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Abstract

The 2012 Mumbai Municipal Corporation elections were characterized by reportedly-
unprecedented flows of cash – a phenomenon has been described in both popular
and scholarly accounts as “vote buying.” Drawing on ethnographic research on
cash exchanges during the run-up and aftermath of the election, the paper probes
some of the presumptions embedded in concepts of “vote banking” and “vote buying,”
thereby unsettling the theoretical and normative frameworks through which
practices of popular politics in contemporary India have been outlined. The ethnographies
reveal multiple logics operative in election-time cash flows; actors involved
with moving money have divergent and sometimes conflicting aspirations, motivations
and agendas, within which cash itself plays various roles simultaneously: firstly
money is used – somewhat conventionally – as a medium of exchange, to pay for
campaign-related expenses including employing a slew of temporary workers as
hired crowds. Secondly, cash is productive and performative of enduring socioeconomic
networks that infuse everyday life far beyond election day. Thirdly, cash
is sign of other forms of present and future knowledge and authority, generating
intense speculation and political realignments during the run-up to election day. The
account that emerges suggests neither a heroic narrative of subaltern resistance to
bourgeois capitalism, nor a dystopic scenario of mass exploitation in which forces
of ‘marketization’ empty the act of voting of meaning. Rather, it is argued, electiontime
cash inhabits a deeply-political landscape of contestation within which issues
at the heart of Mumbai’s modernity – land use, infrastructural investment, and business
prospects – are negotiated.