Thieves in tuxedos

A 7,000-crore scam. That's what our best financial journalists and market analysts were celebrating all these years as the story of Incredible India Inc. That's the price of the lie that everybody was sold. And in the aftermath of Satyam's crash, there is surprisingly little self-recrimination in our financial newspapers. Of course Ramalinga Raju is guilty of a grand theft, but why were our reporters participants in the crime, why did they parrot out its incredible figures all these years, misleading small investors? The truth is that when a thief arrives in a tuxedo, they call him a visionary.

Some six or seven years ago, when I first got to know Clifton, who works on civil rights, he talked about the IT corridor in Bangalore, how it was dispossessing small farmers of their land holdings, and how the 'IT revolution' was actually hiding an elaborate land scam. I alerted my friends in the newspapers then, but nothing came of it. Most reporters would look at Clifton's story as nothing more than the rhetoric of 'leftist losers', people who were fundamentally opposed to 'growth' and 'development', and would be left in the wake of Shining India's inexorable march towards Capitalist paradise.

Most of India's middle class, and indeed the media, were left dizzy by the million- and billion dollar figures routinely thrown about by its big corporates. They didn't stop to examine if this made sense; if this was sustainable, and at whose expense. I have next to no knowledge of market economics, but even I did better -- in my suspicion -- than the best financial wizards of this country. Now it turns out that -- in line with Clifton's analysis -- Satyam's chief business was land acquisition. A ToI feature even fleetingly mentioned a naxalite who said that the land Satyam owned could've solved the Telengana problem. Of course, at the time, nobody in the media would've given a fuck to what a naxalite said.

... and just as Israel will get away with its mass murder in Gaza, Ramalinga Raju will get away with his 7,000-crore theft. The principle is not to be small fry: if you want to kill, kill a few thousand or a million. It's criminal to rob or kill to save your stomach. If you want to steal, steal not a fiver or a tenner, but a crore or a thousand crore. That makes you untouchable. And that's why the biggest scamsters and the biggest criminals of this country have gone unpunished: Bal Thackeray, Narendra Modi, Harshad Mehta, Jagdish Tytler, Dawood Ibrahim.... all cut from the same cloth, more or less.

And from the carnage in Gaza and Rwanda and elsewhere it is apparent that 'poetic justice' is just another pretty term.