"Hamara paisa, hamara hisaab"

There is a story Aruna Roy often narrates when talking about the genesis of the Right to Information legislations in India.

She quotes a woman in Beerawar, Rajasthan, who said, “If I give Rs 10 to my son and send him to the market to do some shopping then when he returns surely I have every right to ask him to give me hisaab. Hamara paisa, hamara hisaab.Why should I not do the same with the government?” While the anti-corruption churning of the last two years would appear to have been an urban, middle-class affair, women participating in social movements like the campaign for the Right to Information have long understood how corruption works.

Is this because women are in general, less corrupt or less prone to corruption than men? One 1999 study based on cross-national data came to the conclusion that women were more honest and less inclined to give or take bribes. Will the entry of more women into the public sphere—in politics, in the bureaucracy, in the social sector—make public services and interactions less corrupt? But charges of corruption are also levelled against women politicians, for example—and certainly of abuse of power. In a 2003 paper, the question is raised: are women less corrupt because they have less opportunity to be corrupt?

This, however, is a counter-factual debate at the moment. What is more important, perhaps, is to understand that corruption too has gendered consequences. That is, women and men feel the impact of corruption in some similar ways, but their experiences with it are different in others that reflect their different power positions in society.

Does this really matter? After all, anti-corruption movements seek to throw out corrupt people and practices, lock, stock and barrel. I would argue that it does matter. As we continue to discuss welfare policies, identity-based party politics, inclusion, governance (and its failures) and safety, corruption emerges as a common thread—whose existence we lament but often with resignation—and insofar as different women experience each of these differently, this is true of corruption too. What is true of how women experience corruption is also likely true for other minority and marginalized groups in society. For instance, understanding that corruption further disenfranchises poor women might help design better projects, with fewer loopholes, greater accountability and more careful recruitment of service delivery staff. Everyone benefits from this, not just poor women.

In a 2012 UNDP study, almost 400 grassroots women surveyed in several countries, including India, defined corruption very broadly to include the following: bribery; abuse of power or poor leadership; illegal or deceptive actions; poor or absent service delivery; sexual exploitation; and physical abuse. The women surveyed saw all public agencies as corrupt with the police and local government being the most corrupt. It was found that women encounter corruption most in the delivery of basic services (like getting food ration allocations, government documents or even health-care) and in the years when they needed public care services most, but that it extended to all their interactions with the state.

In any discussion of the gendered impact of corruption, three factors are relevant.

A majority of the world’s poor are women, and the income gap between men and women is only growing. Landlessness, lack of access to credit and gender inequitable inheritance laws contribute to what economists have called “the feminization of poverty.” Their health and nutritional needs are rarely met, and lack of education and insecure livelihood trap them in their situation. Poor women and those under their care depend most upon the welfare services of the state. Corruption, in the form of poor service delivery, abuse of power and bribery, accosts them at every turn, limiting their ability to use the services that are ostensibly meant primarily for them. This snowballs across generations. Thus it is, that after six decades of development planning for poverty alleviation, very little appears to have changed.

Sexual exploitation and the seeking of sexual favours in exchanges for the delivery of services or entitlements is something we associate with crisis situations like displacement after disasters or war. Vulnerability to sexual and gender-based violence exacerbates the impact of corruption on women’s lives. This extends also to what women face when they seek justice for violence. In the UNDP study quoted above, women said that the police took bribes from both the complainant and the alleged perpetrator. Not just bribes, but nepotism and string-pulling also play a part here. This resonates as true and is reflected throughout our public discourse on governance and sexual violence as well as in our popular culture.

Not just in conflict and post-conflict situations, militarization is shadowed by corruption. The more we call out the para-military and the military to deal with law and order or disaster situations, the greater the opportunity for corruption. This is because in highly militarised situations, we increase the number of gate-keepers for everything. Access and mobility require checking and permission. More documentation is required and papers are checked more often. Property and amenities are commandeered for use, and the transfer involves an invocation of authority but possibly also a negotiation of the terms of use. The gendered impact of militarisation (limited mobility, for instance), the distress of poverty and vulnerability to violence might be compounded here by women often not having ownership of their homes or family property or female-headed households not being listed on a register of who is entitled to help.

The leadership of the anti-corruption mobilization of 2011-12 was very male, in spite of the important role that Kiran Bedi and Aruna Roy played. The crowds of volunteers at rallies across India seemed to have large numbers of young women and young men. One cannot expect a lot of nuance from spontaneous expressions of frustration, but it is still remarkable that for all the discussion at that time about corruption, very little of it was actually related to how corruption affects people differently depending on their social location and their gender. Moreover, a corollary of the myth that women are more honest than men is that the male-dominated public sphere is seen as being too corrupt for women to be able to survive and thrive. Corruption becomes a barrier for women’s participation.

We need to understand how corruption affects women—in different situations, at different life-stages—differently. We also need to ensure it doesn’t stop them from doing the things they need or the things they want to do. Some methods advocated by feminists, including gender budgeting and gender audits, have sought to introduce some measure of accountability for gender just practices into resource allocation and policy decisions. Building capacity should also mean training men and women in these and other tools.

Most of all, however, we need to stop teaching our daughters (particularly, but also our sons) that resignation to one’s fate is a virtue. If we continue to valorise resignation, then they will continue to think: a government officer will ask for a bribe and must be appeased; my passport application must be promoted by an influential relative; I cannot get a loan without a recommendation; I am nobody, the police will not register my FIR; I cannot ask questions. Asking questions, saying no, holding others accountable, gives all of us—women and men and others—agency in the fight against corruption. It really is that simple.

Swarna Rajagopalan is a political scientist with a special interest in gender issues. She is also the founder of Prajnya (prajnya.in), a non-profit centre working on peace, justice and security issues, including women's rights and violence against women.