CORRUPTION PLOTS
The Ethics of Space in the Millennial City
LAND MAFIA
Talk of the “land mafia” is all around in urban India. Who or what is the land mafia? We posed this question to Simpreet Singh, an activist in Mumbai: "I think for me land mafia is the personification of the system. It’s like this construct. But it’s also real." He continued “For me Lehman Brothers was part of that land mafia. Unitech is part of that. The Chief Minister is part of that. The slum dweller who is participating is in the land mafia. Just because I don’t come in the front, it doesn’t mean that I’m not the land mafia. I might be sitting in my air conditioned office and I’m just giving my job to someone else to do.” In other words, the land mafia is everywhere, but it is also particular individuals. It is a construct, yet it is also very real.
Talk of the land mafia can be understood in Raymond Williams’ terms as a "structure of feeling." Everyone knows that wrongdoing surrounding land is afoot, yet no one in particular can be pinpointed as "the mafia." As Simpreet put it, it is a personification of a well-oiled machinery that carries out land transaction. This video (featuring the image above) released by a local business website in Bangalore warns consumers to watch out for the "land mafia," never articulating particular individuals, yet affirming the mafia’s existence. It warns especially that tracing the paper trail of property ownership is key to avoiding transactions prone to corruption and mafia activity.
An excerpt from Scott Carney’s 2008 Wired Magazine article “The Godfather of Bangalore”
In other renditions, the land mafia has been identified as particular businessmen, politicians, or thugs. Scott Carney, an investigative journalist for Wired Magazine studied the Bangalore land mafia for three years. In his article, he narrates the life stories of multiple mafiosos involved in land rackets, some of which involve extortion and murder. As Carney explains it, multinational companies need brokers to facilitate massive land purchases. He quotes one such broker, Muthappa Rai, a self-proclaimed “land mafia” don who claims that his land deals are now “perfectly straightforward”: "Foreign companies come in and everything improves…I have seen this happen the whole world over. Now I'm helping make it happen here." Yet Rai’s procedure for acquiring land is tenuously legal. As Carney says in his article:
Asked to intercede by a prospective buyer, Rai checks out the parcel for competing owners. If two parties assert ownership, he hears both sides plead their case and decides which has the more legitimate claim (what he calls “80 percent legal”). He offers that person 50 percent of the land's current value in cash. To the other, he offers 25 percent to abandon their claim—still a fortune to most Indians, given the inflated price of Bangalorean real estate. Then he sells the land to his client for the market price and pockets the remaining 25 percent.
Brokers like Rai, as cunning as they may seem, are only foot soldiers in a much more globalized and exploitative system of frontier expansion.
A still from the 2014 Kannada film Ambarisha
Another example of the sensational imagining of land mafias is the 2014 Kannada film Ambarisha. The film starts with the murder of Shyam Swami by thugs. Swami is an anti-corruption activist who has filed a “Right to Information” (RTI) petition with the government to demand information on 44,000 acres of government land that has been usurped by a politician. In a notable moment of the film, we see that the law is ineffective in prosecuting real estate corruption. However, lines of complicity are murky and difficult to follow.
In this scene embedded here with English subtitles, the lawyer with the Nehruvian white hat on the right (also the symbol for the 2011 Indian Against Corruption movement) is representing the ethical middle-class citizen who was part of a team of people challenging the corrupt politician. Yet, there is a twist: one of the middle-class petitioners also happens to be a real estate developer. The lawyer on the left represents the politician. He points out this conflict of interest: how can the real estate developer be accusing the politician of any real estate shenanigans when the developer himself must be guilty? Aren’t developers the ones who take advantage of “the public”? The politician is innocent, and the developer is guilty, argues the lawyer! The judge removes all charges on the politician issuing a stern warning to the developer to stop bringing useless cases to court. We see shortly after the scene that the law passed an erroneous judgement: it is indeed the politician who is corrupt and the developer who is innocent. Will the developer be able to fight for what is right? It is a complicated story that does not so much pit “evil” against “good” so much as it reveals a terrain of moral questioning that gets at the heart of contemporary city making.
Stills from the Hindi film Khosla ka Ghosla showing Mr Ghosla set against his plot of land at Delhi’s urban periphery and the protagonists driving away. On the right can be pictured a barrier around a peripheral plot of land with a sign that reads “Do not urinate here”.
The 2004 Hindi film Khosla ka Ghosla [Mr. Ghosla’s Nest] tells the story of a middle-class simpleton, Mr. Ghosla, who gets swindled by the land mafia on the outskirts of Delhi. Early in the film, Ghosla visits his plot on the outskirts of Delhi only to find that someone is squatting there and that the land now belongs to one Mr Khurana. With the police in his pockets, Mr Khurana is shown to be a powerful real estate mafia who routinely robs “good” middle class people of their land. In a comedic twist, Mr Ghosla himself engages in a land mafia plot to re-take the land.
In a case of art imitating life imitating art, one of the properties featured in Khosla ka Ghosla was recently the subject of a real-life property scam in Delhi.
Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.