October 17, 2026

The Syndicate State - The Invisible Economy That Ran Parallel to Bengal

By Sunil Garodia
First publised on 2026-05-21 10:43:00

About the Author

Editor-in-Chief of indiacommentary.com. Current Affairs analyst and political commentator. Author of Cyber Scams in India, Digital Arrest, The Money Trap and The Human Hack

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A newspaper report often carries a larger story inside it.

Recently, nearly 200 auto and e-rickshaw operators gathered outside the Salt Lake residence of newly elected Bidhannagar BJP MLA Shadradwat Mukherjee. They were not there to celebrate his election. They were there because, they said, they had been paying daily fees - Rs 50 per e-rickshaw, Rs 100 per auto - simply to be allowed to do their jobs. Not a tax. Not a fine. Not a toll. Just money, handed over every morning, so that nobody would stop them from earning their living that day. The MLA turned down the money. No one from his party, he said, would collect money illegally. He also said that the days of cut money were over. Perhaps. But the men who gathered outside his house were not, by any visible account, there for the drama of it. They were there because they had run out of quieter options.

This is where the story usually ends in the telling - a denial issued, a crowd dispersed, the news cycle moving on. What rarely gets examined is the arithmetic underneath.

According to various estimates, Kolkata and its surrounding areas have roughly 50,000 e-rickshaws and 60,000 autos on the road. If the rates alleged by these operators were replicated across Kolkata's estimated vehicle population, the amount approaches Rs 85 lakh every day - more than Rs 300 crore annually. Even if the actual figure was smaller, the sums involved would still be substantial enough to warrant scrutiny. And that is before considering hawkers, construction sites, the contractor who knows which supplier to use, the shopkeeper who knows whose goodwill must be maintained, the family renovating a home who receives quiet advice about which labourers to hire and which questions not to ask. The figure becomes something that no longer fits in a newspaper paragraph.

The purpose of this arithmetic is not to convict anyone. It is simply to make the scale visible - because the scale is what makes the casual denial so difficult to accept at face value.

Bengal has lived with the word syndicate for so long that it has stopped sounding like an accusation. It is spoken in tea stalls and construction sites, in residential neighbourhoods and wholesale markets, with the resigned familiarity people reserve for things they have stopped expecting to change. That normalisation is perhaps the most damaging thing about it. Not the money extracted, though that is serious enough. But the gradual acceptance, by ordinary people going about ordinary lives, that this is simply how things work here.

Think about what that acceptance actually costs.

The auto driver who pays Rs 100 every morning does not swallow that loss. He adds it to his fares, invisibly, across the passengers of his day. The contractor who pays at the site does not absorb it either. It enters the estimate, quietly, and the homeowner pays without knowing exactly why the number came out the way it did. The shopkeeper passes it on in prices that drift upward without explanation. What looks like a transaction between two people at one end of a chain reappears, diffused and invisible, at the other end - paid, ultimately, by the person who had no part in the original arrangement and no knowledge that it existed. The ordinary citizen ends up funding a system they never agreed to, cannot audit, and have no formal way to refuse.

That is what makes this different from ordinary corruption. It is not a bribe paid once for a specific favour. It is a recurring levy on everyday life - on the right to drive, to sell, to build, to simply show up and try to make a living. And unlike a tax, it comes with no receipt, no rate card, no parliamentary sanction, and no accountability to anyone at all.

What it does come with is a logic that, once established, begins to reshape everything around it. When access matters more than merit, the better product loses to the better connection. When political proximity becomes an economic asset, economic exclusion becomes a political instrument. The person who learns to navigate the system survives. The person who cannot, or who refuses to, finds that the formal pathways quietly narrow - in ways that are hard to name precisely and nearly impossible to challenge openly.

The TMC has consistently denied institutional involvement and argued that opponents manufacture systemic scandals out of isolated incidents. That argument is not without some force. Accusations made in a charged political climate are not automatically true, and the line between genuine grievance and orchestrated narrative is not always easy to find. But there is something the denial cannot quite account for: the consistency of these complaints, across sectors, across years, across the kind of ordinary people who have no particular reason to coordinate their stories. Truck drivers and hawkers and homeowners and shopkeepers, in different parts of the city, describing variations of the same experience. That pattern is not proof of guilt. But it is something that deserves more than a press statement.

Governments ask citizens to trust institutions. That is a reasonable ask. But trust, to mean anything, has to be earnable  - and the way to earn it is not through denial but through demonstrated accountability. If the complaints are exaggerated, a genuinely independent investigation will show that. If they are not, the same investigation will show that too, and the work of accountability can begin. What cannot go on indefinitely is the current arrangement: allegation answered by denial, denial answered by allegation, and the informal economy continuing underneath, undisturbed, while the argument plays out above it.

There is a line, in any society, that should not be crossed quietly. It is the line where a citizen begins to believe - not as political opinion but as practical knowledge, the kind that shapes daily decisions - that the right to earn a living requires prior permission from an unofficial authority. Once that belief becomes common sense, it is very hard to unlearn. People stop expecting anything different. They build the cost into their calculations. They teach their children to do the same.

And when that belief hardens into public instinct, the state does not merely lose revenue. It loses legitimacy - and once legitimacy begins to leak away, governments discover that it is far harder to recover than money.