A Feast of Vultures: The Hidden Business of Democracy in India

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Every day, millions of people-the rich, the poor and the many foreign visitors-are hunting for ways to get their business done in modern India. If they search in the right places and offer the appropriate price, there is always a facilitator who can get the job done. This book is a sneak preview of those searches, the middlemen who do those jobs, and the many opportunities that the fast- growing economy offers.

Josy Joseph draws upon two decades as an investigative journalist to expose a problem so pervasive that we do not have the words to speak of it. The story is big: that of treacherous business rivalries, of how some industrial houses practically own the country, of the shadowy men who run the nation's politics. The story is small: a village needs a road and a hospital, a graveyard needs a wall, people need toilets.

A Feast of Vultures is an unprecedented, multiple- level inquiry into modern India, and the picture it reveals is both explosive and frightening. Within these covers is unimpeachable evidence against some of the country's biggest business houses and political figures, and the reopening of major scandals that have shaped its political narratives. Through hard-nosed investigation and the meticulous gathering of documentary evidence, Joseph clinically examines and irrefutably documents the non-reportable.

It is a troubling narrative, but also a call to action and a cry for change. A tour de force through the wildly beating heart of post-socialist India, the book is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding the large, unwieldy truth about this nation.

JOSY JOSEPH is a writer-journalist based in New Delhi and founder of Confluence Media, a platform-agnostic investigative journalism outfit.

He has won several awards for his journalism, including the Prem Bhatia Trust's 'India's best political reporter' in 2010 and the Journalist of the Year' Ramnath Goenka award in 2013. Josy has exposed some of India's biggest scandals-among them, the Mumbai Adarsh Housing scam and the 2010 Commonwealth Games scam-and his stories have played a significant role in impacting the country's social and political narrative.

He was the National Security Editor of The Hindu until August 2018, when he left to start Confluence Media.

Josy is also the author of The Silent Coup: A History of India's Deep State (2021). He lives in New Delhi with his journalist-entrepreneur wife Priya Solomon and his daughter Supriya.

The multi-lane highway, the metro that emerged from the bowels of The earth, posh residential colonics and glittering shopping malls, all of these receded in my rear-view mirror. The unauthorized village began where the road ended. I was on the northern fringes of Delhi.

A narrow pathway linked this large spread of single-room shanties to the outer world. It had rained recently, and little children in rags splashed in the puddles. Several men stood around aimlessly by small shops. I began what was to be a futile search.

Delhi was to play host to the Commonwealth Games (CWG) of 2010. According to company filings, several investors of a sports marketing company that was scooping up lucrative contracts in connection with the CWG were residents of this village of Karalla. I was looking for those lucky men.

The XIX CWG, with over 6,000 athletes from seventy-one countries competing in twenty-one disciplines and 272 events, was the biggest sporting meet India had ever hosted. The Central government, led by Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh, wanted to make it a grand coming-of-age show, with a total spend of almost Rs 50,000 crore by various estimates.

Multi-lane elevated roads were built over congested parts of Delhi, new metro lines snaked in fresh directions under and over the city, dedicated apartments for athletes rose up on the Yamuna river bed, shabby stadiums received impressive facelifts, and as the games inched closer, the ugly parts were covered with view blockers and thousands of beggars were carted away to government-run hostels outside the city. A sanitized India welcomed foreign visitors.

Jubilee Sports Technology Private Limited, many of whose promoters claimed to live in Karalla, played a critical role in getting the city ready for the games. I began to get curious about the company when I found out that it was floated by a man arrested in the past by government investigators for accepting a bribe on behalf of his late father, then a senior government official. After hours of searching, with active assistance from local residents, I still couldn't find the men behind Jubilee Sports, and returned to file a news story about the missing men.

This was, of course, far from exceptional. Over the years, almost every major financial transaction in India has been made by fictitious shareholders and proxy directors through shady deals, cash movements. to tax havens and, often enough, outright criminal conspiracy. In fact, this modus operandi is not just limited to the financial world.

If you are able to summon the forensic skills necessary to detect the real powers behind fictitious shareholders and proxy voters, it will get you an intimate, revolting view of India's underbelly, one that will swallow the sanitized, democratic India of impressive achievements and global ambitions.

This book grew out of my anguish at the staggering size and scale of that underbelly, the dilapidated state of Indian institutions and the deep immorality at the heart of our democracy. Collectively, these factors drive the majority of India's citizens to a permanent state of helplessness, and many of them to suicide. The monotony of reading about those deaths and the insensitivity of India's elite set me out on the path to researching this book sometime in 2007.

Book's Contents and Sample Pages