How the Dice Rolls

“Merging capitalism with the state greases the apparatus of power by lucrative patronage networks that guarantee a piece of the pie for the politically pliant. Anyone willing to bolster the regime becomes a candidate for more generous rewards.”

Nothing could sum up better the transactional relationship between big capital and authoritarian rule than these words of William E. Scheuerman, Professor of Political Science at Indiana University in the ‘Boston Review’, under the catchy title Why Do Authoritarians Win?

He was commenting on Harvard professor John Keane’s new book The New Despotism. Keane‘s finding is these despotic regimes actually represent a modern species of state-sponsored capitalism, whose terrible inequalities and inequitiesare bridged by top-to-bottom patron-client connections, middle-class loyalty, staged elections, and a great deal of officially sanctioned talk of the people as the veritable source of political order.

But then, where India is concerned, the unquestioned and highly unquestionable narrative is that only Opposition leaders and dissenters are steeped in corruption — and they need to be jailed at periodic intervals or harassed by the agencies, through non-stop grilling from dawn to dusk, and far beyond. The agency officers take rounds to refresh themselves and ‘change duties’, but the ‘corrupt’ and cornered casualty has to go through it all and have his personal devices hacked or intruded into, legally or otherwise. The process is itself the punishment as statistics will bear out. Till March 31, 2023, the Enforcement Directorate (ED) has registered 5,906 cases – which is a fourfold increase since 2014 – and 95% of these were/are against Opposition leaders. Out of these, the ED has disposed of only 25 cases, a mere 0.42 of the total — but arrested, raided, questioned, for days together, and politically smeared every one in their net.

All political parties all over the world need cash and that not all of it is totally above board. Even Abraham Lincoln’s or Nehru’s era would have had such messy donations. In India, when this is moved around without clear accounting, it attracts the highly prickly PMLA, or the Prevention of Money Laundering Act. This Act was meant to control black money, but the latter has just grown exponentially, for reasons that we (and even a total outsider to politics, miles away from all this) can guess.

Common sense dictates that the not-properly-accounted-for receipt and fluid movement of cash must be across the political spectrum, but the law and the agencies are turned and laser-beamed at only those who oppose the regime. When one waits at the parliament building’s gate for ‘home drop ferry’ every day during the sessions, one has to gape at the sheer opulence of........

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