Ultimately, corruption wins in India. There is no real incentive for any power group—politicians or businessmen—to mitigate inequality or the corruption that rides on inequality. We have not arrived at such a situation by design. There has been no conniving plan that India’s prosperity would be at the expense of exploiting our poorest, and keeping them poor. The development of our corrupt system has been organic, growing like a tree that expands and spreads its branches in the air, and digs its roots deep into the ground.
After eight gruelling months, Chirag set up his small business in central Delhi. When he had set out from New Zealand, he had not accounted for bribes in his budget estimates, and on the eve of his company’s launch, that was the budget he had maintained. But there seemed to be one final threshold he needed to cross. On the day of the launch, he was faced with a group of unexpected visitors—transvestites in colourful saris, wearing fake gold jewellery, painted lips and thick black hair switches. They demanded money in exchange for blessings. Nowhere else in the world had Chirag heard of such a unique business model.
‘Come on, young man, give us some badhai,’ one of the transvestites said, while the other three rested their backs on the reception desk and clapped. ‘Fifty thousand rupees for us all will be good.’
‘Oh, but I have no money. The owner is away,’ said Chirag.
‘Tell the owner to come give us money!’ another transvestite insisted.
‘He is a terrible man, the owner. He does not even pay me,’ Chirag replied.
‘Listen boy, don’t mess with us! The consequences will not be pretty! You go give the owner this card,’ the transvestite threatened Chirag, thrusting a visiting card into his hands. The visiting card was in Hindi, and read:
Koyal Rawat
98716416xx
Guru Koyal and Party
Note: We warn you that in case any transvestite other than us is given badhai, you will have to pay us ten times the amount.
The ultimate accomplishment in India is not just the accumulation of wealth, but attaining that wealth honestly. The latter is a tall task, precisely because we are all part of the nexus of nepotism, corruption and extortion. The wealthy do not want to destroy this nexus, and the marginalized, such as Guru Koyal and Party, cannot afford to. The politicians pay lip service to an anti-corruption agenda, but that too, in reality, caters mostly to their own pursuit of power. The groups currently dominant in India have no incentive to mitigate India’s gaping income inequality. The rich get richer only when the poor get poorer. We are stuck in a system that is unyieldingly corrupt and most treacherous to the poorest.References
Agrawal, Nisha. 2017. Inequality in India: What’s the real story? World Economic Forum, 2 July.
Ashforth, Blake E., and Vikas Anand. 2003. The normalization of corruption in organizations. Research in Organizational Behaviour, pp. 1–52.
Bourdieu, Pierre, and Loïc J.D. Wacquant. 1992. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
Chatterji, Miniya. 2012. The globalization of politics: From Egypt to India. Social Movement Studies, pp. 96–102.
Daily Mail. 2016. As population soars, India battles to tame malnutrition. 2016. 7 January.
De Graaf, Gjalt. 2007. Causes of corruption: Towards a contextual theory of corruption. Public Administration Quarterly, p. 71.
DiRienzo, Cassandra E. et al. 2007. Corruption and the role of information. Journal of International Business Studies, pp. 320–332.
Financial Express. 2016. Pregnant woman delivers baby standing outside ATM machine kiosk. December 4.
Giri, Saroj. 2011. Where is India’s Tahrir Square? Open Democracy, 17 February.
Government of India. 2014. The Gazette of India. http://ccis.nic.in/WriteReadData/CircularPortal/D2/D02ser/407_06_2013-AVD-IV-09012014.pdf.
Gupta, Dipankar. 2000. Mistaken modernity: India between worlds (Noida: HarperCollins India).
Hindustan Times. 2017. CVC report on dip in corruption shows people’s level of satisfaction with AAP: Sisodia. 16 April.
Manish, Sai. 2016. 86 per cent of currency by value in India are of Rs 500 & Rs 1,000 denominations. Business Standard, 8 November.
News World India. 2016. The demonetisation, a crippled economy and the mayhem! 14 December.
Pring, C. 2017. Global corruption barometer 2016. Global Corruption Report 2017.
Times of India. 2007. Majority of Indians wish to be reborn in motherland: Survey. 14 August.
Times of India. 2017. India’s rising income inequality: Richest 1 per cent own 58 per cent of total wealth. 16 January.
World Population Review. 2017. Delhi Population. http://worldpopulationreview.com/world-cities/delhi-population.
Worstall, Tim. 2016. India’s demonetisation kills 100 people apparently—this is not an important number. Forbes, 8 December.
13Decibels
The avant-garde building sits on the banks of a lake on the posh outskirts of Geneva, surrounded by the Swiss Alps. A curved linearity connects its various sections, with ascetic minimalism in glass and stone, green proselytism and postmodern interiors. Probably the most unlikely not-for-profit one could come across, the character of the World Economic Forum headquarters building is an apt reflection of the abstraction in the world today. On the other hand, the organization’s humble mission statement—‘improving the state of the world’—is hardly representative of the power it wields on the most influential individuals across politics, business, arts and the sciences.
Essentially, this is what the World Economic Forum does: it chooses the most powerful people in the world for attending various confidential meetings all around the year. These individuals—partly because they consider it a status symbol to be among the ‘chosen ones’—pay hefty sums of money as registration fees to come together and talk to each other about solving crucial world issues. It is like an elite restaurant with restricted entry
