Power Politics and Corruption
Contents: Prologue. 1. Introduction/Amitabha Sarkar. 2. Economic Discontent and Corruption/Amitabha Sarkar and Samira Dasgupta. 3. Corruption, Culture and Insurgency: Two Narratives in Manipur/M C Arunkumar. 4. People Vs Public: In the Domain of Anthropology (Note from a peripheral People's Anthropologist)/Dipak Piplai. 5. Crime and Punishment in a Tribal Society: Transitions in Time/Geetika Ranjan. 6. Social Movement in view of Social Identity and Vote Bank (An empirical study)/Samira Dasgupta. 7. The State of Corruption: An Anthropological Analysis/Abhik Ghosh. 8. Tribal Health in India through the Lens of Nutritional Indicators/Susmita Bharati, Manoranjan Pal and Premananda Bharati. 9. Issues, Challenges and Developmental Concerns in the Socio-Economic and Cultural Landscape of Tribal Communities in Assam/Tiluttoma Baruah. 10. Towards a Political Anthropology of North-East India: Issues and Concerns/Upala Barua. 11. Indian Forest Act and Forest Protection to Elucidate India as a Tree Planting Laboratory in the 21st Century/Suparna Sanyal Mukherjee and Saikat Kumar Basu. 12. Manipur Violence: Diplomatic Policy, Customary Law and Social Demography/Amitabha Sarkar. 13. Power, Corruption and Identity in Rural Governance: An Ethnographic Study/Irfan Ali Banka, Muzamil Rashid and Abhik Ghosh. Index.
Corruption is now a day is widely rampant in our society. The expressions of such corruption are varied and depend on time and space for its manifestation. In power politics political corruption is the use of powers by government officials or their network contacts for illegimate private gain. Politics today in our country has become a crucial tool in accumulation of wealth from the grass root level in the name of development. Our country is the largest nation of this earth which possesses Democracy but there are some black spots, which we cannot overcome rather compelled to accept as a regular system in our life being a stray incident, here in the name of democracy voting rights are controlled by hooligans, musclemen and vote is looted with power politics. This power is controlled by the ruling authorities. Power is a crucial and comprehensive variable in any political party. It is, on the one hand, linked with political power, and on the other hand, with wider social relations which people have with others. It is also concerned with the prevention of lawlessness and insecurity, in other words, politics focuses on the maintenance of law and order in society It is also concerned with conflict resolution and social integration, and here lies the other aspects of political power that emerges as an attribute, that is, corruption.
Some forms of corruption now called "institutional corruption" are distinguished from bribery and other kinds of obvious personal gain. For example, certain state institutions may consistently act against the interests of the public, such as by misusing public funds for their own interest, or by engaging in illegal or immoral behaviour with impunity. Trying to influence voters by promising freebies, facilities or favours to a particular section (race, religion, economic level etc) of society is also a kind of political corruption. Perhaps the highest level of corruption occurs when bribe is paid by business houses to make state policy skewed towards them.
In this treatise we try to assemble some empirical observations from various parts of the country in order to portray a picture of manifestation of corruption prevails among us which may certainly attract attention among the administrators and the institution of politics under the umbrella of power politics. We demand justice and corruption free society but perhaps it is 'crying in the wilderness’.
