Corruption Deeply Embedded in Indian Government Institutions

India’s political and government institutions face a systemic corruption crisis that fundamentally undermines democratic governance and public trust. A pervasive problem is the concentration of immense wealth and legal impunity among elected representatives—Members of Parliament (MPs) and Members of Legislative Assembly (MLAs)—which debilitates their ability and willingness to represent the common citizen or deliver justice effectively. This essay fully develops this overarching argument with supporting data and conceptual detail, illustrating how elected officials leverage power through a recurring four-step framework of abuse. Two emblematic examples, the Prajwal Revanna case and the Bilkis Bano convicts’ saga, are used to underscore but not dominate the discussion.

Immense Wealth and Criminality Among Elected Representatives

A fundamental issue lies in the extraordinary wealth and extensive criminal backgrounds within the political class. Official disclosures submitted to the Election Commission reveal that a significant portion of MPs and MLAs possess assets running into crores of rupees. Over 40% of legislators declare pending criminal cases, including serious offenses like assault, murder, and corruption. This self-disclosed data is the minimum threshold, as underreporting and concealment likely obscure the true scale.

This concentration of wealth and cases creates a political elite well-insulated from ordinary citizens’ realities. It impedes genuine representation as lawmakers often prioritize personal wealth protection or power consolidation over public welfare. The vast economic gulf between legislators and typical citizens weakens electoral competition based on merit or integrity.

The Four-Step Framework of Abuse

Powerful politicians frequently engage in a systemic cycle of corruption and impunity that can be described in four critical steps:

1. Commission of Serious Crimes

Many elected officials exploit their power to commit grave offenses, ranging from corruption to violent crimes. Their status dilutes fear of prosecution, resulting in a proliferation of serious criminal conduct within the political arena. These crimes often directly harm citizens or undermine democratic functioning.

2. Intimidation and Neutralization of Victims and Witnesses

Following criminal conduct, victims and witnesses frequently face threats, coercion, or harassment aimed at silencing them or weakening their resolve to participate in justice processes. Intimidation tactics erode the rule of law and facilitate ongoing impunity for offenders.

3. Strong-Arming Institutions and Extra-Constitutional Overreach

Politicians use their influence to exert pressure on law enforcement, judiciary, and administrative bodies. This pressure sometimes oversteps constitutional boundaries, involving corruption or extra-constitutional actions to protect perpetrators and quash accountability initiatives.

4. Evading Accountability

When legal institutions start to act, powerful individuals often employ various tactics to evade accountability. This may include fleeing the country using privileges such as diplomatic passports or leveraging political interference and bureaucratic delays domestically. The lack of transparent, speedy mechanisms enables this flight from justice.

Use of Official Privileges: Diplomatic Passports and Other Resources

In addition to wealth and influence, the Indian political system grants several official privileges to MPs and MLAs that can be misused. Diplomatic passports, intended for official diplomats, are regularly issued to parliamentarians—even those with no formal diplomatic role. These passports ease international travel by circumventing visa requirements and provide immunities and institutional protection.

Though intended for official functions, these passports have been exploited to facilitate escapes, as seen in Prajwal Revanna’s international travel amid legal scrutiny. This misapplication exposes weak institutional oversight and accountability regarding passport issuance and revocation.

Furthermore, public funding for travel, security, and housing accompanies these privileges, funded by taxpayers. When such resources are diverted to serving personal interests or to avoid justice, they compound institutional corruption and citizen alienation.

Illustrative Case Studies

While the focus remains on systemic institutional corruption, the following cases illustrate the four-step framework in real-world contexts.

Prajwal Revanna Case Detailed through the Four-Step Framework

Step 1: Committing Serious Crimes

Revanna was accused of multiple grave offenses, including repeated sexual harassment and rape of his domestic help and other women. Explicit videos surfaced showing these abuses, corroborated by victim testimony. His conviction and life imprisonment sentence in 2025 reflect the severity and seriousness of his crimes.

Step 2: Intimidation and Neutralization of Victims and Witnesses

Victims faced harassment, threats, and psychological pressure to deter them from testifying. The widespread circulation of obscene videos made by Revanna intensified the atmosphere of victim intimidation, making it harder for witnesses to come forward safely.

Step 3: Strong-Arming Institutions

Revanna’s relatives, notably his father and former Prime Minister H.D. Deve Gowda, explicitly exerted direct pressure on police and judicial authorities to stall investigations or influence procedural outcomes. This political interference represents intentional strong-arming aimed at neutralizing institutional accountability beyond mere bureaucratic lapses. The abuse of the diplomatic passport, while serious, was a procedural lapse enabling evasion but distinct from the active coercive efforts by his family and political network.

Step 4: Evasion of Accountability

Using the diplomatic passport issued by the Ministry of External Affairs without required political clearance, Revanna fled the country to Germany amidst ongoing investigations, effectively avoiding immediate legal process. This use of official privilege to escape jurisdiction exemplifies evasion of accountability facilitated by institutional weaknesses and procedural failures.

Bilkis Bano Case Detailed through the Four-Step Framework

Step 1: Committing Serious Crimes

During the 2002 Gujarat riots, convicts perpetrated brutal acts including gang rape, murder, and communal violence offenses against Bilkis Bano and her family. Courts sentenced these perpetrators to life imprisonment, underscoring the gravity of their crimes.

Step 2: Intimidation and Neutralization of Victims and Witnesses

Survivors and witnesses lived under constant threat and hostility in riot-affected areas. Multiple reports documented pervasive intimidation designed to silence witnesses and obstruct justice for victims of communal violence.

Step 3: Strong-Arming Institutions

Political interference extended well beyond administrative release orders. Leaked audio recordings directly implicated the then Gujarat Chief Minister and other high-ranking officials in providing ongoing protection and impunity to riot convicts, including Bilkis Bano’s assailants. This patronage effectively manipulated policing, prosecution, and judicial oversight, disturbing constitutional checks and representing systemic extra-constitutional strong-arming.

Step 4: Evasion of Accountability

While not fleeing the country, the convicts’ temporary release circumvented full judicial accountability. Political protections enabled these offenders to evade prison and continue to benefit from impunity domestically. Only intervention by the Supreme Court and Gujarat High Court reinstated long-delayed justice.

These comprehensive explorations demonstrate how the four-step framework operates individually yet collectively as a systemic cycle of corruption, privilege misuse, and impunity spanning from serious criminal conduct to political cover-ups and procedural evasion. The abuse of official privileges like diplomatic passports and direct political interference in policing and judiciary weaken democratic governance and deny justice to victims.

Data Highlighting Corruption and Governance Challenges

International and domestic data reinforce the severity of systemic corruption in India:

• India ranked 96th out of 180 countries in the 2024 Corruption Perceptions Index, scoring 38/100—indicative of significant public sector corruption.
• Political corruption indexes place India above the world average, highlighting widespread governance failures.
• Over 40% of elected representatives declare criminal cases, many of which are serious, affecting governance integrity.
• Surveys show high public perception of corruption, with many reporting paying bribes in accessing public services.
• Estimated illicit financial outflows from India run into billions of dollars annually, signaling vast systemic leakages.

This data reveals governance frailties that go beyond individual cases, reflecting a broader institutional malaise.

The State as Self-Preserving Organism: Deriving Anarchist Theory from First Principles

The four-step framework documented throughout this analysis reveals something more fundamental than mere corruption or institutional failure. When examined closely, this pattern demonstrates that the state and its political class function as an active, self-preserving organism rather than the passive, neutral arbiter promised by liberal democratic theory. The framework—crime, intimidation, institutional capture, and evasion—is not a deviation from proper governance but rather the manifestation of hierarchy and violence as the state’s core operational logic.

From Empirical Pattern to Structural Analysis

Consider what the evidence actually shows: Politicians commit crimes (Step 1), intimidate those who threaten exposure (Step 2), neutralize institutional checks (Step 3), and evade accountability (Step 4). This is not random dysfunction. It is systematic self-preservation—the behavior of an organism defending itself against threats to its survival.

Each step serves a biological function:

• Crime (Step 1) = Resource extraction and dominance assertion—the organism feeds and reproduces
• Intimidation (Step 2) = Threat elimination—the immune system attacking foreign bodies (witnesses, victims, journalists)
• Institutional capture (Step 3) = Environmental adaptation—co-opting what should be external predators (courts, police, media) into symbiotic defense mechanisms
• Evasion (Step 4) = Survival adaptation—metamorphosis, relocation, or dormancy when threats cannot be neutralized

This is not metaphor. The state-political complex exhibits the defining characteristics of a living system: it senses threats, responds to preserve itself, adapts to changing environments, and reproduces its structure across generations through dynastic politics and institutional continuity.

The Hierarchy-Violence Nexus

Anarchist theory centers on two fundamental critiques: hierarchy (concentrated power creates domination) and violence (the state’s monopoly on coercion serves elite interests). The Indian case validates both with stunning clarity.

Hierarchy as structural domination: The concentration of wealth and legal impunity among MPs and MLAs creates a permanent ruling class insulated from the consequences faced by ordinary citizens. This is not accidental inequality—it is functional hierarchy. The system requires this concentration because governance has become indistinguishable from extraction. Those without the capacity for violence and wealth accumulation cannot enter or survive in politics.

Violence as preservation mechanism: Every step of the framework involves violence or its threat—physical violence against victims and witnesses, institutional violence through captured police and courts, structural violence through laws selectively applied. This violence is not deviant behavior by bad actors. It is how hierarchy maintains itself against challenges.

Critically, this violence is organized and legitimized through state institutions. The same police who should investigate crimes protect perpetrators. The same courts that should deliver justice delay cases for decades. The same passports meant for diplomacy facilitate escape from prosecution. State institutions don’t constrain elite violence—they multiply and legitimize it.

The Myth of the Neutral Arbiter

Liberal political theory rests on a foundational assumption: the state is a neutral referee that enforces agreed-upon rules impartially. Citizens consent to state authority in exchange for protection of rights and equal application of law.

The evidence presented throughout this analysis systematically demolishes this assumption:

• There is no neutrality when over 40% of legislators have criminal cases and the system delays their prosecution indefinitely
• There is no impartial rule of law when diplomatic passports enable flight from justice or when political interference directs investigations
• There is no equal protection when victims face intimidation while perpetrators receive state resources and institutional cover
• There is no consent when elections require criminal wealth and violence, excluding clean candidates systematically

What we observe instead is the state functioning as player, referee, and rule-maker simultaneously—all serving the preservation of hierarchy. When Prajwal Revanna’s family pressures police and he flees using official privileges, or when leaked audio reveals chief ministers protecting riot convicts, these are not system failures. They are the system working as designed: protecting its own components against accountability.

Self-Preservation Over Justice

The organismic behavior becomes most apparent in how the system responds to threats. When victims seek justice, the organism responds with intimidation. When investigations begin, the organism corrupts or neutralizes investigators. When convictions occur, the organism facilitates evasion or premature release. When public outcry intensifies, the organism creates the appearance of accountability—committees, inquiries, transfers—that ultimately reinforce rather than challenge the underlying structure.

This is adaptive behavior optimized through evolution. Politicians who fail to protect themselves are removed by prosecution or electoral defeat. Institutions that resist capture are defunded, circumvented, or staffed with compliant officials. The system selects for those willing to use violence and corruption, then provides them the tools and protection to do so effectively.

The four-step framework thus represents not individual moral failure but evolutionary optimization: the hierarchy has developed and refined mechanisms to identify threats, neutralize them, and perpetuate itself. Corruption is not a bug in the system—it is how the system feeds and reproduces.

Arriving at Anarchist Conclusions

These observations lead to conclusions that align precisely with anarchist political theory, not through ideological preference but through logical necessity:

1. Concentrated coercive power inevitably serves those who wield it. The state’s monopoly on legitimate violence becomes a tool for elite domination, not public protection. The evidence shows this is not contingent but structural.

2. Institutional reform is metabolized and neutralized. Anti-corruption commissions become captured, oversight bodies become complicit, and reforms become opportunities for performative change without substantive transformation. The organism adapts to survive reformist threats.

3. Electoral democracy without dismantling hierarchy provides legitimation theater, not genuine accountability. Elections occur, but criminalized wealth determines outcomes. Democratic ritual exists without democratic substance.

4. The “rule of law” under hierarchy means rules that protect rulers. Law becomes a weapon wielded by the powerful against challenges to their power, not a constraint on power itself.

5. Hierarchy breeds and requires violence for self-preservation. The system cannot function without the capacity to intimidate, coerce, and harm those who threaten it. Violence is not incidental but essential.

These are not radical impositions on the evidence—they are what the evidence demonstrates when examined without the assumption that states must be, or can be, neutral arbiters.

The Anarchist Vindication

Perhaps most striking is that left anarchists face systematic state repression—UAPA charges, detention without trial, surveillance, harassment—for accurately describing what the state actually does. They are marginalized, tabooed, and oppressed for articulating a critique that the state’s own behavior validates.

Anarchists argue that states function as protection rackets for elites, using monopolized violence to maintain hierarchy. The Indian state demonstrates this with textbook precision: politicians commit violence, the state apparatus protects them, institutions that should constrain instead serve elite interests, and those who expose this reality face the state’s coercive power.

The tragedy is not that anarchist theory is radical—it is that observable reality has become so damning that accurately describing it sounds radical. The state has successfully trained populations to accept its self-description (neutral arbiter serving public good) while its actual behavior (self-preserving hierarchy maintaining dominance through violence) remains hidden in plain sight.

The four-step framework, repeated across countless cases at every level of government, is not evidence of a corrupted system. It is evidence of a system functioning exactly as concentrated coercive power functions—protecting itself, feeding itself, and reproducing itself, using violence when necessary and institutional legitimacy when possible.

Conclusion: Beyond Reform—Confronting the Nature of Power

This analysis began by documenting systemic corruption in Indian governance. It ends by revealing something more fundamental: what appears as corruption is actually the normal operation of concentrated coercive power. The four-step framework—crime, intimidation, institutional capture, evasion—is not a pathology requiring treatment but the physiology of hierarchy itself. The wealth and criminality of elected representatives, the misuse of official privileges, the capture of institutions, and the intimidation of victims are not deviations from proper governance. They are governance under hierarchy, stripped of its legitimizing mythology.

Standard reform prescriptions assume the system wants to constrain itself. But self-preserving organisms do not voluntarily weaken their defense mechanisms. The evidence shows that reform initiatives are predictably metabolized: anti-corruption bodies become captured, oversight mechanisms become performative, and transparency requirements become compliance theater. The reform paradox is damning: institutions capable of enacting meaningful reform would not need reform, and institutions requiring reform cannot enact it because they are constituted by the very interests that benefit from the status quo.

Left anarchist theory, marginalized and repressed, predicted precisely this outcome—that states monopolize violence to serve elite interests, that hierarchy inherently produces domination, and that meaningful change requires dismantling concentrated power rather than reforming it. The Indian case demonstrates anarchism not as ideology but as accurate description. The state behaves exactly as anarchist theory predicts: as a self-preserving hierarchy using violence and institutional capture to maintain elite dominance. The cruelest irony is that those who articulate this analysis face the system’s full coercive power—detained, surveilled, and prosecuted for accurately describing what the state actually does.

The question facing India, and all societies organized around concentrated coercive power, is whether genuine justice is possible within hierarchy, or whether justice requires dismantling hierarchy entirely. The evidence, examined honestly, suggests an uncomfortable answer—one that anarchists have been articulating, and being persecuted for, all along. The four-step framework is not a bug to be fixed. It is the operating system itself.