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

Author: Joseph, Josy

• If you are able to summon the forensic skills necessary to detect the real powers behind fictitious shareholders and proxy voters, it will get you an intimate, revolting view of India’s underbelly, one that will swallow the sanitized, democratic India of impressive achievements and global ambitions

• In this country, it is okay to do practically anything: use fake promoters, accept bribes, commission murders, intimidate media, manipulate courts and grab power.

• In this country, it is okay to do practically anything: use fake promoters, accept bribes, commission murders, intimidate media, manipulate courts and grab power. The one big rule: don’t get caught.

• 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.

• How robust is its democracy? How fair? Have its institutions been maturing over the years? Are the waves of transparency and well-fought elections improving the lot of its poor? Are the cleavages between its institutions deepening, or disappearing? Why do other institutions not challenge the duplicity of the political classes often enough? Is everyone tangled up in a grand conspiracy to subvert the republic? Is there a way to assess and report on this modern India, without self-censorship and varnishing, without betraying my childhood village by the backwaters, without omitting friends, without being seduced by the intimate glamour of the imposing capital city?

• A chief minister who allocated prohibited ridge land in Delhi to his friends; naval officers who sold secrets from the war room for a fee; politicians, generals and bureaucrats who conspired to build an apartment complex for themselves in the name of war widows – I’ve been working for over two decades, the list is long.

• Every time a scandal breaks, there is outrage and public debates, but when the studio lights go off, the participants of the show sit down to sketch out the next conspiracy.

• Ironically, the true age of the middleman dawned in the wake of India’s economic reforms in the early 1990s, even if the system was perfected during the licence raj that preceded it.

• That old India had its own monsters, chief among which was the creation of a complex web of state controls in every walk of life. To buy a vehicle or to start a business, perhaps even to dream or breathe fresh air, you needed state permission.

• Along with most of India, my generation migrated from typewriters to touch screens, from villages to metropolises, from a socialist economy to a thriving market economy – all in a matter of two decades.

• Along with most of India, my generation migrated from typewriters to touch screens, from villages to metropolises, from a socialist economy to a thriving market economy – all in a matter of two decades. The one constant in our lives was the middleman, who got us what government owed us: birth certificates, driving licences, registration, appointment, name change, passports, etc.

• The tribal people are trapped, while the insurgents, agents of an insensitive state machinery and a new ruthless entrepreneurial class play out their games and ambitions.

• Politicians, banking cheats, professional scamsters, smugglers, pimps and all manner of business folk, from liquor barons to sweet sellers, have entered the lucrative business of education – a sector that is protected from slowdowns

• Rather than a theoretical, academic framework, this is a reporter’s inquiry into the state of the nation. Yet, it is not a gutter inspector’s report. It is a record of the reality of India as I know it.

• Like most public projects in India, if it did nothing at all for the village folk, it must have benefited someone else – contractors, engineers and possibly politicians.

• Those imposing buildings of New Delhi are out of the reach of ordinary folks. They are fortified with weapon-wielding sentries positioned behind sandbags and manned by poker-faced receptionists.

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

• Bribes are the booster shot that get India’s creaky government machinery moving.

• Bribes are the booster shot that get India’s creaky government machinery moving. You just need to have the right amount and know the right middleman to pull the strings for you.

• Anwer pointed at the stadium and asked me: ‘What is wrong if a poor man feels like bombing that stadium?’ I had no response; it was one of those rhetorical questions activists pose. How, Anwer asked, could India waste electricity playing matches in the night when thousands of villages like Hridaychak do not yet have electricity?

• Anwer’s frequent trips to the government offices in New Delhi and Patna are a tutorial on the modern Indian state. From the fears of a minority community to corruption, he is now an informal reference manual on India and its governance structures.

• ‘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.’

• Although the system of intermediaries has not been adequately studied, one can confidently assume that the business of being a middleman between the public and governments is the most flourishing industry in India.

• A significant part of India’s GDP and much of its black economy is made up of the fees generated by these facilitators for getting people what is, mostly, rightfully theirs – or for getting businessmen deals that may not have gone to them otherwise.

• Over 56 per cent of the rural Indian population does not have access to electricity.

• However, on the records of the Union government, which now has an app to track villages without electricity, 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• The only one to blame for the plight of the children of Hridaychak is the government; not lack of money, not lack of enthusiasm among the children, but a complete lack of willpower and compassion on the part of the government.

• 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

• As I left, I asked one of the children, ‘What do you want to be?’ The boy, in a torn sweater and inadequate winter clothes, stared at me and then looked at his friends. They all began to laugh.

• 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. They said even women wanted to join the protest. ‘This was an act of desperation,’ one of the protestors told local media. Such protests are almost routine in India’s rural areas, but most of them go unreported in the national news, unless there is a shock value that would make it ‘newsworthy’: women stripping naked or men defecating together.

• 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’.

• 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.

• 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 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.

• Every political leader and candidate I met said they were spending hundreds of thousands of rupees on the election. For what, I asked many of them. ‘Sir, you don’t ask such questions,’ one candidate replied.

• In Kashmir and the north-east of the country she had managed to suppress much of the demand for independence from India,

• The man who started out as a typist to Indira Gandhi has, over the years, been probably the only outsider present as fate and history played truant with the family’s fortunes, and in turn with the fledgling democracy.

• Unexplained riches, metamorphoses and mysterious fortunes are all part of the lives of our politicians and their trusted aides.

• In 2004, he surprised the business world by taking over a defunct private airline with a still-valid Air Operating Certificate and launched the highly successful low-cost airline, SpiceJet.

• If you want the Indian system to work for you, it is critical that you understand the power of the personal assistant, even in this touch-screen era.

• Mac decided to publish his memoirs of the Nehruvian era. In the preface to Reminiscences of the Nehru Age (Vikas Publishing House, Delhi, 1978), which is now out of print, Mathai writes: ‘Before I started writing this book, I suspended from my mind all personal loyalties of a conventional nature: only my obligation to history remained.’

• 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.

• The warm reception was symbolic of the unusual strengthening of India–Israel relations since both sides established formal diplomatic contact in 1992. Though India had recognized Israel in 1950, New Delhi was cautious. In principle, India was opposed to a religious state, primarily because of its own experience of Partition in 1947, and there were concerns regarding the sensitivities of its large Muslim population. Indians, including Mahatma Gandhi, sympathized with the Palestinian cause – the exception being Hindu zealots who staunchly supported the creation of a Jewish state.

• 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.

• After initial efforts at giving me a formal explanation, he finally admitted how complex defence deals were and how pervasive was corruption. ‘The only thing you can do here is to ensure you are clean and the file is clean.

• In modern India, national interests are served by men and women who operate below the radar, ensuring that multi-billion-dollar deals in various sectors are not derailed, and that the Indian economy continues to spend and expand.

• 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.

• 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.

• At the highest echelons of Indian decision making, it is hard to figure out who is a mere middleman and who is a mere industrialist.

• Since Independence, India has been heavily import-dependent for defence equipment, and in the initial decades, up until it collapsed in the early 1990s, most of the purchases were from the Soviet Union. In the next decade, India did not make many purchases. Then the Kargil conflict with Pakistan in 1999 churned things up. India went back to the global arms bazaar with such vengeance that, by 2012, it had become the world’s largest importer of arms.

• The Indian government’s Defence Research and Development Organization (DRDO) has been a massive failure, despite the eulogies that the political and bureaucratic class regularly pay it. It has not been able to successfully master a single major military platform, except missiles.

• ‘The golden rule (to protect one’s honour) is never question a written comment about the integrity of a decision.’

• Once they entered the big league, the Choudhrie brothers were quick to create a web of contacts across the political, bureaucratic and military hierarchies

• Choudhrie had a quiet and peaceful run until the summer of 2001, when ‘Operation West End’ broke. The web news portal Tehelka posted secret recordings of military officers, civil servants and politicians to show that Choudhrie was involved in fixing major defence deals.

• Ironically, the Opposition – led by the BJP at this time – was in the middle of an aggressive campaign against the ruling coalition for widespread corruption, but remained unusually silent on this case.

• No surprises there. In the 1980s, the HDW allegations, along with the Bofors scandal, kicked up India’s first true national outrage against corruption.

• ‘In 2011 alone, more than £7 billion of offshore money flooded into potentially tax-exempt purchases of UK houses, flats and office blocks. Most buyers snapped up property in central London, helping to explain why prices there have defied the recession

• Mauritius is a little island nation of over a million people and just one-hundredth the size of the Indian economy, but it has been the biggest source of foreign direct investment to India for years. This bizarre trend has flourished thanks to Mauritius’s own secretive financial regime and a bilateral tax agreement, the Double Taxation Avoidance Agreement, which allows all investments from Mauritius to enter tax-free into India.

• Every time a senior government official’s appointment is announced, such as that of chairman of a government-run enterprise or a nationalized bank, there are stories of how much it was worth, and who paid whom on whose behalf.

• In 2012, Vigilance Commissioner R. Sri Kumar cited an internal study to say that the CBI’s conviction rate in corruption cases was a shocking 3.96 per cent.

• The agency routinely closes cases prematurely for ‘lack of evidence’. The few high-profile corruption scandals that the CBI investigated more thoroughly have mostly ended in a humiliating defeat in court.

• The government admitted that its own Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP) found that the foreign direct investment from Mauritius between April 2000 and March 2011 was 41.8 per cent of the entire amount received by India.

• Even the government does not know how much of this black money comes from criminal proceeds and what percentage is ‘just’ tax avoidance.

• Ironically, much of the information we have on how the Indian system actually works comes from the result of investigations abroad – the result of foreign firms trying to win contracts in India coming to the attention of authorities back home.

• According to a senior ED official associated with the SIT, if the Adani case reaches its logical conclusion, the group will have to pay a fine of around Rs 15,000 crore.

• The Adani group vehemently denies any wrongdoing. Modi, after his rhetoric-filled ride to power, has been silent.

• In March 2011, a Delhi trial court discharged Quattrocchi in the Bofors case. The magistrate noted that the CBI had failed to provide any legally sustainable evidence despite twenty-one years of investigation. 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.

• Colonel Kushal Pal Singh, a former army officer and chairman of DLF, is the face of India’s construction boom. He told senior journalist Shekhar Gupta in a television interview in November 2011: ‘In my terminology, what I call bribing is in two parts: one, where you give money to somebody to facilitate quicker disposal. Second, you give money if somebody asks you to do a wrong job.

• The process was simple: DLF advanced Vadra the money to buy cheap agricultural land, which he converted to land for commercial use using political influence and sold back to DLF for a huge profit.

• Hindu members of Dawood’s gang who had split from the Muslim don in the wake of the serial blasts.

• It is no coincidence that India’s most successful businessmen find themselves not just on the list of the world’s richest people, but also at the cross hairs of Central and state regulators, auditors and investigators.

• Many of the richest men and women today made their fortunes after liberalization. The storied rise of Dhirubhai Ambani from gas station attendant to billionaire owner of the Reliance group is held up as proof that the system works for everyone.

• Grandhi Mallikarjuna Rao started the GMR group in 1978 and tried his hand at twenty-eight different businesses, reaping the rewards once the economy began opening up in 1991. Today, Rao’s GMR group is a leading player in the construction of roads, power projects and airports.

• During his time in office, Rajiv was determined to end state monopolies and support the private sector. He reduced tariffs and tackled overall bureaucratic controls, and famously unleashed a revolution in the telecom sector, which was symbolized by the yellow public call office (PCO) booths mushrooming by the thousands across the country. That aside, Gandhi pushed many measures in the face of opposition from the old guard of his party: among them, the Panchayati Raj system to devolve power to the lowest level of Indian society, incentives to private sector to make them profitable, and subsidies to increase private industrial production. Though not a communist regime, India was firmly in the Soviet camp, following many of its economic policies, dependent on Moscow for its military modernization and finding grand capitalist conspiracies too. However, the young prime minister struck a different tone, kick-starting processes that would eventually lead to the economic liberalization programme that is still under way. He took particular interest in the aviation sector, as he himself had been a commercial pilot with the state-owned Air-India.

• In 1989, under a new Open Sky policy, the government began issuing air taxi licences for capacity building of the Indian aviation sector. Until then, the Indian skies had been monopolized by Air-India for international routes and Indian Airlines for domestic ones.

• In contrast to the optimism running through the East West office, and India’s airline sector generally, the global aviation industry was in turmoil in 1991 because of the Gulf War and a hike in oil prices.

• Anyone who understands the system realizes that it wasn’t just enough to know a powerful Gandhi, or a few senior political figures; you needed to reach every level of governance, from the attendant outside a senior functionary’s office to the highest office.

• India’s socialist economy has not been replaced by laissez-faire in these decades. The government did not really withdraw from the marketplace or regulations.

• Meanwhile, those indicted in the riots and the demolition of the mosque at Ayodhya – which was the trigger behind the 1993 revenge blasts – are yet to be punished. In fact, many of the accused continue to occupy powerful positions in Indian public life.

• Chhota Rajan became the Hindu don and found secret admirers and supporters in the Indian security establishment. The complex, hatred-filled history of India–Pakistan had a new edge to it.

• Bombay Police’s most celebrated ‘encounter’ officer, Inspector Pradeep Sharma,

• The two were visibly shaken when they emerged from the session. The meeting was over in no time and the two men never returned to give testimony in court.

• The commissioner listened attentively and politely. However, the Mumbai Police did not look into the R&AW inputs and the case was never reopened. Was it incompetence or manipulation? There is no knowing.

• The Wahid brothers, though, were unabashed and naive in their allegiance to the Congress. They had built no bridges with the Hindu right wing at all. This was not because their Muslim identity would have been a hindrance: at the highest levels, there is no religion, no caste.

• It was the Wahids’ own fault that they did not see the tidal wave of right-wing politics rising across India. And they paid for their political naivety.

• Though the evidence was untenable, allegations of links to Dawood is an effective ploy to strengthen and sensationalize any case, and also to cover up the agencies’ weak investigation skills.

• Speculation was that Doval was planning to target Dawood and his gang if they attended the Dubai reception. But Dawood turned the tables on him and one of India’s most celebrated spymasters was caught on a Delhi road with a criminal.

• He is one of India’s leading sponsors of sports and employs over a million people who greet each other with ‘Sahara Pranam’.

• For a meagre Rs 100 as annual rental and a one time payment of Rs 6.19 crore, the operator had been allowed to use land with earning potential of Rs  1,63,557 crore over the concession period of fifty-eight years.

• When Patel took over as civil aviation minister, Indian Airlines was the market leader with a 42 per cent market share. Now it is struggling for survival. Between 2004 and 2014, Air-India also withdrew from several lucrative international sectors, handing them over to private players.

• In every gathering of India’s powers that be, you could point at someone randomly and there would be a similar story to tell.

• If businessmen do not themselves make time for the business of politics, their proxies and friends are active, openly lobbying for their narrow business interests in parliament.

• During the day, Singhvi would appear in court for those companies and private interests that were suspected of defrauding the public exchequer, and by evening he would be on national television channels defending his government’s decisions.

• Thakur’s statement simplifies the political realities that shape power and influence in modern India. When it comes to sharing the pie or claiming a piece of it, there are no political divisions

• In November that year, during a Himachal Pradesh vs Jammu & Kashmir game in the domestic first-class tournament, the Ranji Trophy, Thakur made a dramatic entry as captain of his team. It was historic, ridiculous and a story for our times. It was probably the first – and last – time that the president of a state cricket association got himself elected as the captain without undergoing selection trials or playing any significant cricket. With that otherwise insignificant appearance, Thakur became qualified to become a member of the national junior selection committee, satisfying the criterion that only first-class cricketers could be a part of national selection panels. Since then, he has been steadily climbing the ladder of power. Today, he is probably the most powerful sports administrator in India.

• While it seems clear that they manipulate politics for personal benefits, it is hard to tell if the scions are career politicians, or businessmen who became politicians. Those lines have become blurred. It is also a fact that politics is increasingly a profession, rather than a vocation, for many public figures in India.

• In December 2014, the Financial Times of London reported that Prasad had been on the payroll, as a lawyer on a retainership, of Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance group for several years. He is responsible for the telecom sector, where the Reliance group is investing several crores of rupees to roll out a 4G broadband network around the country. According to documents I accessed during the research for this book, even Prasad’s lawyer son is a consultant with Reliance.

• Mallya slipped out of India on a diplomatic passport, which was issued to him as a member of parliament. Such are the privileges of being in Indian politics.

• ‘They have been expanding every year. Only 20 feet away, another power plant has just been completed and will start operations soon,’ Patel said. ‘Growth, it seems, is just for them.’

• ‘What did Naveen Jindal say,’ I asked. ‘I would rather not say,’ he said, smiling.

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

• From up there, Korba looked as if it hung from a mesh of wires. High-tension lines from power plants criss-crossed the region.

• Another afternoon in early 2015, I was in Gevra, one of those Indian villages where development is marked by a huge opencast mine and not by its people.

• A large amount of India’s mineral deposits lies in a stretch across the ecologically sensitive and biodiversity-rich central region of the country. Two broad kinds of violence and protests are playing out here. On the one hand the residents and activists of these areas are protesting against the reckless industries that are making their fortunes at the cost of public health and environmental damage and on the other is the violence between armed left-wing extremists and government forces.

• Governments and political establishments have termed the civilian protests as anti-national efforts by foreign-funded non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the armed rebellion as terrorism.

• Air pollution, scientists say, is the fourth-highest risk factor for death globally, after high blood pressure, poor diet and cigarettes.

• 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.

• That the Supreme Court had twice indicted Modi’s Gujarat government – once as modern Neros in the context of the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat, and a second time for ‘non-application of mind’ when ruling on the 2002 Akshardham terrorist attack – did not matter to India’s electorate