There are reasons to believe that some 12 lakh crore rupees have been systematically siphoned off from banks in the first 8 years of Narendra Modi’s rule — mainly by big corporate borrowers,. This was/is done quite ‘legitimately’ by taking loans for units and then getting them written off as unrecoverable non-performing assets (NPAs) The scale of that is 4 to 6 times higher than the internationally accepted norm. Obviously such a massive but smooth operation is simply not possible without complete political backing. Every GM, ED or CMD of a bank knows that when he is told by someone representing the core of political power “to lend to X”, he jolly well does it.
