Documents by Agusta-Westland in an Italian court dealing with IAF’s scam deal for the AW 100 helicopter for VVIP use, mention “the Family” in political India which had to be paid off for the deal to go through. The talk of the head of the numero uno ruling dynasty raking in the monies — a big portion of nearly every deal GOI has been involved in since Manmohan Singh was hoisted into power in 2004, including all the scams starting with the Commonwealth Games scandals, is unabating. If there’s so much smoke surely there’s fire somewhere.

The Huffington Post’s compilation of a list of the world’s richest leaders on Monday, Dec 2, 2013 seemed to bolster this suspicion of unconstrained corruption, as featured in it was the President of the Congress Party Sonia Gandhi in the $2 Billion category — richer by some $600 Million than the Queen of England, Liz-II! It drew a tart comment that this denotes India’s “progress”! Interestingly, a day later (i.e., on Dec 3, 2013) the H-Post removed Sonia G’s name from that List, saying this info was taken from a third party source and was not verifiable. But then most of the other persons listed did not/have not publicly owned up to such wealth either. So, what’s different about Sonia G?

In any case, of the 203 comments on this story in the H-Post, see — http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/29/richest-world-leaders_n_4178514.html — many reacted to Sonia G’s name in the List with a “Hey, tell us something new”!-attitude, most of them speculating that the name removal was because of (1) GOI pressure, (2) H-Post being paid off to remove the name, and/or (3) a powerful lobby in New Delhi.