The front page of every newspaper in New Delhi provides daily testimony to the fact that Indian power politics is about flattery, which is why loyalty has overlapped completely with obsequiousness. The sycophancy may be marked in Congress, but other parties are hardly immune. A new low was reached when two newly-appointed ministers in Jammu and Kashmir showed their gratitude by prostrating themselves at the feet of Congress Party President Sonia Gandhi. They did not ask her permission, clearly embarrassing her. At least the sycophancy was secular: One minister was a Hindu and the other a Muslim.
Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati routinely demands cringing obedience from those hapless enough to have taken a favor from her, and uses humiliation as a political tool. Stories from South India are worse.
Such political culture does not encourage honesty. The fraud at Satyam is not a mere economic offense. It is also a political offense. Satyam is a Hyderabad story. Crooks who steal shareholders blind cannot do so without political patronage. Bankers — some of whose hypocrisy is matched only by their pomposity — hand out huge amounts in the full knowledge that the money is going to be stolen by promoters they cozy up to. The kickbacks are substantial, because the first principle of dacoity is that there has to be equitable (if not equal) distribution of the spoils. The slicing order of the stolen cake is this: Company promoter takes the biggest chunk, politician gets the second bite, and banker nibbles at the third.
Andhra Pradesh is rife with thuggery. There is one business group which claims an 18 billion-rupee turnover in steel. It has only one small problem. It has no steel plant. A second company has got contracts for irrigation projects from the Andhra government worth 150 billion rupees, but has a working capital of only 550 million rupees. Do the math, and you know that there are ghost projects hovering all over the state. Another company in the same racket (co-owned by a ruling politician’s son) has 120 billion rupees worth of projects on its order books and a working capital limit of only 500 million rupees from a nationalized bank.
You might ask, legitimately, why newspapers do not expose this odious stink. The price of independence is high. When the chairman of the Eenadu group, Ramoji Rao, refused to be Andhra Chief Minister Rajashekhar Reddy’s lackey, the state government went after his businesses with vicious ferocity. Every instrument of coercion in the state government, the Union Finance Ministry, the Registrar of Companies, the Income Tax Department and even the Reserve Bank of India, was used against Ramoji Rao’s Margadarsi Financiers. When this did not break Rao, bulldozers were sent to demolish permanent structures in his Ramoji Film City on the excuse that they were built on land assigned to weaker sections. Quite clever, that: Not only does Rajashekhar Reddy bludgeon the media, but he tries and milks it for votes as well!
But there is some hope. Corruption is the most venal sin in the checklist of the voter. Politicians might think that they have hidden the evidence by muffling or strangling the media. But you can fool all the voters only some of the time. Word travels, if not through print and audiovisual, then through the air, borne by the tongue. There is some evidence that no politician can erase: When there is theft, something has to be stolen, and in the case of irrigation projects it is the fact that there is no water where there should have been water for the farmer. Equally, the message is going out that those chief ministers who are clean will get re-elected.
Our saving grace may be simply this: Greed for power will trump greed for money. Indian politics is full of characters without character.
