“We will vote, but we are losing faith in politics,†said a student at Jadavpur University in Calcutta. â€Young people are very pessimistic, and don't think voting will change anything.â€
“Corruption?†another student asked. â€We are disgusted, but not surprised.â€The New York Times, November 12, 1989.
“His business rivals never fully understood how Manoj Jayaswal got so rich so fast, except that he often seemed joined at the hip with powerful politicians. He hosted them at lavish parties, entertained them at his daughter's opulent Thai wedding and stood among them at India's presidential palace†Jim Yardley and Vikas Bajaj wrote in The New York Times, of the businessman who i s now embroiled in a $34 billion coal mining scandal dubbed Coalgate.
“Today in India, politicians are so powerful,†Santosh Hegde, a former Supreme Court justice who recently led a sweeping investigation of a different mining scandal in southern India told Mr. Yardley and Mr. Bajaj. “All together, they are looting the country.â€
Coalgate is the latest in a numbingly long line of scandals that seem to bloom, unchecked, as politicians and businessmen rub elbows in India, each estimated to cost the country's citizens more than the last as India's economy grows. The very first happened just ten years after independence, Samanth Subramanian wrote earlier this year, involving Life Insurance Corporation and a businessman who was arrested at Claridges Hotel in New Delhi. There was the 1969 collapse of the Kerala government, after a vote related to investigation into corruption in land distribution, the Bofors defense deal scandal in the 1980s and scores of others.
So many, Edward A. Gargan wrote in The New York Times in November of 1992, that “for the first time many Indians are openly questioning not only whether honest government is even possible, but also whether the country's very soul has been irredeemably warped.â€
Will India ever shake off corruption? Leave your comments below.
