Katherine Boo points out in her new book Behind the Beautiful Forevers, a chronicle of lives in a Mumbai slum, “in the West, and among some in the Indian elite, this word, corruption, had purely negative connotations; it was seen as blocking India’s modern, global ambitions.” But few of these critics of corruption acknowledge that, as Boo writes, “among powerful Indians, the distribution of opportunity was typically an insider trade.” This was demonstrated most recently by a series of taped phone conversations, made public in late 2010 by the news magazine Outlook, between a corporate lobbyist and some of India’s most famous businessmen, journalists, and politicians (some of them can be found among Hazare’s more well-off supporters), which revealed how powerful businessmen not only influenced economic policy-making, ensuring clear playing fields for themselves, but also managed to install their own candidates in senior ministerial positions, such as the telecom minister accused of underselling the mobile phone spectrum to his preferred bidders. - Pankaj Mishra
— Indians Against Democracy by Pankaj Mishra | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books
Short URL for this post: http://tmblr.co/ZRvhbyFOBiNf
