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

by Josy Joseph

The protection of shaky reputations is a flourishing industry. There are PR consultants whose brief is to alert the rich and famous about any possible adverse reports brewing against them in newsrooms. There are lawyers drafting defamation notices and then there are those who manage the situation if nothing else works. All of them make a killing out of the potential embarrassment of a famous client.

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.

Hotel industry veteran Ajit B. Kerkar was a member of the Air-India board, and sat on the sub-committee that decided to disinvest hotels owned by its subsidiary, Hotel Corporation of India. A day after the divestment decision was taken, Kerkar exited the board, only to return as a buyer. A company promoted by him bought it, and then re-sold it within a few years at a significant premium. That, in a nutshell, is how divestment has played out in India.

The Indian democracy works only through middlemen who know how to get the moribund system moving. Ordinary Indians in their thousands wait patiently every day at the residences of local politicians, typists, professional middlemen and such intermediaries to get the system to deliver what is justifiably theirs.

Hridaychak is an electrified village, 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.

In New Delhi, all discussions are now about transforming India into a manufacturing hub, building smart cities and strengthening the country’s IT power status. A new government is talking about regaining India’s past glory and its rightful place in the global order. But here in Hridaychak, those words mean nothing.

Yet, according to UNICEF, about 65 per cent of rural Indians relieve themselves in the open – sometimes on the road to a graveyard, risking communal tensions and violence.

In 2015, when the new Central government amended the Land Acquisition Bill, taking away the need for the consent of locals and Social Impact Assessment studies in many cases, a group of tribals in Jharkhand gathered one day to defecate in public on copies of the bill.

The Bihar government ordered a Bihar Land Reforms Commission in 2006, under D. Bandyopadhyay, who was credited with carrying out land reforms in neighbouring West Bengal some three decades before that. The Commission’s interim report was an eye-opener on the state of affairs.

The government said that about 2,78,320 acres of land were found to be not suitable for distribution because of ‘improper physical characteristics’, but it couldn’t tell the Commission who it was that had decided all that land was of no use.

The Commission pointed out that historically the Bhoodan movement had suffered from many frauds perpetrated by greedy landowners. Of all such cases, in Bihar, that of Hathua Raj, a large zamindari in Saran district, is legendary. Through a simple letter, the head of this family offered to donate 1,00,000 acres of land to the Bhoodan movement. It was meant to avoid pressure from the Gandhian leader and escape the land-ceiling restrictions that had come into being as a result of the movement. The Saran district authorities notified it through a gazette notification saying that by April 1959 there were 1,03,903 acres of land available for the poor in the district. The Commission said Hathua Raj had committed a ‘trick of colossal proportions’. ‘A question arises as to what is to be done about such unconfirmed lands,’ it said.

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

Assuming that Yadav is a typical case, the pension money being pocketed by officials of the department and their political masters must be around Rs 600 million a month.

Most of his family was away at the local temple to pray for the success of his son’s marriage. Rai picked up a ringing phone and told his son to give the priest his reference, probably to ensure there was no delay. Even to the local gods, he had special access.

It is not just the poor that these middlemen at the grass-roots level serve. They are also crucial to the local administration. Rai and his ilk help the administration gain local support for controversial projects, like widening roads or acquiring land. It is through facilitating these activities that the intermediaries sustain their political careers.

There are two key reasons why, even in a highly literate state like Kerala, ordinary people look for intermediaries. For one, government resources are limited and thus demand far outstrips supply, like in, say, government-run hospitals. Secondly, and crucially, many government institutions, such as the police, are brutal and corrupt. The local intermediary could help someone jump the queue or soften treatment at the hands of a government institution.

In some parts of Bihar, it was easy for me to identify the new web of intermediaries who have emerged. Many of them had become leaders and elected members or chiefs of village councils. The locals came up with many nicknames for them – Bolero mukhiya, Innova sarpanch – after the names of the SUVs they purchased once they had ascended to their post. The secret of their fortune is no mystery. As the chiefs of local bodies, they have an important role in dispersing a significant amount of cash and contracts to the people.

The emerging evidence raises several questions regarding the efficacy of the Panchayati Raj system. Has devolution of power improved efficiency of governance and brought welfare to people? Or has it added a few new layers to the corrupt political–bureaucratic network? The

We stepped out into the winter sun and the din of traffic. Thanking me warmly for the visit, Rai insisted I attend his son’s wedding reception the next day. As I got into the car, his parting words were: ‘I have to be forever on the right side of the people. It’s not always easy.’

the professional intermediary says is true? How can

withdraw from the marketplace or regulations. If anything, it found new ways to coerce and assist a new breed of business people as the scope widened dramatically. What is constant is the grip of corrupt politician–businessman–criminal syndicates on governance. It is even greater than anything the average observer of the Indian democracy can imagine, even in these days of exposés and hidden cameras.

A report by the Centre for Media Studies in March 2014 had estimated that political parties, the government and candidates would spend about Rs 30,000 crore in the general elections of 2014. In reality, by the end of campaigning, the political parties declared a total spend of less than Rs 2,000 crore, all combined.