4500 Crore Rupees

How many zeroes are there in rupees 4500 crores? How many schools could be built by rupees 4500 crores? How many loans of poor farmers in Bundelkhand and Vidharbha could have been written off so that they did not have to kill themselves or alternatively sell their wives to their lenders in lieu off the debt incurred? How many hospitals could we have built? How many industries/dams/canals could have been built?

Uttar Pradesh government has recently charge sheeted four IAS officers, including one retired, for their alleged involvement in the multi-crore Noida land scam during the previous Mulayam Singh Yadav government. The officers include former chairman of the New Okhla Industrial and Development Authority (NOIDA) Rakesh Bahadur, former CEO Sanjeev Sharan, former deputy CEO K Ravindra Nayan and the then divisional commissioner Meerut Devdutt. The officers have been charged with selling expensive commercial land at throwaway prices to hoteliers resulting in loss of Rs 4500 crore to the state exchequer.


Recently I was reading about elections in Maharashtra, Harayana and Arunachal Pradesh. Incumbents were victorious in all the places. Another important feature was the fact that all the candidates had managed to increase their net worth by more than 1000% in the previous five years. Pritish Nandy quotes much higher and more accurate numbers in his blog.


If you now can correlate the two paragraphs, you would know how the assets of the people in power are increasing in each year. You would also correlate this with feudalism in Indian Democracy. Is this not the reason why the sons and daughters are preferred candidates in all parties? Loot of public funds has become a public policy and lucrative business for our rulers and the ruler-capitalist-bureaucrat nexus is snatching away our very valuable assets and turning it into personal property of the ruling elite.


The result of this is for all to see. We are creating a creamy layer, the top four five percent of the population, urban based with transnational affiliations, who are ready to line their pocket, scratch each other’s backs and push the marginalized into ghettos from which the marginalized would never be able to rise in revolt.


And if the marginalized does rise in revolt, the upper class elite would have the means to silence him by throwing at him, another set of disenfranchised citizenry, the so called Security Forces.


Paulo Freire (Pedagogy of the Oppressed) has referred to this as the conspiracy of silence. All the decision makers, whether from one set of ruling elite or another set (read feudal families – karan nadhi, sule pawar/deshmukh/takheray, badal/ amaridner singh, chautala/hooda, obdullahs/sayyeds, yadavs etc etc) will provide sound bites when in opposition but will not unravel the nexus. No one will unravel the nexus because they benefit from it too.


If India ever has to wipe away the tears that flow from its impoverished citizenry, then rules have to be made to allow the state to confiscate all these ill gotten gains. Rules also must be made that no matter what, the primacy of the law of the land will not be challenged. Because even if rules are made and in rarest of rare cases, follow up is done, as in Bofors, we have allowed the perpetrators of the crime to walk away on such flimsy arguments that just because a large period of time has elapsed, no good can come by following the law of the land.


Justice delayed is justice denied. But what would we call blatant misuse of executive official power to deny justice altogether, as has been done in case of Bofors.


And in such a scenario, should we not then support the call to arms by Maoists who speak for the disenfranchised peasantry and masses in whose names the laws are being made in the first place?