From Gajni to Gujarat: India’s Long Tradition of Helping Its Looters

 

From Gajni to Gujarat: India’s Long Tradition of Helping Its Looters

India has been looted many times over the centuries, and let’s be honest, it wasn’t just the outsiders who pulled it off. Every robbery, from temples to treasuries, has been made faster, smoother, and more efficient thanks to Indians themselves opening the back door.

Take Muhammad Gajni. He robbed the Somnath Temple with the help of insiders. That part of history doesn’t make it into the sanitized versions taught in schools, because it’s easier to blame the foreign invader than to admit the locals held the ladder. Fast forward a few centuries, and you find local kings doing the same, happily collaborating with outsiders to fight their rivals, only to discover (surprise, surprise) that the outsider never leaves once he wins.

Then came the British. Did they conquer India alone? Hardly. They had plenty of local partners, middlemen, and collaborators who helped them consolidate power. India’s tradition of aiding the looter was alive and well.

From 1942 onward, the RSS worked overtime to ensure that the British never left and that India never truly gained freedom from colonial rule. Collaboration was their specialty, and that mentality has never left them. After independence, these very forces continued their partnerships this time with Western powers to undermine successive Indian governments for 67 years, right up until Modi arrived to finally take the driver’s seat. Some traditions, it seems, die very hard.

And now, enter the modern-day looters. This time, not from Kabul or London, but from Gujarat. A handful of business thugs who spotted a man with less than a fourth-grade education, packaged him as a religious savior, and launched him to power. Religion, of course, being the oldest marketing gimmick in Indian politics, was deployed to divide the nation and keep the masses distracted. Once power was secured, the real game began: loot, loot, and more loot.

Consider Assam, where the Modi government just handed over practically an entire district to Adani for peanuts. It’s the same old story: the nation is robbed in broad daylight while the public is kept busy hating the Nehru-Gandhi family.

But let’s revisit the part of history you won’t hear on prime-time shouting matches. In 1957, Nehru wanted to step down as Prime Minister. He had given his all to the nation, but after Gandhi’s assassination, Patel’s death, and Subhash Bose’s disappearance, there was no other leader with nationwide acceptance. The party convinced Nehru to stay, because, unlike the vultures circling for opportunity, he wasn’t interested in looting the country.

Uma Bharti and her ilk sneer that Nehru was “influenced by Western politics.” True, but that’s not the insult she thinks it is. Before America, no modern nation had dared to hand power to the people in governance. Nehru, along with Gandhi, ensured that India went even further, handing the monumental task of drafting the Constitution to Dr. Ambedkar, a Dalit intellectual. The result? A constitution more liberal than America’s, giving every Indian above 18 the right to vote from day one, something even the West had failed to do.

And yet, while the Constitution was being written, the RSS and other religious gatekeepers were already working overtime to keep India divided, undereducated, and distracted. They thrived on spreading hate against the government, magnifying every shortfall while refusing to credit the very real achievements from industrialization to education that transformed India from a colony of snake charmers into a modern state.

Fast forward 67 years after independence, and Gujarat delivered its grand plan: billions invested in grooming Narendra Modi, polished into a “savior,” and sold to the masses through a toxic cocktail of religion and propaganda. The result? A nation that once produced world leaders for Google, Microsoft, and countless high-tech industries ended up electing a man who thinks gas can be extracted from sewage and that clouds provide stealth cover for airstrikes.

The irony would be hilarious if it weren’t so tragic. Dr. Manmohan Singh, a world-respected economist, could stand in global forums and command respect with silence. And yet, the same India that gave him two terms turned around and replaced him with a “visionary” who believes rain clouds can outwit radar. The media, of course, worked overtime to make Singh look like a mute puppet (“Pappu”) while inflating Modi into a larger-than-life genius (“Gappu”) who now claims he’s not even biological. Really you can’t make this up.

These old tricks lies dressed up as religion, falsehoods peddled with passion, propaganda disguised as patriotism are hardly new. They worked in the dark ages when bickering kings invited invaders to plunder the land. What’s truly embarrassing is that they still work today, in a country that loves to call itself the world’s IT powerhouse.

From Somnath to Assam, from Gajni to Adani, India has perfected the tragic art of helping its own looters. The packaging has changed WhatsApp forwards instead of royal whispers, TV anchors instead of court jesters but the outcome hasn’t. The loot rolls on, and the applause for the looters hasn’t stopped.

So emboldened have today’s looters become that they don’t just steal resources anymore they’ve figured out how to steal elections and keep the throne warm. With government agencies captured, the media neutered, and even the judiciary bent by money and muscle power, this regime has clung to power for 11 years. And yet, despite the mountain of evidence of voter fraud, it still assumes the nation will continue to cheer them on. Maybe, but something suggests the tide is beginning to turn.

And if it doesn’t? Then let’s admit the obvious: aiding the looter isn’t India’s curse, it’s India’s craft. From welcoming Gajni with open gates to handing Adani whole districts for pocket change, from bending to the British Raj to bending for WhatsApp forwards, we’ve turned betrayal into a national tradition. The only real innovation is how slick the tools have become, deepfakes instead of daggers, hashtags instead of horses, election fraud instead of foreign armies.

And yet, somehow, the applause never stops. We’ve gone from snake charmers to IT charmers, but the trick is the same: hypnotize the masses while the loot is carted away.

So maybe this isn’t history repeating itself after all. Maybe this is India’s greatest contribution to political science: proving, century after century, that a nation doesn’t need outsiders to be looted. It can do the job perfectly well on its own.