What Privileged Class Deviance Means

In one line

Privileged class deviance is deviant conduct by those who hold power, whether economic, official, political or professional, which causes great harm, is rarely defined as crime, and is almost never punished.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: the notion of privileged class deviance is the Indian formulation, associated with Upendra Baxi's writing on the Indian legal order, describing the deviance of those with power rather than merely those with occupational position; it includes official deviance, police deviance, political deviance, professional deviance and corporate deviance, and its defining feature is the mismatch between the harm caused and the response of the legal order.

The definition, taken apart

"Privileged class." Not a class in the economic sense alone. The category is defined by access to power: to office, to discretion, to capital, to a licence, to a profession, or to political authority. A police constable is not wealthy and is privileged in the sense that matters, because he holds a power over others that they cannot resist.

"Deviance," not crime. For the reasons given in the previous chapter. A great deal of the conduct is not criminal, and whether it should be is one of the questions the concept is designed to raise.

And the implicit third element: the response. The concept is not merely a description of who offends. It is a claim about the legal order's reaction, and the phrase in MU's own syllabus is "Privileged Class Deviance and Indian Legal order". The two halves belong together.

Why it is not simply white collar crime

Students use the two terms interchangeably. They overlap heavily and they are not the same, and an examiner setting both on the same paper is testing the difference.

The practical consequence. A study of white collar crime in India would examine company frauds, tax evasion and professional misconduct. A study of privileged class deviance examines those and also custodial violence, the fabrication of evidence, the misuse of a discretionary allotment, the criminalisation of politics and the failure to register a complaint. MU's syllabus asks for the second.

The five domains

Economic and corporate deviance. Fraud, evasion, adulteration, market manipulation, unsafe workplaces, environmental discharge.

Official deviance. Corruption, favouritism in the exercise of discretion, and the use of office to obstruct or to oblige.