Jake's View | India a mess after Nehru and Congress

In the centre of Calcutta at a corner of a big open field called the Maidan, stands a statue of India's first premier, Jawaharlal Nehru.

The nearest entrance to the Maidan is a festering, flyblown rubbish tip, where the prowling dogs make you think of rabies, while the field itself is covered in a virtual snowfall of litter.

While I looked on last week, some yahoo was racing his car in circles there, raising clouds of dust. No one stopped him.

Perhaps it is fitting that the statue of Nehru looks away. The Maidan is a comment on the stewardship of himself, his family and the Congress party, which was finally booted out of office this year.

You failed, Jawaharlal. You and your Congress successors worked up an almighty mess and 1.25 billion people suffer from it today.

Well, perhaps not all of them. As the central bank governor, Raghuram Rajan, concedes in his book, , it would not be surprising if India has already overtaken Russia in the dubious distinction of the largest numbers of billionaires relative to the size of the economy, in all cases through commercial avenues tightly controlled by government.

As to everyone else, just walk the streets of Calcutta.