I believe Vijay Mallya escaped with government’s complicity. It could be complicity or incompetence; the probability of complicity is 99%.

In this case I would not single out Modi & Jaitley being complicit as an extra-ordinary act.

In my view such an act would have happened even in the earlier UPA government and would happen in the next government that comes as well.

It is from people like Mallya, Lalit Modi & so on, who are on the wrong side of law and have amassed wealth that scope for extracting bribes exist.

I expect a traffic cop in India to take a bribe to allow an offender to get away, similarly I expect a politician to allow an economic offender to escape by paying a bribe. This has been our tradition from CEO of Union Carbide to Quottarochi and maybe so many others.

Indian society has to change top down. Lok Pal should be present to oversee the conduct of PM & government, political parties should be under the ambit of the RTI, there should be state funding of elections. Now we have legalized corruption with master-strokes like electoral bonds scheme and PM CARES Fund.

I don’t think we will change in the next 20 years. Mallyas will keep escaping & farmers will keep committing suicides!

–BY COL M M NEHRU