The Modi government is four men — or so runs the summation by the Indian blogger Dhruv Rathee. The first enriches himself by compelling the Indian people to use ethanol. The second grabs land to expand a real-estate empire. The third profits from leaking exam papers. The fourth sells off the Nicobar Islands to line his pockets.
This summary, which reads like a satirical skit, points to four channels of corruption operating simultaneously: the transfer of benefits through ethanol politics, the land grab dressed up as slum redevelopment, the education corruption of leaked exam papers, and the contest over development rights on a strategic island. The four channels are independent of one another yet interwoven, and together they form a systemic cross-section of the crony capitalism that operates under the rule of the Bharatiya Janata Party.
The corruption of the Modi government is not the overreach of a few individual officials. When no effective firewall separates political power from commercial capital, the making of policy itself becomes an instrument for distributing benefits. That four channels of corruption are running in parallel means the problem lies not in any particular person or department, but in the underlying logic of how power operates.
Ethanol — An Interest Chain Under the Banner of Green Energy
The Indian government is promoting E20 ethanol-blended gasoline. The official narrative is energy security, reduced oil imports, and higher incomes for farmers. But a fact that opposition parties and the media keep pointing out is this: the family businesses of Nitin Gadkari, the Modi government's Minister of Road Transport and Highways, have long held ties to agri-processing, sugar, ethanol, and food-processing enterprises. The promoter of the policy is, at the same time, a beneficiary of the policy.
The crux is not whether the Gadkari family actually profits from the ethanol industry — it is the objective existence of the conflict of interest itself. When the principal promoter of a policy is also a family associate of its principal beneficiaries, the public character of that policy is pierced through by private interests. The ethanol policy is not necessarily wrong in itself. But under such a structure of interests, the direction in which the policy is adjusted will tilt naturally toward "who benefits" rather than "who needs it."
Dharavi — Land Redistribution in the Name of Slum Redevelopment
Dharavi is one of the largest slums in Asia. The redevelopment project that the Adani Group has entered is called urban renewal by its supporters and land grabbing by its critics. The heart of the matter is this: when a developer is simultaneously one of the largest political donors to the ruling party, the "public interest" shell of slum redevelopment becomes suspect.
The controversy over the Dharavi redevelopment reflects a deeper contradiction in India's urbanization. Land is one of the scarcest resources in India, and whoever obtains the right to develop it controls an enormous channel for the transfer of wealth. When the redistribution of land is entangled with the system of political donations, the rights of slum dwellers become a cost that can be traded away.
NEET — How Leaked Exam Papers Shake Social Trust
The leak of the NEET medical entrance examination is one of the most sensational education scandals in India in recent years. More than two million candidates were forced to sit the test again, student protests have continued to intensify, and opposition parties are demanding the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan.
The damage that exam leaks inflict on Indian society lies not only in the unfair treatment of candidates. More fundamentally, they shake the channel of social mobility that revolves around examinations. For hundreds of millions of lower- and middle-income Indian families, education is the only credible path to changing one's fate. When that path is infiltrated by corruption, the social contract that "hard work will be rewarded" begins to crumble. The rise of the CJP (the Cockroach Janta Party) and the turn of youth discontent toward satire are directly connected to the crisis of trust triggered by the exam leaks.
The Nicobar Islands — The Risk of Privatizing Strategic Assets
The Great Nicobar Island development project — encompassing a transshipment port, an airport, power plants, and urban infrastructure — has been packaged by the Modi government as a "national security project" that strengthens India's strategic capacity in the Indian Ocean–Malacca direction. But environmentalists, tribal-rights organizations, and the Congress party point out that the project is destroying primary forest, threatening the habitat of the leatherback turtle and the living space of Indigenous communities — and that, in essence, it hands an ecologically sensitive island over to capital for development.
Who reaps the returns of a development project carried out in the name of national security? When a strategic infrastructure project simultaneously involves large-scale land conveyance and commercial development rights, the national-security narrative can become a tool for legitimating capital's access to scarce resources. The controversy over the Great Nicobar project is not about whether to build, but about the rules for distributing the gains from construction — whether they serve national strategy, or serve particular interest groups.
Where the Four Paths Converge
Ethanol, Dharavi, NEET, Nicobar — the four affairs appear to belong to different domains, but they share a common underlying structure: the firewall between policy-making and commercial interest is failing systematically. This is not merely a problem of the Modi government; it is a deep-seated feature of the BJP's political model. When political power is highly concentrated, when the system of political donations lacks transparent constraints, and when mechanisms for recusal from conflicts of interest are absent from the policy-making process, every domain of policy can become a channel for corruption.
The reason Dhruv Rathee's "four men" framing resonates so widely is not its accuracy — political corruption is never the act of a single individual — but the fact that it captures a social perception: the entire government, from top to bottom and from inside out, is being pierced through from within by a handful of interest groups.
These four affairs are interwoven and are steadily fermenting in Indian public opinion, shaping a perception of the Modi government as a systemically corrupt administration in which everything — from policy and land to education and ecological resources — has been hollowed out by crony interest groups.