A corrupt ant kingdom

1200 million ants are jostling in a not-so-large territory.  The worker ants produce enough food with their sweat and blood and they are sold to ant markets or to the collection agents of the ruler-ants who give them a little and keep the rest to themselves. These agents of the ant-government can be easily be identified as they work very little, are well fed, with good dwellings and more than enough storage of food.  There is another group who belong to the upper echelons of the ant-hierarchy having direct access to the ant-queen who, unlike others of her genre, is not big but diminutive, white, quite dignified, and lives in an intricate palace given free by the ant-government consisting of a series of underground chambers, connected to each other and to the surface of the ant city by small tunnels. She uses these intricate networks for transporting and hoarding the rich food delicacies and grains collected from the worker ants. There are other ornate rooms for retiring, meeting with her son-ant and other top officials of the ant-governing body.

 Again, unlike other ant queens she does not like the work of even laying all the eggs. She has so far laid only  two eggs which were  hatched with a lot of fanfare and one of the hatchlings  will eventually inherit the ant-kingdom.  She has relegated the work of laying eggs to the other lesser queens and the ordinary female ants by a special act of the ant parliament. The minor queens and kings shares the legal taxes collected and the wealth accumulated through graft.

When the underground cellars are full, she sends the wealth secretly to foreign stores of far away ant kingdoms. A part of this wealth is used during the election of ant-representatives to their law making bodies. Each candidate is given enough money to go and win the election by hook or crook. The queen with all her wealth is unchallenged and although she holds a major chunk of the black money in the kingdom, she is not questioned or accused as the police departments and the top investigating chiefs are under her thumb. She cleverly evades the issue and makes the poor ant-population believe that she, her family members and the court jesters are all clean and corrupt-free. The ants in general are always poor and hungry. One in two is starving and one in three is illiterate. The hungry, naked ones, pre-occupied with procuring the bare necessities for survival, are least concerned with what the queen or her courtiers do with the wealth of the ant-nation. The illiterate ants do not even know the policies of the Queen; let alone what is happening in the ant-parliament.

As the ants believe in different faiths, it is easy for the queen to manipulate the votes unblock of a minority community by blindly supporting it in their fight with the majority religious groups. The ant-media is fully controlled by the queen with her money power and the not-so-poor-not-so- rich ants which form about 30% of the ant-population (mostly the ant–government employees and blue collared  workers), influenced by the media lies, support the queen’s policies and she goes on unchallenged. The kingdom is said to be a democracy but the governance is simply autocratic and queen controlled. Ants are dying every day and the queen is sending rockets to seek interstellar ant colonies and she pops up an occasional crude nuclear device and announces the same with headlines like ‘ant-kingdom in the nuclear club.’ The national wealth is spent for the ant-government employees, such ridiculous programs and the remaining disappears in graft.