Telgi’s fate may have been different if he’d bought votes

livemint.com:

₹80 lakh on a gorgeous dancer in a single night. The amount mentioned in the rumour had kept increasing for some hours before settling at “80 lakhs." There was no doubt though that a man known as Abdul Karim Telgi had tipped the dancer a considerable sum. The inner circles of dance bars include cops.

The news evoked the curiosity of the police, who discovered a man who had built an elaborate business counterfeiting stamp paper and other forms of revenue stationery. They had stumbled upon a perennial source of income. Telgi, who had starved as a child and sold fruits as a young man, had made a fatal error in trying to impress a dancer.

But at the time, even the cops did not know how big Telgi’s operation was. Actually, no one still knows the full scope of his scam. What is certain is that he stole thousands of crores from the government.

Telgi is the subject of a SonyLiv show called Scam 2003, which is part of a series on endearing scams created by Hansal Mehta and Applause Entertainment. Telgi’s story is rare because it offers a clear glimpse into the making of a class of Indian politicians and the enormous sums of money in the underbelly of a corrupt country. The story would have never got out if he had fully evolved into a politician.

He was getting there, though, to a point where an entire past of a ‘leader’ can be erased. We like con-men, especially if they have not conned us. My favourite is the man who sold insurance to train passengers who wished to travel ticketless—if they were caught by a ticket checker, he would compensate the fine.