From the New York Post: "Brutish $100M Newport Beach bank fraudster used armed thugs to seize hotels in ruthless campaign of terror, courts docs reveal." From the article:
Indian-born businessman Mahender Makhijani, 44, was pulled out of his tony Newport Beach mansion Wednesday morning by gun-toting federal agents who took him into custody for allegedly defrauding a local bank out of nearly $100 million in a complex real-estate scheme.
But bad as that was, it was not all:
Last month an arbitrator found the Makhijani — who’s alleged to have a taste for sex and drug parties —liable for a more than $1.3 billion in damages over his real estate dealings with Laguna Beach businessman Mohammad Honarkar.
Court documents in both cases allege that he ruthlessly used threats, intimidation and even violence to gain an upper hand on business rivals, including Honarkar.
In an article at the Unz Review entitled "Predation Wearing the Mask of Civilization," Jayant Bhandari explains how corruption is endemic to Indian culture. He writes, for instance, that:
Even in the most civilized nations, courts decide only the tiniest sliver of human reality. The vast majority of civilization—trust, restraint, honesty, the silent agreements that make daily life possible—exists below the threshold of formal law. Verbal promises and everyday decency were never meant for judges. They rest on an internalized moral order.
In India, that moral order does not exist.
He goes on to describe the pervasive corruption and necessity of paying bribes just to get officials to do their jobs. You would think that Indians would clamor for reform, but that is not the case:
Indians do not want the system abolished; they want access to it. Their ambition is to reach a position from which they can extract, or to marry their daughters into households enriched by extraction. How the money is obtained is irrelevant. Corrupt wealth commands respect—often more respect than the same wealth earned honestly. Money and power are the only yardsticks. You can be assured that love, a civilizational value, is conspicuous by its absence.
Bhandari gives some personal experiences from growing up in India and the addresses the underlying problem: the complete lack of a moral foundation.
When you talk about morality or truthfulness with Indians, they make fun of you and ask, “Are you becoming a saint?” Or they suggest that religion belongs in the temple, not in everyday life. You are judged as naïve, unaccustomed to real life. In their minds, goodness and honesty are not the duties of ordinary people; they belong to saints, while ordinary life is expected to be crooked. They do not understand sainthood as moral elevation; they understand it as withdrawal from real life. The phrase survives as a verbal reflex in a society where morality itself has no ordinary authority.
In such a society, everyday conversation does not rise toward moral reflection. It remains trapped in gossip, spectacle, magical politics, and the misfortunes of others.
In such a culture, competence is not the organizing ideal; power is. Education is pursued not for formation but for certificates that open the door to office, money, and status. Parents help children cheat because the certificate, not the discipline it is supposed to represent, is what matters. Once such men enter institutions, they do not acquire respect for the office or its responsibilities. The seat becomes a resource to exploit. Lacking inner authority, they compensate through cold arrogance, petty tyranny, and sadism; the higher they climb, the more vicious their insecurity becomes.
The same lesson begins in school. Authority is converted early into leverage: private tuition, gifts, favoritism, and exam manipulation. The student learns the real curriculum long before adulthood: authority is not to be respected, but navigated; rules are not to be internalized, but managed; power exists to extract.
The article offers a lot of insights to Indian society and mindset, so be sure to read the whole thing.