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

by Josy Joseph

The second biggest bank loan defaulter after Kingfisher today is Winsome Diamonds group, which has failed to pay back a loan of over Rs 6,500 crore. And where is its promoter Jatin Mehta now? He is in Singapore. Promoters of the Deccan Chronicle newspaper submitted forged balance sheets to various banks to raise hundreds of crores of rupees, which was used to buy a cricket team and fancy cars.

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

As per Islamic traditions, land, cash or other assets donated for religious or charitable purposes is held permanently under the wakf laws. India has a long tradition of wakf and has a central law, the Wakf Act of 1954, under which thousands of acres of land and hundreds of buildings are administered by Wakf Boards in each state.

The Ambanis’ shifting political loyalties is representative of the challenges faced by the modern Indian businessman. Even if a company wants to do business fair and square, politics won’t let them.

On 23 May 2010, the Ambani brothers announced that they were scrapping the non-competing agreement, allowing both to operate freely wherever they wanted. This meant Mukesh could enter telecom, finance and power, while Anil could enter petrochemicals. Soon it emerged that Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries Limited had been quietly working towards re-entry into the telecom sector all along.

There was one exception: a little-known Internet service provider, Infotel Broadband Services Pvt. Ltd, with an annual turnover of just Rs 18,00,000 and one subscriber. Infotel was aggressively bidding across India. Its promoter Mahendra Nahata had in the past once defaulted on government licence fee in the telecom sector after making similarly high bids. But the officials seemed unconcerned. When the bidding ended, Infotel had agreed to pay a whopping Rs 12,847.77 crore for a national licence. That was 71,000 times the company’s annual turnover. Nobody questioned it – it was as if the government didn’t want to know how he would pay the mind-boggling amount.

Tihar Jail is Asia’s largest prison, housing over 13,000 inmates at any point of time. It was built to house 6,250 prisoners. Over 10,000, or about 75 per cent, of its population on an average are undertrials – victims of India’s slow-moving judicial system – and at least some of them are likely to be innocent.

From murderers to women and men accused of dowry harassment, to militants linked with armed movements, Tihar Jail is a microcosm of India itself.

Without going into the quality of criminal investigations, it is safe to conclude that those at the top are increasingly under scrutiny. Many lower courts are punishing even the most powerful without mercy; and the higher courts are mostly uncompromising too. This democratization of the legal process is what Tihar’s prisoner demographics represent: the son of a senior political leader who owns a sprawling business empire, a senior police officer who once worked in the office of the prime minister, a former chief minister of Haryana, a couple of god men with millions of followers, among others.

The all-powerful chief minister of Tamil Nadu, Jayalalithaa, was summoned to a trial court in neighbouring Karnataka in a disproportionate assets case and sentenced to jail on 27 September 2014. She became the first sitting chief minister of an Indian state to be disqualified from holding office due to conviction in a criminal case. In May 2015, the Karnataka High Court acquitted her of the charges, and later that month, she assumed office as chief minister again.