Assam is the most accessible state of the seven that make up India’s north-east region. A three-hour flight from Delhi transports you from dull brown farmlands to lush green floodplains. From high up in the sky, you can see rice fields stretching from one end to the other and a river taking up as much space as is practically allowed. Older than the Himalayas, the Brahmaputra is a river of majestic dimensions, passing into Assam from China on its northern border and, after flowing through the state for 600 km, slipping into Bangladesh on its southern end.
India’s north-east is a patchwork of ethnicities, and its history is one of war, flood and displacement. After the conclusion of the Burmese War in 1826, fought between the British East India Company and the Kingdom of Burma (now Myanmar), Assam came under British control. The colonial authorities appointed an officer representing the governor–general to oversee Assam’s administration, and later, in 1838, the region was officially incorporated into British-administered Bengal. In 1946, Assam was granted self-rule by the British Raj, but after India gained independence, it became part of the newly established Dominion of India. The Indian government then redrew the map, further distinguishing Assam from the rest of the north-east. During the 1960s and 1970s, Assam lost significant portions of its territory to newly created states within its borders. Since then, ethnic groups have frequently clashed over issues of language, identity and territorial sovereignty, both among themselves and with the Indian state.
Today it is as famous for its tea estates and wildlife reserves as it is notorious for ethnic conflict and sectarian divides. Privileged “mainland” Indians who live outside of the north-east can dismiss Assam as a conflict zone. Foreigners can’t fly into Guwahati without a special permit from the Home Ministry. I had been to Assam only once before, but this time, I had a feeling that I would be returning often.
By the time my colleague Sadiq and I arrived at Barpeta in early 2022, it was already well-known for insurance scams in trade circles. If the scammers in Deoghar inspired awe for their ability to fool strangers over the phone, their colleagues in Barpeta were recognised as market leaders in insurance fraud. According to industry reports mapping out areas based on ease of business, this otherwise mundane district in the north-east rang alarm bells. Trade associations marked it as a ‘negative pincode’, a codeword for places where suspicious deaths disrupted the average ratio of policies sold to claims raised. Insurers in the private sector sent verification agents to Barpeta not only after a claim was made but also before a policy was sold. Yet, the scammers’ ability to fabricate convincing death scenarios outpaced the precautions put in place by the insurance companies.
And much of the local genius was concentrated in Tengabari, a small village of 500-odd people.
A chai shop in the village market served as the meeting place for the best minds in the business – an incubation centre of sorts for the local talent. On most days, a group of men sat at a table drinking tea and swatting flies from early morning to midday. From a distance, their desultory adda – the local word for a relaxing chat over tea and snacks – resembled all others taking place at tea shops across Barpeta between those hours. However, those with access to the table, such as the teashop owner, confirmed theirs was a conclave where ideas took shape that would make a mockery of the PowerPoints being presented in corporate headquarters to protect the health of the insurance sector.
Not every act of fraud is equally illuminating. Some can tell you exactly how and why the frontiers of this global empire of scammers are set further and yet further every year. Those that do, often have something in common: the dynamics between the scammers and their victims are particularly clear. In that respect, insurance fraud in Barpeta was remarkably revealing.
Each man in this group was a Muslim. In Tengabari, where the majority of residents also identified as Muslim, they wouldn’t invite any attention for their religious identity. In many other pockets of Barpeta, too, Muslims blended seamlessly into local communities. But in most other places in India, where they are an embattled minority, Muslims plotting an economic crime – defrauding reputed companies, targeting a welfare scheme, bribing government officers – would count as an egregious offence.
Over the past years, elements in the Indian state have come to persecute Muslims to the point where ordinary, law-abiding individuals live in constant fear of being jailed or disenfranchised or standing helpless as their houses are being bulldozed and business licences revoked, all by government decree. This relentless oppression doesn’t just strip people of rights; it robs them of dignity. In Assam, the threat has gone deeper: this region has been rife with ethnic insecurity, and Muslims are attacked as outsiders, colonisers, “vermin”.
How, then, did these villagers in Barpeta find the courage to perpetrate an organised fraud against a public scheme that bore the prime minister’s name? What possessed them to challenge an adversary that wielded every ounce of its power to crush their spirit?
Perhaps it wasn’t courage at all but desperation – a too-good-to-miss chance to turn the state’s apathy and inefficiency against itself. Maybe they felt they had nothing left to lose. Who better to target than a government that already saw them as culprits, even when they were just going about their lives?
Were these scams a form of economic retaliation, a pushback against pervasive discrimination? Or were they, simply, too good an opportunity to pass up? Or something too complicated for me to easily imagine? To find the truth, I’d have to proceed carefully, one question at a time.
After speaking with some regulars at the chai shop, Sadiq and I started down a winding dirt path to find the most extravagant dwelling in all of Tengabari. A compact Maruti Suzuki car, the only private four-wheeler in the village, was parked outside its tall black gates. We opened the gates, entered the courtyard, and ran into the home’s owner. He was slight in build with a thin face, dark skin and jet-black hair swept neatly back. Dressed in a checked lungi and vest, he greeted us formally and told us to call him Amjad.
We sat down in plastic chairs under a roof of pumpkin vines. Nearby, his children played in the mud while chickens and goats dashed across the enclosure. A security camera, attached to a corner of the top floor of Amjad Hussain’s two-storey house, captured a panoramic view of his entire property. He explained that it served an urgent purpose: deterring dastardly thieves who sneaked in at night to steal fish from his private pond, which they would sell in the local market the next morning.
We had come to speak to him about a younger brother of his, named Abul Hussain. In 2012, Abul died unexpectedly young, and five years later, Amjad received Rs 25 lakh as the nominee of a life insurance policy his brother had purchased from a private company called Aviva. (The police records that we had accessed included copies of the policy document and bank statements confirming the wire transfer.) That could explain the two-storey house, the car, the fishpond. Amjad knew that we knew what everyone else in the village knew: Abul had never been born.
A friend of his, an insurance broker, needed a client, and Amjad needed some cash, so they invented a brother for him. Amjad christened him Abul because it was a common name in the community, he explained. The scammers got a birth certificate from the village chief, a school-leaving certificate from a principal, and a passport photo from a studio in the market. Where they could bribe, they opened their wallets. When someone resisted, they resorted to forgery. Nothing helped more than a wide network of friends ready to turn into accomplices.
As Sadiq pressed him for details, I noted the hectic scene unfolding around us. A goat turned over a bucket to bite into a juicy bit of greens. A chicken swooped down from the roof. His wife rushed in with a tray of tea and biscuits. Beneath the veneer of rural tranquillity, unresolved tension bubbled, threatening to break the surface.
Sadiq asked him what he did with the money that came to his bank account. Amjad’s face fell. As if on cue, black clouds floated across a bright sky. Of the Rs 25 lakh that came in, he got to keep only Rs 2 lakh, he revealed, looking mournfully into the middle distance. The rest he transferred to the bank accounts of people who allegedly blackmailed him out of his own scam. New forms of corruption were being invented in real time, each scheme more cunning than the last.
A few days after he filed Abul’s death claim with Aviva, the company dispatched three private investigators, two men and a woman, from Haryana for verification. No sooner had they arrived in Tengabari than they discovered the fraud. One of them rang up Amjad and asked him to meet them on a riverbank after sunset. “I said, ‘Take whatever you want, but don’t say anything that will make them reject the claim’,” Amjad recounted as the first few drops of rain leaked through the vine overhead.
Later, in the police charge sheet accusing Amjad and his friends of an organised fraud against Aviva, we found the details of where the money went. Various portions of the Rs 23 lakh were wired to bank accounts owned by Kuldip Kumar Chauhan from Fatehabad, Ravindra Gupta from Ghaziabad and Sohan Lal from Panipat, among others – good Hindu names from prosperous towns in ‘mainland’ India. It turns out that investigating scams was an even more profitable scam. When a team of the Assam police travelled to Delhi and Haryana to track down the recipients, they found no one at the physical addresses attached to the bank accounts. In India, it’s scams all the way down. The file was closed.
Excerpted with permission from Scamlands: Inside the Asian Empire of Fraud That Preys on the World, Snigdha Poonam, Penguin India.
