A Feast of Vultures: The Hidden Business of Democracy in India

by Josy Joseph

The protection of shaky reputations is a flourishing industry.

This is a crisis that privileged Indians are in denial about, because all of them – all of us – benefit from it. India has become a very rich country of too many poor people.

The biggest beneficiary of the anti-corruption movement, however, was Narendra Modi, whose Hindutva credentials and corporate backing helped him ride the anti-establishment wave to become the prime minister in 2014.

‘If you fight persistently, you can get something you deserve with a lot of difficulty. If you have money, you can get it without a fight.’

Over 56 per cent of the rural Indian population does not have access to electricity. In absolute terms, anywhere between 300 and 400 million Indians,

This data is from 2016, need to find 2020 stats.

since any village with power supply to at least 10 per cent households is considered electrified in its statistics.

Democracy is a regular visitor via elections; for everything else, the villagers must look for facilitators and middlemen. This is also true of most of India.

‘When the most ancient European university, the University of Bologna, was founded – this was in 1088 – the centre of higher education at Nalanda was already more than 600 years old,’

Democracy in India is only a ‘top dressing on an Indian soil, which is essentially undemocratic’.

According to estimates, it will take about 320 years to dispose of the over three crore cases pending now in Indian courts.

The problem in India, he explained, is that the state machinery is built top-down, unlike in the United States and other developed economies. The result of this is that, in India, the government is active and alive only up to the district level; at best, a step down. Below that, people exist in a black hole.

For a country the size of India, decentralization is crucial; but in a deeply corrupt system, it only seems to have added a new opportunity for bureaucrats and local-level intermediaries to make more money.

In short, he must ensure that the government keeps running in the sinister and corrupt way that has become the norm. It would be no exaggeration to say that these powerful intermediaries play a critical role in ensuring that the Indian government does not grind to a halt, its armed forces modernize regularly, that highways are constructed, and the economy keeps growing at a robust rate rather than stagnate. In a perverse way, these middlemen are the answer to an inept and stagnating government.

Informal estimates say that India could end up spending around Rs 6,70,000 crore on importing arms during this decade alone.

He added that while the total amount of bribe in the scandal was only Rs 64 crore, the CBI had spent a whopping Rs 250 crore on the case.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA

at the highest levels, there is no religion, no caste. It is money and the give-and-take of favours that speak.

At the peak of its glory, Mallya’s group was a multinational conglomerate of over sixty companies, with an annual turnover of over Rs 45,000 crore by 1998–99.

According to a 2010 study by National Social Watch Coalition, 128 out of the 543 members of the then Lok Sabha were businessmen with known or potential conflicts of interest with respect to the parliamentary proceedings they were participating in.

the O.P. Jindal group, run as independent units by his four sons, is a collective valued at over Rs 1,20,000 crore.

Filing cases against people in faraway courts is the standard harassment practice in India.