Scams Happen In Tandem

Celebrity deaths in the US happen in threes. What about scams in India?

While going through old newspapers last week, the exposé of the high-profile land scams had looked concerted to me. First Adarsh, then Lavasa, and then, the man himself, BS Yeddyurappa.

I had sanely brushed those ideas off.

But when yesterday's The Hindu claimed to have unearthed another spectrum scam- the S band scam- I thought to myself this has the potential to become one of those modern myths.

When you make a time line of major Indian scams in recent past and try to club the similar ones, you get: the land scams, the spectrum scams, the sports scams- CWG and IPL, the scams of educational regulatory bodies- AICTE and MCI. LIC Housing and UTI.

Be careful, however, to remove the stand-alone scams- that's how modern myths are built.

If one goes about exploring this 'phenomenon' the Paul Krugman way, who claimed in today's New York Times that Global Warming has caused the Egyptian Revolution, it may be logical to theorize this into a demand-supply situation. A scam comes out in open, the nation is shaken, and one of the media houses runs away with the credit for that. Other media houses ask their journalists to get on with it. And voila. New scams. Which are, of course, similar in nature.

When the Tehelka came into being it exposed about half a dozen major and minor scams in almost no time. And then, suddenly every one was doing a sting operation. Tehelka, soon, became a major force, no more a nimble start-up. Then Tarun Tejpal went about writing books and winning awards while scamsters went about their jobs.

The thing is when you look for a scam in a land of a billion you are going to find one.