Making India Work by William Nanda Bissell

Author:William Nanda Bissell [Bissell, William Nanda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9788184753936
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2012-01-12T00:00:00+00:00

Type 4: Gunpoint Corruption

This form of corruption affects underprivileged citizens of India from whom—by threat of physical violence, arbitrary imprisonment and loss of livelihood—the state extracts money. Twenty years ago, as a student, I was returning to Delhi with two friends from a trip to the hills in the northern state of Himachal Pradesh. We arrived, scruffy and bedraggled at the town of Pathankot (located in the neighbouring state of Punjab) and had boarded the train to Delhi, when my friend suddenly realized that her camera was missing. There was a group of policemen standing around observing the scene. (It later turned out that they had masterminded the theft.) I went to them and tried to get them to register my complaint. The policemen took one look at us and immediately started shouting, threatening to beat us, saying that we might ‘disappear’ if we kept complaining. This was during the period of terrorism in Punjab. Police-engineered disappearances were frequent occurrences. Fearful, we backed down and managed to convince them not to take us in. The mother of one of my friends was a powerful judge. Once in Delhi, she had the officer who threatened us and his constables summoned. I was there, in the garden of the family’s government house, when the officer and his constables arrived. The officer started physically trembling as he entered. On his way out he saw me in the garden and kept repeating: ‘Why did you not tell me you were so well connected? Why were you travelling second class?… If only I’d known …’ The response of a family friend, a senior bureaucrat, was, ‘Now you know what the poor have to endure.’

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