public orinternal. Every social problem that needed understanding would be broken

down into its constituent elements that would then be distributed over thegrid. The grid, in this sense significantly overlaps with the methodology usedto develop software. In my work with software developers at Infosys, everynew project I followed would be sliced under the Software DevelopmentLife Cycle (SDLC) that consists of four steps: requirement analysis, design,code generation, testing and maintenance. The SDLC like the grid offereda snapshot view of the problem, made its individual modules visible, and italso generated consent about the framework one is required to follow. Thesoftware code has a predefined path, known as loop, where a mistake (for

example, I enter an invalid character while typing my password) does not stallthe software programme but brings it back to its starting point. Likewise, thestray dogs Ratnamma evoked did not nullify the grid; instead the dogs weredismissed as stray in relation to the water grid.

Social critics in Bangalore have questioned the efforts of the InfosysJanaagraha nexus that exclude and delegitimize the poorer sections of the citythrough notions of unplanned, slums, illegal, unauthorized (Benjamin,2005). Solomon Benjamin uses the metaphor of the Trojan Horse to arguethat the politics of stealth of the ITNGO nexus works to install a decision-making process that in guise of being progressive allows elite groups to takeover economic and political territory (Benjamin, 2005: 20). As I gather frommy ethnography, the centrality of the middle class as the reformers, however,does not automatically obliterate their concern for the poorer sections. Ratherthe educated middle class, after the nationalist movement, is once again, Iargue, engaged in a pedagogical mission in relation to the rest of the society(Chatterjee, 1993: 172). Almost every programme in Janaagraha carried anurban poor component. The urban poor issue was referred to as the blackbox. The black box indicates the middle class lack of knowledge of the poorbut also a critical buried reality to be unearthed for reforming governance

and citizenship.We can effortlessly dismiss the grid as another tool detached from social

reality, a developmental artifact, which perhaps it is. Or the grid may depicta set of studied intentions, which nurture an exclusive space for the middleclass. Yet we need to ask: what makes the grid or the code a viable ontologicaltool? To me the grid conceals and congeals the imagination and discursivepractices of a new India, led by the SDLC mode of thinking. This mode ofthinking cannot address the menace of stray dogs. First, because in middleclass neighborhoods this is not a problem, and second, to induct the urban

poor who do not have education in the market rhetoric there is no place forstray dogs. Stray dogs, as a stray category, also disturbs the legibility of thegrid where the problems have been neatly placed to promote lucid thinking



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about governance and citizenship. A week later in an internal meeting oneof the Janaagraha volunteers mentioned the disruption Ratnamma caused by

bringing up the issue of stray dogs, Why should that matter so much, whenwe are trying to talk about something very important like water?

The middle class phenomenon is gaining prominence in most developingcountries that are now living in an era of market liberalization.17 WilliamMazzarella has observed that there is an obsessive public concern with thecategory middle class in post-liberalization India (2005). While Mazzarellaraises issues about applying the category middle class to the Indian society,given its origin in Europe, he agrees that the strength of the category toimagine a better India is undeniable. My analysis of the middle class, however,

does not center on its rise. Rather, I focus on the return of the middle classand their values after a period of perceived disengagement with the state.Around the 1970s and 1980s the Indian middle class shifted from a

Nehruvian civil service-oriented salariat, short on money but long oninstitutional perksto a bewildering (and, to some distasteful) array of new,often markedly entrepreneurial pretenders to the title (Mazzarella, 2005: 1).The ascent of the middle class discourse in India had for a while vacillatedbetween nostalgia for the old middle class (Varma, 1998) and adulation ofthe new one (Das, 2002). Neither of these explications, condemnation andcelebration as Fuller and Narasimhan point out of the middle class aboutthemselves, necessarily reflects social reality with much accuracy (2007).Leela Fernandes, critiquing Varmas argument as monolithic, contends thatthe newness of the middle class does not refer to upwardly mobile segmentsof the population. Rather, its newness refers to a process of production of adistinctive social and political identity that represents and lays claims to thebenefits of liberalization (Fernandes, 2006: p. xviii). In this sense the middleclass becomes both a site of production and an embodied marker of successushered by liberalization.

Most authors index the middle class penchant for exposing the ethical void

created by corruption of politicians but none adequately highlight their rolesince the 1990s as the new custodian of national ethics. The return as it isembedded in the narrative of IT success is both political and ethical. Theaffiliation between class and ethics is imperative; it is perceived to be thestrongest with the middle class and tapers off at the two ends, the upper andthe lower classes. The middleness and the consciousness of middleness of thisclass, as Partha Chatterjee (1993) has contended, is of particular significancein the Indian context. Chatterjee writes:

For the Calcutta middle class of the late nineteenth century, political and economic

domination by a British colonial elite was a fact. The class was created in a relation ofsubordination. But its contestation of this relation was to be premised upon its cultural

leadership of the indigenous colonial people. (1993: 36)



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In the imagination of the IT entrepreneurs, the contest between thecolonial state and the colonized has reincarnated itself in independent India

between the sovereign state and its citizens. Narayan Murthy evaluated thestate bureaucrats as even worse than the colonizers because they think ofthemselves as the elites and the government belongs to them. He cites FrantzFanons very well known book, Black Skin, White Masks, to make his case.He further asserted, They are the owners and the managers and this colonialthing carries on even after Independence. It is something about civil societythat makes this enduring. Similar to the nationalist project years ago, onesees the return of a hegemonic ideology to renew the ethics of the nation state.

Return has another significance in Ramanthans return to his homeland

from the West. Over the length of my work with Janaagraha, I encountereddispersed accounts of how Janaagraha was established. Collating them, Ipresent a gist here. The Ramanathans while living in London (previouslythey had lived in New York) had closely observed the ways in which westerncivil societies and states function. The commitment of both the state andthe citizens towards a good life vis--vis a fragile democratic system inIndia stimulated a passion in them to change India. The contrast seemedunacceptable after 50 years of Indian Independence.

Unlike most Non-resident Indians (NRI) who practice distant nationalism,the Ramanathans proudly held, we decided to returned to Bangalore, ourhometown. We returned to start what a friend called a no revenue modelphase to our livesa citizens movement. India, after Independence experi-enced an exodus of the educated middle class, Ramanathan once explained,but the process seems to be reversing slowly but surely. I want Indians tothink proudly of our country and not to leave and that you would love to comeback.18 The last part was congenially directed at me, given my current locationin the US. The media has called the return the reverse brain drain. Thoughnot unprecedented for a Non-Resident Indian, the return of Ramanathanis in some way considered unique. Part of the reason lies in his commitment

to transform India as a nation state rather than address social problems likepoverty or malnutrition separately. Despite clear ideological and temporaldisparities, Ramanthans return enthused the media to compare him withGandhi who too relinquished his legal profession in South Africa in 1914 togo back to India to confront British colonial rule.

IT Inside Out

Nandan Nilekanis secretary, Mallika, handed me an invitation to a pub-lic meeting for the PROOF Public Discussion Quarter II-200405 of theBangalore Mahanagar Palike (BMP), the Bangalore city administration.



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PROOF is an acronym for Public Record of Operations and Finance(PROOF) a multi-NGO initiative, including Janaagraha. PROOF holds

quarterly public meetings between citizens and the Bangalore MahanagarPalike (BMP) to evaluate the financial performances of the latter. I receivedthe same invitation from Janaagraha where preparations of the meeting wereunder way by the team dedicated to PROOF. As indicated in the invitation,Nandan Nilekani would be presiding. While conducting internet-based re-search to prepare for the meeting I noted the idea of accountability thatunderscores PROOF as follows:

Performance audits and quarterly financial statements are universally acknowledged as

essential mechanisms and a criteria for progress. The Corporate sector, the NGO world,

CBOs and civil society have not only embraced the concept, but have used it as thebasis of performance measurement and the springboard of good governance. Today,

we need the Government to practice it, PROOF provides this platform. It is about our

Government building confidence with PROOF. (PROOF, 2001)

Nandan Nilekani had personally endorsed PROOF:

I support the PROOF campaign wholeheartedly. As a CEO I cannot imagine running

my organization without credible information being produced, disseminated and used

on a regular basis by all stakeholders . . . Especially in todays climate such informa-

tion is more than just performance, it is about fundamental institutional integrity.

(PROOF, 2001)

Nilekanis endorsement of PROOF is twofold: the first reason is technical,where the state is as much accountable to the citizens as he as a CEO isaccountable to the stakeholders of Infosys. This is however underlined byhis singular focus on the ethical dimension of integrity of the state as aninstitution. His fusion of stake and integrity, which as I have been arguingdistinguishes his critique, places endeavors such as PROOF as an ethicalobligation on the part of the state as well as the citizenry as a new reality toreckon with.

The PROOF meeting was held on 11 December 2004 in downtownBangalore. Though the meeting theoretically was publicized as a space foropen interaction between the state and citizens across classes, the citizenswho attended the event were overwhelmingly middle class. The additionalcommissioner of BMP, Shri Hari, acknowledged:

All these have been made possible because of Nandan. He himself took a personal

interest in this, he himself spent his, I mean, personal money in funding this kind of

financial sector reform of implementing a fund-based accounting system based on inter-

national standards with no compromise whatsoever.

Nilekani carefully moderated the open house Question and Answer sessionbetween the citizens and the BMP officials. A middle-aged gentleman fromthe audience raised a question about the overwhelmingly quantitative nature



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of the presentation. He urged for a more descriptive one in the next quarterthat would be more comprehensible to the average citizen like myself. The

BMP commissioner stressed the need to change the responsibility of citizensconcurrent with the changing structures of governance: The city is ours, theCorporation is ours . . . the final opinion should be formed after getting intothe details and verification. He carefully avoids the request for a descriptiveanalysis; he emphasizes that ifgovernance is to be made a transparent andaccountable matter, the onus is also on the citizens to familiarize themselveswith the inner workings of the state, which is generally quantitative in nature.The change is not a simple imposition on the BMP by the IT corporationsbut is more nuanced not only in its actual operation (say, how the budget is

reported to the public) but also in its stipulations about the formation of aspecific subject who occupies the category of citizen.Ramesh Ramanathan, endorsing the need for reforming governance,

concluded the meeting as follows:

The BMP officials did not have to be here. Let us not get swayed by the glass buildings of

the city. We are still second-class citizens where participation is not yet formalized.

Ramanathan recognized the effort of the BMP officials to be present at themeeting, which is a new and possibly not an easy experience for a state admin-istration, who are not used to facing the public to answer their questions.

However, he also reminded the audience that the engagement with thestate is incomplete till citizen participation is officially instituted withinprocesses of governance. Like Narayan Murthy before him, Ramanthansuse of second-class citizens invokes the colonial legacy but with a twist.There is a hierarchy between the state officials as the first-class citizens, withcontrol of and access to the state apparatus, vis--vis the general populationwho are second-class citizens with little or no access to the working of thegovernment. To recast the nations present in terms of history is not only amatter of referencing a past that is available to Nilekani, Ramanathan and

also Narayan Murthy before. The past also creates a sense of ethical urgencyto reform the present and overcome the debilitating legacy of colonialism,which is now inherited by the sovereign Indian state.

The Global and the National

Is globalization as we experience it today an unprecedented phenomenon?If globalization introduces the market paradigm, is it necessarily antitheticalto the nation-form? Where does the allure of the market lie? These are the

central questions that dominate the literature on globalization. Globaliza-tion is primarily studied as a tension between the global and the national orthe local. The boundarylessness of the global makes one free, while the



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boundedness of the nation is restraining. Others argue the contrary: it is theonslaught of the global and plausible threat to the loss of national identity

that makes the nation stronger. The reliance on a dichotomy to explicatethe dynamics of the global and the national fails to capture the ethnographicnuances of the exchange in ways that blur unexpectedly.

The IT entrepreneurs evoke the market and its metonymical associationsof freedom and openness to highlight the existing closed state. Openness,as in a market, implies the bustle of multiple actors and actants19 to whom thefunctioning of the system is transparent and is calculable in terms of profit andloss. In contrast, a closed system cultivates corruption because it is unavailablefor scrutiny. It is not the introduction of the market in an erstwhile closed

economy that marks a departure. The departure rather lies is the rising faithin the idea of the market as the indispensable tool to organize, monitor, andensure the ethics of the nation state that has allegedly deteriorated over theyears. The induction of India into the global market through the success ofIT opens up possibilities of progress for a nation struggling to modernize.

Above all, globalization raises the ethical stakes for India. The inductionstipulates adherence to ethical standards of business practice sanctified at theglobal level, which trickles beyond the capitalist logic to life itself. By ethicalstandards I imply the corporate practices that adhere to a certain blueprintthat clearly separates the ethical from the unethical. These are usually re-ferred to as Best Practices, which now applies to the NGO sector as well. Wecan absolutely be wary about the global standardization of ethics. However,standardization is the tool that ensures the smooth working of global capital.Monica Prasad has analyzed various international standards of program-ming processes such as ISO 900 used to ensure the quality of the softwareproducts and the kind of controls these standards enable companies to exerton employees (Prasad, 1998). The software industry has now moved on tothe Capability Maturity Model (CMM), another internationally institutedstandard pertaining to both software and people processes. Infosys faithfully

adheres to the CMM in both cases. Prasad rightly argues that these standardsof controlling labor are not only to gain surveillance and control but alsoto signal quality and reliability to far-removed consumers and distributors(Prasad, 1998: 444). Here, the blend of economics and ethics through the globalstandards of business practices creates an economy of ethics.

I therefore propose that rather than decoupling the global and the nationalit will be further useful to study the dense transfer points between the two.In this article I am specifically interested in how a rethinking of the everydayethics of the nation state is initiated at the interface between the two. I do

not suggest a line of thinking along that of renewing the national identity.Rather, I ask: how are global ideas of liberalization established in everydaypractice? Or, how is globalization naturalized within the folds of the nation



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state? Thus ideas of freedom and openness are no longer distant ideasintroduced by equally distant processes of globalization but govern the very

premise of the everyday thinking about the nation state.Ulrich Beck has introduced important distinctions between globalization,

globality, and globalism (2000). Globalization implies the very processeswhich bind different nation states as transnational actors in capitalist pro-duction. Globality is familiar, as Beck argues, in that we have long lived ina linked world society. However, globalism is a new paradigm that under-scores globalization as such. Globalism, Beck argues, is a view that the worldmarket eliminates or supplants political action. He further argues (aboutGermany) that globalism involves thinking that its state, its society, its

culture, its foreign policy can be run in the way a company is run. Here is astriking similarity in the ism with the corporate model prescribed by theIT entrepreneurs for the Indian state in the use of market concepts such asstake, performance, accountability.

However, I contend that the market is not necessarily a depoliticizingagent. It does privilege economics over the political, but the coupling ofthe two gives rise to a new kind of politics between the state and the civilsociety, especially the middle class in India. I have called this the politicsof accountability. This kind of politics has a curious relationship with theideals of democracy. We are supposedly the largest democracy in the world,a management executive averred:

. . . yet I do not see any democratic processes at work. We are all scared to walk into

government offices because you do not know how your file will be used and misused,

or if it has been lost for life. If this were a true democracy, things would have been

otherwise. Democracy in India is only for politicians and they have corrupted the whole

system, we are still living at their daya (mercy). We are treated like kids and with no

respect, they decide everything and for their profit.

In public meetings, Ramanathan often reminded citizens he was address-ing that:

At Janaagraha we believe that it is not possible to get better governance without deep-

ening the meaning of democracy from representation to participation. This means that

in the alphabet of democracy, you cannot go from E to F, elect and forget; you need to

stay on the letter E, elect and engage.

To employ corporate terms such as stake, performance, and account-ability for public governance is unprecedented in a country anchored inthe paternalism of the state and the birthright of citizens. Paternalism as anorganizing principle is a familial model where power flows from the parentto the child. It does not preclude democracy but certainly limits its possibil-

ities. The state surveys, organizes, and charts the lives of citizens as a parentdoes for a child. The option of the car one drives, the house one lives in, theclothes one wears, the TV channels one views, are severely constrained given



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their limited availability. In other words, it is the absence of choices or ratherthe stringent control of choices that raises issues of a control between the

state and the citizens. Like a child, explained a volunteer at Janaagraha, weare in constant need of guidance from the government, like we are nevermatured enough to make our own sensible choices in life and neither can weask questions if we are not happy with the choices made for us. The marketredefines the relationship between the state and the citizens from the tenuousbonds of kinship to precise collective interests in India as equal stakeholders.Citizenship takes on a meaning not vis--vis the state but from within theapparatus of the state (Petryna, 2002). As stakeholders, the market freesthe citizenry from the control of the state and repositions them in a relation-ship where raising questions regarding governance is not considereddeviant. Rather, it restores the founding principles of democracy. It is inter-esting to note that democracy in this rhetoric is reinstated not through politicsbut through the ideals of the marketplace. Is this then a different kind of politythat, as Nicholas Rose has suggested (1999), breaks away from state controland charts its own freedom? Does the onus of governance then shift to theindividual citizen? One wonders if every citizen can be equipped to holdthe state accountable as proposed by those whom Janaki Nair calls the newcaptains or is it a prescription for yet another form of exclusion?

The middle class is central to the rise of this reform agenda. The middle

class has been proverbially linked with a growing consumer market in recentlyliberalized economies (Varma, 1998). However, here I am concerned morewith the principles of freedom of choice and accountability that underscoreconsumerism than consumerist practices. As a consumer one holds the pro-vider accountable for the quality of the goods or services offered which heor she made a conscious choice to utilize. Accountability is the obligatorybasis of the market transaction. By contrast, when citizenship is defined asa birthright, its link to the state is fixed in ascriptive notions of paternalismof the state. The state is not accountable to its citizens for how it governs as

long as it governs. The five-year centralized planning of the Indian state isan instance of this paternalistic mode when decisions are made independentof the citizens and then implemented to govern their lives. It was only in the1990s that the eighth Five Year Plan could not take off because liberalizationpolicies contradicted the very basis of the distant and centralized planningmodel of the state. The market removes the filial interference of paternalismby presenting choices as well as ascertaining the ethical right to choose.

Conclusion: The Place of the Market

Atul Kohli has refuted the idea of 1991 as a watershed in what he calls thebig bang rhetoric of a dramatic policy shift. He locates liberalization as



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a more gradual process that was related both to the global situation andinternal changes in Indian businesses (Kohli, 2006). Kohlis argument is

tenable theoretically but not necessarily ethnographically. In this article Ihave shown that the imagination of 1991 as a watershed and the kind ofchanges it promises for India nonetheless is a powerful ethnographic reality.If nothing else, as Mazzarella has argued, 1991 offers a definite date whenIndia embarks on a path that is both national and global, hinged on theidea of the market as the new organizing principle of the polity (Mazzarella,2003). In my ethnography it is a temporal reference that is evoked as anindex of change.

The market is intended to activate a shift from a state-centered to an open

and free economic model. The market is not only deemed to allocate resourcesusefully and efficiently in the economic transactions, but also offers a powerfulparadigm to reorganize the social, as a domain of calculable and predictabletransactions. In the past few decades, the hegemonic market has dominatedthe idea of social development and India is not unique in this regard. As iswell known now, India has exploited the opportunities offered by the marketto carve a niche through the global IT industry. Yet the market itself hasremained an elusive category in anthropological analysis. How do individualsvariously located understand the market? Timothy Mitchell has argued

that telling capitalisms story in developing countries, as in his research inEgypt, usually rests on a distinction between the non-market and the marketbut the narrative in effect circumvents the latter (2002: 244). The analyticchallenge, as I have showed, lies in capturing the expansion of the marketprinciples of freedom, self-interest, profits, and calculability, in what he callsthe para-sites of capitalism. The decontainment of the market and its rest-less brimming over into otherwise unrelated domains, such as the social, arewhat concern me in the analysis here.

IT in India is adored for its ability to prevail in the global market despiteits location in the developing world. This proven ability has not only madethe IT industry entrepreneurs the champion of the market model but alsoits experts. There is now an extant literature on experts and their expertisein certain fields of knowledge. The instance of the IT entrepreneurs and themiddle class NGO leadership nexus disturbs the given notion of experts:experts and expertise are delinked here. Expertise is not limited to onesknowledge, say in IT, but can be borrowed from IT and implemented andimplanted in the social domain. Nonetheless, their prescription of corporategovernance models to amend public governance raises issues of transferabilityof corporate expertise to public governance. I contend that, rather than asking

if this is feasible, it is more productive to interrogate how this idea becomespossible at a given point in time and the circuits and the para-sites throughwhich it gains ground.



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The success story of IT is now a well-established narrative in and outsideIndia. In making my initial plans for the project, the euphoria of success was

my entry point to the issue as well. The euphoria of success however, seemedto suppress the various channels of civil society through which it cascadedby making them look normal. During the course of my ethnographic work, Ihad conversations with various social critics in Bangalore who were deeplytroubled by the growing power of the ITNGO nexus in matters of governanceand asked, how are they qualified? This is undoubtedly a valid question. IsNarayan Murthy educationally or professionally qualified to prescribe a newmodel of governance? The answer is plausibly in the negative. Narayan Murthy,Nilekani, or Ramanathan were never involved in public administration.

Moreover, they themselves are aware of this. Yet their legitimacy seemsunproblematic to themselves as well as the wider civil society. Therefore,rather than asking if they carry legitimacy to promote a new model ofgovernance and citizenship, I ask, how do they legitimize their ethico-politicalnarrative on the state and citizenship. In this article I have mapped the flowof the ethico-political narrative founded on success from the IT industry tothe civil society and finally to the state.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This article draws on ethnographic work I conducted in Bangalore between 2002 and2005 for my doctoral dissertation research. The New School Summer Travel Grant,the National Science Foundation, and the American Institute of Indian Studies,University of Chicago, funded the field research at various stages. The New Schoolfor Social Research provided much-needed support while writing. I have receivedunconditional cooperation from everyone I worked with at Infosys TechnologiesLimited and Janaagraha; to all I express my deepest gratitude. I sincerely thankAdriana Petryna, Ann Laura Stoler, and Gyan Prakash for their insights and criticalcomments. Hugh Raffles and Hylton Whyte have offered useful suggestions to refine

the arguments I present here. Thanks to Erin Koch, Karolina Szmagalska-Follis, AnneGalvin, Leo Coleman, and Indranil Dasgupta for commenting on and editing draftsof this article.

NOTES

1. Bangalore officially reverted to its pre-colonial Kannada name Bengaluru inNov. 2006. It is the capital of the southern state of Karnataka.

2. This emulates the Silicon Valley in California. However, it is a misnomer because

Bangalore topographically is a plateau. Thus, sometimes it is also referred to asthe Silicon Plateau of India.3. Some authors argue that the process of liberalization started in India earlier

than 1991 with the drafting of the Computer Policy in 1984 and the Computer


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