“Ajit Singh was the biggest goon in town. He had many interests. Dredging the riverbeds for construction sand, cutting down trees for timber on Forestry Department land, mining quarries for stone, stealing medicines from the government hospitals. So long as we did his work, whatever else we did, short of killing cops, we had protection. I had a great education there, I understood the turning of the wheel, how the cops and the politicians and the bureaucrats were all working together to keep this wheel in motion, how every spoke of the wheel was important, how the wheel was the system itself. We indulged in extortion, collecting protection money from businesses or else burning them down, we’d commit kidnappings for ransom.”
Deepti Kapoor, “Age of Vice”, 2023
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