The business-crime nexus is no aberration. Men who make their first millions in protection rackets and drugs invest in bonafide businesses. Says Vinayak Vakatkar, retired assistant commissioner of police, Bombay: "Enough businessmen, having realised the kind of easy money in the underworld, have taken to it." Industrialist J.K. Jain's diary, seized by the CBI early this year, named many politicians—including two ex-prime ministers and many Union ministers—as having tasted hawala money.
The men who built America's industrial base—the railroad tycoons, the steel moguls, the financiers—routinely used intimidation and murder to achieve their ends. And wasn't Al Capone really a businessman who cashed in on the opportunities in bootlegging created by the Volstead Act which imposed prohibition? Capone was finally sent to prison not for murder but on a business-related charge—evasion of federal taxes.
Having criminal elements on the payroll to break up workers' agitations is common practice in the industrial belts all over. The CBI has indicted several Bhilai industrialists for the murder of trade unionist Shankar Guha Niyogi. Bombay itself provided a celebrated example when industrialist Sunit Khatau was shot dead on May 7 last year. The killing came as no surprise to insiders. Says Prabhat Sanzgiri, CPI(M) and CITU leader:"During the '80s textile strike, Khatau had used criminal gangs to break the strike. He has paid with his life."
Of course, the "system" is the favourite alibi for businessmen using criminals. "If construction laws were simpler," says a Bombay real estate developer, "builders wouldn't have gone to the underworld." So slums are burnt down to build swank office buildings, whose profits may end up financing Hindi films about slums being burnt down to build swank office buildings.
It's undeniable that law has helped breed crime. Illegal liquor supply to prohibition state Gujarat has always been big "business". Before Manmohan Singh changed things, computer marketers routinely used smugglers to bring in chips and motherboards from South-East Asia. And big truck financiers who don't hire criminals to lean on defaulters are rare.
Consider the film industry, the stockmarket, real estate and construction. Barring the top few firms, they have no access to a structured money market but their sizes total up to possibly hundreds of thousands of crores. Result: the supply of white money is far less than the demand, and the demand is less than the supply of black money. At that twilight conversion zone breeds the business-crime nexus, where gun-running money boosts the BSE index, protection moolah builds high-rise apartments, and drug profits translate into hit movies.
Veteran producer G.P. Sippy demurs: "Eighty per cent movies flop. Why should the underworld invest in an industry where money is not assured?" Because, Mr Sippy, even the mafia don wants to taste glamour. Some years ago, the Bombay police arrested the producer of Game at the movie's premiere on charges of murder and kidnapping. The theme of Game: crime doesn't pay.
