Delhi did not in general attract businesspeople with startling ideas; as we have seen, it was in Bangalore that the best software companies were set up, also during the Indira Gandhi era. No: the people who were pulled in to Delhi in those years were the ones who needed to hack into the political establishment in order for their business to work. This included those who sought control over basic resources — real estate, minerals, petrochemicals; those who operated in highly regulated areas — such as telecoms or media; or those for whom the state was a major client — such as construction or heavy industries. All of these needed powerful patrons in the political and bureaucratic machinery if they were to get land, resources and approvals, and if they were to avoid critical operational delays, harassment of every imaginable kind, and even total shutdown for some trumped-up reason or other.
• • •
The enclaves built for Delhi’s high-ranking bureaucrats are invisible to most people. Set back from the road, and cut off by guard posts, they are pretty hamlets of quiet streets embraced by lush trees. Inside, chauffeurs dust off bureaucratic cars while gardeners water and prune the plants. The houses are well designed and maintained. There are different grades of accommodation for inhabitants of different ranks: the most splendid residences are large and cut off by hedges and private drives even from the rest of these cut-off places.
The house I come to is not one of these; it is on a street in a row of similar houses. But it is a comfortable dwelling, faintly reminiscent of the American suburbs: there is a basketball hoop at the end of the driveway. Meenu answers the door, apologetic for the fact that I have got so lost on my way. There is nothing for her to apologise for: these enclaves are designed to be found only by those who already know where they are.
The large sitting room we sit down in is strikingly empty of possessions. One has the feeling of a family that has moved many times and is ready to do so again, at a moment’s notice.
Meenu’s son runs out to see who the visitor is. He is delighted to have a stranger in the house, especially one as ignorant of contemporary ten-year-old-boy culture as I. He brings a succession of things he feels I need to know about: books, toys, games. He lies on the sofa with his feet up on the wall, telling me stories about his school. Meenu shoes him out of the room, saying, “Can I talk now?” He disappears for a while but will continue to launch illicit educational operations on me for the rest of the evening.
“I went to Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi,” says Meenu, “and I just sort of fell into the civil service exams. My father was in the bureaucracy so it wasn’t at all alien to me. I passed the exams on my first attempt, and I’ve been a bureaucrat since I was twenty-three.”
Now in her late thirties, Meenu has an elegant, thoughtful face. She is dressed casually, in jeans and a white shirt, and her hair is cut short.
“It’s the only kind of work I could be satisfied with,” she says. “Bureaucrats have a huge impact on ordinary lives, including people very far away.”
Her husband, Amit, comes into the room. He is tall and slim, and as soon as he enters I have the sense that he and his wife share an intimate bond. He works in the railway administration just as she does, which is how they met. Unlike her, he is from Bihar, where his father worked for the government.
The migrants who swelled the population of Delhi in the years after 1947, were not all poor and uneducated. Not by any means. As the capital, Delhi drew educated people from every corner of the country. It had two large and excellent universities, several research hospitals, and national centres for dance, theatre and music. It hosted the headquarters for countless research centres and NGOs. It was the centre of Indian journalism. And it was the hub for politics and the bureaucracy. These systems, though they were essential to the city’s make-up, were entirely cosmopolitan, and the local Punjabi majority had no hold over them.
“It is true that the bureaucracy is very corrupt,” says Meenu. “I would say that 80 per cent of bureaucrats are corrupt. Fifteen years after entering the bureaucracy, many of my peers own ten houses and fleets of cars.”
Needless to say, these assets were not bought with bureaucratic salaries, which rarely exceed $15,000 per year.
Amit joins in.
“People who aren’t there to make money are terrorised. Especially in highly corrupt areas like customs, which is where I worked before. If you have a high-value position which you’re not exploiting, if you’re not handing out money to the people around you, you get serious threats. It’s not so bad in the railways, where they just harass you by transferring you.”
‘Success’ in the Indian bureaucracy generally means getting to a position where you can offer something that powerful people need, or, even better, where you can hold harsh threats over their heads. The customs and tax services are therefore the most energetically entrepreneurial of all. Senior figures in these services can amass fortunes of tens of millions of dollars. It is a cut-throat game, however, and it requires great acumen. The Indian bureaucracy is consistently listed as the most corrupt in Asia, and this is usually intended as a slight. But with big money at stake and a fantastically complex set of competing interests to negotiate, corrupt Indian bureaucrats are no dud. They have skills and drives which equip them very well, in fact, for twenty-first-century life.
“There are levels of moneymaking, of course,” says Meenu. “At the bottom is ‘speed money’, which basically means collecting bribes for what you are supposed to do anyway. You don’t actually do anything wrong, you just charge for it twice. For instance, if you’re deciding the order that freight trains will depart in — and there is money riding on those trains because people are waiting for shipments — you can put the train first that was anyway going to go first and you’ll still get 5,000 rupees [$100] speed money. Because people are so used to paying. It has sunk into the psyche that unless you pay it won’t happen. When you enter the services your seniors tell you, ‘Just do your job and money will come anyway’. Of course, if you put another train first you’ll make 200,000 rupees [$4,000].”
One can appreciate the conviction with which market forces are applied. Why not let the market decide in which order trains run? The first slot is a commodity that can be auctioned, and whoever wants it the most, gets it. It is market capitalism in its purest form. The ability to create markets out of nothing, the ability to see that everything has a financial value: these things mark out India’s bureaucrats, not just as the rod in capitalism’s churning wheels, which is how they are usually portrayed, but also as a talented entrepreneurial class with a profound capitalist instinct.
“We were transferred to Ferozepur,” Amit says, “the most corrupt centre of the northern railways. We told our boss, ‘We don’t want to go. It’s very corrupt there.’ Our boss was amazed. ‘In Ferozepur,’ he said, ‘you only have to open your drawers and bundles of cash will fall in.’ It was true. Even boxes of sweets you were given at festival time would be stuffed with cash. Those were some of the most desirable positions in the country and people would pay big money to get them, knowing they would earn ten or twenty times their salary in bribes.”