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

by Josy Joseph

Sadly, local elected bodies in most villages are an extension of corrupt and inefficient governments at the state and the Centre.

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, almost the population of the United States, live without electricity, their nights occasionally lit by kerosene lamps. Not that the rest of India has adequate power; most gated communities in its cities are sustained by private diesel generators.

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.

According to recent estimates, some 66 per cent of rural residents do not have access to critical medicines, while 31 per cent Indians have to travel more than 30 kilometres to avail themselves of any health care.

Just 28 per cent of Indians in urban areas corner 66 per cent of India’s available hospital beds. Mind you, India is still largely a rural country, with around 70 per cent of its population living in rural areas.

Every political and administrative change in the state government sends tremors through the school. When Nitish Kumar, the chief minister of Bihar, resigned in May 2014, the resultant reshuffle and chaos meant that payments for the school reached three months late.

As for contract teachers, who are not regular government employees but make up a significant part of the state’s teaching community, their meagre salaries are usually paid in five- or six-monthly cycles.

That year, the free textbooks meant for the students did not arrive in April 2014 when the academic year started. They came only by October–November. ‘Half the academic session is almost lost. We managed by using old textbooks of senior students,’ one of the school’s eleven teachers told me.

Children in this school are actually lucky, the teachers said, because many schools in the neighbouring villages have just one or two teachers. ‘In Paharpur, there is a primary school (from classes one to five) operated by just one lady teacher,’ one of them said.

A recent survey by the National Institute of Education Planning and Administration (NIEPA) found that over one lakh of India’s elementary schools had only one classroom. In Bihar, over 1,200 schools had no building at all. Across India, 90 per cent of these no-room or single-room schools were in rural areas. Some 27 per cent of Bi...

The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009, has made it every Indian child’s right to access full-time elementary education of satisfactory and equitable quality until the age of fourteen. Estimates vary, but India has a shortage of almost half a million teachers and over eight million primary school-age children still do not attend school. The legislation is impressive on paper, but like many other promises of this great republic, it too mocks the expectations of the people of this village.

Observers – among them, Nalanda Mentor Group member George Yeo – say that the collapse of Nalanda is symbolic of the decline of Asia and the rise of the West in the second millennium.

In 2007, at the East Asian Summit held at Cebu in the Philippines, member nations decided to re-establish the Nalanda University.

‘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,’ Sen pointed out.

Dr B.R. Ambedkar, the architect of the Indian Constitution and pioneer of modern Dalit politics, called untouchability ‘another appellation of slavery’. Although abolished by the Constitution, the caste system – and discrimination on the basis of caste, which is illegal and punishable – thrives in India.

Even as I sign off the edits on this book, a family of Dalits has been beaten up for accidentally touching the hand of a Brahmin while handing over money for the groceries they had purchased.

Successive governments in India have covered up the true story of the missing toilets with averages and total numbers. The Modi government claims that it will end open defecation by 2019. Many governments before this one have set similarly ambitious targets. 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. Almost 600 million Indians, mostly in rural areas, are without toilets, a problem that is fast becoming an India-only one.

In Uttar Pradesh, which has a population of over 200 million, a staggering 77 per cent of rural households did not have a latrine. In Bihar, 81.4 per cent of rural households did not have bathrooms in their premises. The national average for India’s rural areas shows that over 67 per cent did not have access to toilets, while in urban India, the figure is 12.6 per cent. A significantly larger proportion of the population has mobile phones in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh.

Acharya Vinoba Bhave, a spiritual follower of Mahatma Gandhi, launched the Bhoodan movement in 1951 from a village in southern India to persuade India’s rich landowners to voluntarily give up a part of their holdings to the landless. The movement was a huge success and collected hundreds of thousands of acres of land, and many state governments passed Bhoodan Acts. Over the years, the movement lost its steam and corruption took charge of the efforts, as with most other early initiatives of free India.

Based on the government’s own data, Landesa, an international NGO working on land rights, estimated in 2015 that even though 85 per cent of rural women are engaged in agriculture, only 13 per cent of them own land. The situation is far worse in Bihar, where only 7 per cent of women have land rights.

Even their semi-built houses are far more comfortable than Bansi’s. He and his brother, their wives and many children, are all crowded into a single-room house. Standing in this quarter, surrounded by stagnant drainage and futureless children, the words of Ambedkar ring so true: 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. And this is just one social welfare scheme in one of India’s twenty-nine states and seven Union territories.

The Indian government has around forty schemes to provide welfare to its poor: uplift their economic conditions, provide toilets, drinking water, roads, schools and hospitals, guarantee employment and other assistance. It spends about 1.7 per cent of its GDP in the social sector – the health and education sectors receive 1 per cent of the GDP, while rural development gets 0.7 per cent. In the budget for 2016–17, this totalled to a whopping Rs 2,53,356 crore. All the schemes have grand names, mostly after famous Indian leaders from the past, but none of them assure a better future for the Indian poor.

There have been occasional studies of the extent of corruption leakages in social welfare schemes. In 2009, a Planning Commission of India study of the distribution of subsidized food items through the Public Distribution System (PDS) found that only 16 paise out of a rupee reached the targeted poor. The remaining 84 paise went to pay salaries and as leakages and bribes and commissions for the country’s bloated government.

These intermediaries occasionally even take up the role of the government, holding kangaroo courts and settling disputes. For the poor, the arrangement makes great sense; courts are costly and appallingly slow.

According to estimates, it will take about 320 years to dispose of the over three crore cases pending now in Indian courts.1

One of the studies that assessed the phenomenon of this lower-level intermediary is by Anirudh Krishna, a professor of public policy and political science at Duke University.

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.

‘These intermediaries are useful though unscrupulous.

Inadvertently, they help the poor and the political process.’

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.

On a November morning in 2014, with the help of local intermediaries, dozens of women were picked up and taken to sterilization camps not very far from where Rai was based. Though Rai was not involved in organizing that camp, it is the kind of programme that he regularly assists the district administration in putting together. At the camp, tubectomy was being performed on women in a frenzy – yet another population control overdrive. Within hours of the surgeries, the women who had been operated upon began to fall ill. Over a hundred of them were rushed to hospitals in Bilaspur, and at least fifteen died in the next few hours. Investigations revealed that the doctor who conducted the procedures was under pressure to meet government targets on sterilization, and carried out eighty-three surgeries in six hours in unhygienic conditions. They also found that one of the medicines that was administered contained rat poison.

Some corrupt officials and ministers had taken a hefty commission to buy the medicine in bulk from a manufacturer. He, in turn, made up his expenses by replacing costly chemicals with rat poison.

In a bright yellow cotton sari with a black-and-white border, feet clad in a pair of simple black slippers, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi walked into the pleasant New Delhi morning. She walked, as was her wont, briskly along the pathway from her residence to the next bungalow, where Peter Ustinov, the Academy Award–winning actor and columnist, was waiting to interview her. She was running late by thirty minutes. As she crossed the wicket gate between the two compounds at 9.20 a.m., Sub-inspector Beant Singh, who had been guarding her for almost a decade, turned and shot her. When she collapsed to the ground after taking three bullets, Satwant Singh, a twenty-one-year-old who had been with the prime minister’s security for just ten months, fired thirty rounds at her. The two men dropped their guns, and one of them reportedly shouted, ‘I have done what I had to do. You do what you want to do.’ The two Sikh bodyguards were taking revenge on Gandhi for ordering the Indian Army into the Golden Temple, the highest temporal seat of their religion, to flush out armed Sikh separatists in summer that year.

The story begins with the Partition of India in 1947. As a ten-year-old boy, Dhawan was plucked from the comforts of a landed peasantry life in rural Pakistan in 1947. The Partition of the subcontinent set off one of the biggest massacres in modern history. Millions of people migrated across the newly drawn boundaries in a traumatic exodus that continues to shape the narratives of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

In May 1991, Rajiv Gandhi became the second member of the Nehru–Gandhi family to be assassinated, when a suicide bomber of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) blew him up during an election campaign at Sriperumbudur, near Madras (now Chennai) in Tamil Nadu.

Rajiv, Indira Gandhi’s forty-year-old son, was sworn in as prime minister that same evening. Dhawan was among the small number of people at the Rashtrapati Bhavan, where the president swore him in.

Unexplained riches, metamorphoses and mysterious fortunes are all part of the lives of our politicians and their trusted aides. There are many who have thrown away government jobs to become personal assistants to political leaders; there are trusted aides who have risen in politics because of the blessings of political leaders.

Reminiscences of the Nehru Age (Vikas Publishing House, Delhi, 1978),

In London, sometime between 1947 and 1951, Indian high commissioner V.K. Krishna Menon hosted a reception at India House. It was attended by the then British prime minister Clement Atlee and others. Mathai writes: ‘Nehru stood in a corner, chatting with Lady Mountbatten all the while. Krishna Menon turned to me and said that people were commenting on it and requested me to break in so that Nehru could move about. I told him that I had no locus standi, he was the host and it was his duty to make the PM circulate. Krishna Menon did not have the guts to do the right thing.

Mathai’s two books – the second book is My Days with Nehru – are peppered with stories of India’s most towering personalities, their petty clashes, affairs, rumours, paramours and all.

‘She’ contained many lurid details about what Mathai claimed was his over-a-decade-long intimate affair with Indira Gandhi. There is little evidence to corroborate Mathai’s

In 1993, the minority government of prime minister P.V. Narasimha Rao deployed every possible strategy to garner support in parliament as it struggled to hold on to power. Among the political manoeuvres was giving huge bribes to Opposition members who were willing to be bought.

As word began to spread about the fortune that the MPs had landed, many in their camp began to bargain for their share. Among them was Shashi Nath Jha, private secretary to JMM chief Shibu Soren. By the next summer, Jha had disappeared. After years of investigation, CBI exhumed his remains from a village near Ranchi in 1998 and accused Shibu Soren, among others, of murdering Jha.

I met an old man who was, for a few decades, personal assistant to one of the country’s senior-most members of parliament. After endless cups of tea, he opened up. That both of us shared a mother tongue, Malayalam, helped. He told me about a round of bribes – not the one that resulted in Jha’s murder – that was being circulated in New Delhi for the survival of another minority government. One evening, the government’s agents landed up at the MP’s official residence with a huge bag full of cash. After the visitors took their leave, the MP and our narrator locked the gate, shut all the doors and windows of the ageing white mansion. They broke the tiled floor of the house and dug the ground beneath. ‘We kept the bag in a hole, spread sand over it and cemented it,’ he recalled. To hide the amateur cementing, they pulled an old carpet over it. After the new government survived the confidence vote in parliament, and the political dust settled, the floor of the bedroom was dug again. The cash bag was taken by road to the MP’s hometown hundreds of kilometres from New Delhi, accompanied by the leader himself and his security guards. A distillery was constructed with the money.

The defence delegation’s visit was of crucial importance to Israeli defence firms, whose fortunes had come to rely heavily on Indian orders. The world’s largest importer of military ware by the second decade of the twenty-first century, the Indian military accounts for almost 50 per cent of Israel’s foreign military sales. India has placed over Rs 60,000 crore worth of orders with Israel’s defence and space firms starting in 1999, when Israel had quickly and quietly assisted India in the Kargil war.

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.

In the Indian economy, middlemen play out their roles in the dingy back rooms of decision making. They carry bribes, pay whoever needs to be paid, intimidate someone if required, and ensure that their clients have insider information on a contract from the very beginning of the process. They provide undue and unfair advantage. India has no formally recognized lobbying industry, nor does it allow agents in government contracts. But influential middlemen are an essential ingredient in any major government contract.

Firms from countries where anti-corruption laws are relatively lax tend to be opaque, because they can run their business without too much fear of prosecution by their respective governments. Not surprisingly, they tend to be among the foreign firms that most often pocket the big government contracts.