Corruption as a political issue is back in the headlines after a hiatus, although the word corruption itself is not being used. Instead, there have recently been careful expressions of wonderment at the sudden improvement in the fortunes of a company owned by BJP chief Amit Shah’s son Jay, and a defamation complaint at said expression of wonderment.

Shah pointed out that despite a jump in revenues from Rs 50,000 in 2014-15 to Rs 80 crore in 2015-16, the company in question had lost Rs 1.5 crore. The Wire, which had broken the story, pointed out that this fact had been mentioned in its report. Apart from a criminal defamation complaint filed by Shah Jr, the dispute between Shah and The Wire now seems to centre on how a small company such as Jay’s was able to get an amount of Rs 15.78 crore in unsecured loans. The suggestion here is that this loan would not have been possible if Jay Shah had not been Amit Shah’s son.

Perhaps it would be correct to deduce from the story that merely being Amit Shah’s son was not good enough for Jay Shah to get an unsecured loan of Rs 15.78 crore from any source in Gujarat until 2015-16. Shah’s influence during Narendra Modi’s tenure as Gujarat chief minister, which began in 2001, was presumably insufficient to swing such a loan, even though he had served as president of the Ahmedabad District Cooperative Bank and chairman of the Gujarat State Financial Corporation in the 1990s before he became an MLA.

That bank loans are often given on insufficient collaterals for dodgy reasons is well known, so the topic of shady practices in banking deserves all the media attention it can get. The loot of public sector banks has evidently been on in India for several decades, which is why the country is now faced with a looming crisis in its banking sector to which former Reserve Bank of India Governor Raghuram Rajan brought attention during his tenure. According to a Reuters report published on October 11, “Indian banks’ sour loans hit a record 9.5 trillion rupees ($145.56 billion) at the end of June, unpublished data show, suggesting Asia’s third-largest economy is no nearer to bringing its bad debt problems under control.”

Earlier this year, in June, the RBI had identified 12 accounts each of which owed banks more than Rs 5,000 crore. This would make it a minimum of Rs 60,000 crore, but the actual figure has to be much higher than that since the RBI said these accounts are responsible for 25 per cent of non-performing assets of banks – and that number was already over Rs 8 lakh crore in June. A quarter of Rs 8 lakh crore is Rs 2 lakh crore.

Oddly enough, the names of these 12 entities are not mentioned in reports on the travails of India’s economy. It’s as though these names are a national secret. Who are these people who are more powerful than Amit Shah, since he can be attacked for Rs 15.78 crore in loans taken by his son’s company, but people who have taken and sunk lakhs of crores borrowed mostly from public sector banks cannot even be named?

Last year, the Supreme Court had, while hearing a related case, observed, “People default after taking loans to run their empires and declare insolvency, while farmers are being driven to suicide for small loans”. The court had also pointed out that “RBI has a statutory duty to uphold the interest of the public at large, the depositors, the country’s economy and the banking sector. Thus, RBI ought to act with transparency and not hide information that might embarrass individual banks.”

After initially demanding that RBI disclose the names of the defaulters – a demand the RBI opposed – the court, however, subsequently changed its mind.

The media, which is otherwise eager to create a furore at the very hint of a scam, has been uncharacteristically restrained in its coverage of this matter of the missing lakhs of crores. Jargon and sophistry have been used to hide the bare facts. Terms such as “written off” have been used in a manner that implies the money written off is not lost to the bank – a lie, since only a very small proportion of money written off the books is ever recovered.

The bad debt issue is not the only one in which a scam worth lakhs of crores is waiting for absent media outrage. There’s also the little matter of unpaid taxes which amounted to Rs 8.24 lakh crore at the end of March 2016. Of this, 97.3 per cent was classified as “difficult to recover” according to the Comptroller and Auditor General of India in March this year. In 2015, Minister of State for Finance Jayant Sinha had informed Parliament that just 17 individuals owed the country Rs 2.14 lakh crore in taxes. These stories made barely a ripple and have disappeared without a trace.

Perhaps, it would be incorrect to focus too much on numbers. Sometimes numbers are not the story; the characters are. So for instance, in the Jay Shah story, it was probably not the sum of money involved – chickenfeed compared to lakhs of crores involved in these other cases – that made the story a hit, but the fact that he was Amit Shah’s son. Unfortunately, we don’t know the names of the characters who managed to not pay Rs 2.14 lakh crore in taxes.

There are other interesting characters whose stories have lately come to light in recent days. One such story is in Nagaland, where the National Investigation Agency earlier this month arrested three senior officials of the state government for collecting “taxes” on behalf of an underground outfit, the National Socialist Council of Nagaland’s Khaplang faction. Earlier in the year, three other officials including the joint director of the social welfare department had been arrested by NIA for the same reason.

A somewhat similar case of government money being diverted to fund armed insurgency against the government had come to light earlier in Assam. There, a group called the Dima Halam Daogah’s “Black Widow” faction had diverted funds meant for social welfare to shell companies in Kolkata that converted the rupees into dollars. This money was then used to buy arms in Thailand and smuggled into Northeast India. The details emerged during an NIA investigation, and led to the conviction of 15 members of the group earlier this year. This sort of thing has been going on for decades. The amounts involved would easily run into thousands of crores.

The BJP and Congress angles involving national figures are sadly missing in these stories, so they are of no apparent interest either to the Indian media or the country at large. These stories will only become big stories when political interests get involved.

The truth of the matter is that the media is and has long been very selective about the kind of stories it plays up and plays down. Stories that are inconvenient to corporate advertisers, such as stories about unreturned loans and unpaid taxes worth lakhs of crores, are typically underplayed. Stories of impropriety involving politicians emerge more frequently because there are various parties trying to pull one another down. These stories are often planted by rivals against one another; the media is used as a tool. Stories that have no evident political angles at the national level, such as diversion of social welfare money for buying guns, evoke the media equivalent of a shrug.

What constitutes a big story in the ‘national’ media is defined based on the interests of powerful metro elites, not the general public.