Is India Still the ‘Golden Bird’? The New Plunder by Domestic and Foreign Capital

Since childhood, school textbooks have taught us the glorious history that in ancient times, India was the ‘Golden Bird’. Rivers of milk and curd flowed here, India accounted for one-third of total global trade, and merchants from across the world came to purchase Indian spices, cotton textiles, and precious gems.

Then historians tell us that first Mahmud of Ghazni and the Mughals clipped the wings of this golden bird, and later the British East India Company, over two hundred years, plundered an immense fortune of nearly $45 trillion (₹3,700 lakh crore) from India, ferried it to London, and left India on the brink of destitution.

We all know this history by heart.

Yet, in his book ‘Anokha Bharat’ (Unique India), author N. Singh fires a question that pierces the very conscience of every patriot: When the white British left in 1947, did the plunder of India’s ‘Golden Bird’ truly come to an end? Or did merely the faces of the plunderers change—with our own indigenous industrialists, corrupt politicians, and international corporate syndicates taking the place of the British?

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Neo-Liberalism and Crony Capitalism: The New Modern Face of Plunder

The policies implemented in the country after 1991 in the name of economic liberalisation (LPG) completely altered the character of the Indian economy. Growth took place, roads were built, technology arrived; yet along with this began such a ruthless corporate plunder of Indian resources that it left even the East India Company far behind:

1. The auction of water, forest, land, and mines for a pittance: The nation’s coal mines, iron ore, bauxite, natural gas, airports, ports, and power grids—everything was dropped straight into the laps of a chosen 4–5 large corporate houses. Adivasis (indigenous tribal people) were evicted from their ancestral lands at gunpoint.
2. Waiver of bank loans (NPAs) worth lakhs of crores: If an ordinary farmer fails to repay a tractor loan of ₹50,000, the bank orders a kurki (attachment and auction of property) on his home, throws him in jail, and humiliates him by publishing his photograph in the newspaper. But when mega-corporate billionaires swallow over ₹15 lakh crore of bank loans, governments write them off and quietly bury them in bad-debt accounts!
3. Double standards in taxation: The country’s 140 crore common citizens pay steep GST on everything from a needle to flour and lentils. In sharp contrast, corporate tax for massive corporations is slashed from 30% to 22%, and PLI subsidies worth billions are doled out to them.

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Colonial British Plunder versus Modern Corporate Plunder

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The Bitter Truth from the Book: N. Singh’s Economic Analysis

Author N. Singh writes in Chapter 2 of his book ‘Anokha Bharat’—‘India: The Golden Bird (The Capture by Capitalists, Opportunistic Domestic Companies, and Foreign Corporations)’:

“The East India Company came from across the seven seas to trade and ended up enslaving the nation. Today, our very own elected governments have served up the country’s water, forests, land, mines, and ports on a platter to a handful of domestic and foreign corporate houses. The wealth held by a few families at the time of Independence has now multiplied into trillions, while 80 crore citizens of this country have been reduced to surviving on a five-kilo bag of free ration! Was it for this day that our freedom fighters kissed the hangman’s noose? When a handful of individuals become owners of an entire nation’s resources, that is not democracy, but a corporate dictatorship (Oligarchy)!”
— N. Singh (Anokha Bharat, pp. 75–76)

The author further strikes at the nexus of governance:

“To contest elections, political parties take thousands of crores in secret electoral donations from these very capitalists. When a government is formed, it is beholden not to the public, but held hostage by the tycoons who funded it. Decisions in the budget are taken not for the welfare of the people, but to pump up the share prices of these magnates in the stock market.”
— (Anokha Bharat, p. 79)

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Four Fundamental Measures to Halt the Plunder of National Wealth

1. National Resource Trust for natural resources: The private monopoly over mines, oil, gas, and ports must be ended; 50% of the total profits generated from them must be mandatorily channelled directly into the nation’s healthcare and education budgets.
2. Expedited confiscation of assets of corporate loan defaulters: For industrialists who deliberately default on bank loans (wilful defaulters), their personal assets, bungalows, and shares must be seized immediately, with an absolute legal embargo on their fleeing abroad.
3. Total transparency in electoral funding: The source and donor’s name for every single rupee of corporate donations received by political parties must be published openly on the Election Commission’s website.
4. Strict anti-monopoly legislation (Anti-trust laws): No single corporate conglomerate should be permitted to hold more than a 20% stake in any one sector (such as airports, ports, telecommunications, or media) so that healthy competition is preserved.

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A Question Worth Contemplating (The Message of the Book)

Is India truly a self-respecting nation of 140 crore Indians, or has it been reduced to the private jagir (fiefdom) of a few multi-billionaires?

To understand the complete inside story of this new and insidious plunder of India’s economic resources, every conscious citizen must read this second chapter of N. Singh’s acclaimed book ‘Anokha Bharat’.