“What happened in Delhi in 1984 was an organised massacre of people and I don’t think the city has a capacity to absorb what happened. The scars don’t heal. In me, personally, the scars have not healed. The only release I have had is through my discovery of other people who have been subjected to that kind of violence — though in a much more sustained way — at the hands of the Indian state. Almost every village in Nagaland has been raped by the Indian army. Consistently. Their villages have been burnt and they have been relocated in other areas so that they are forced to encroach on other people’s territory. That produces violence. Then the state comes in with violence to stop that violence. So the north-east is a cauldron.
“When I encountered those people, I realised that my suffering was nothing compared to theirs. They have suffered immeasurably, but that is their strength, their resilience. Their hands have been cut off and their villages destroyed but they still put their high-caste oppressors to shame because they have dignity. They are capable of looking after themselves. They are brilliant. They are survivors. When everything explodes, they will survive. The elite will not, because when all this is dismantled, they will have nothing to rely upon except dignity and character, which they do not have.
“In the north-east, they know everything about their surroundings and they eat everything. There is no shortage of food. They know how to survive in famine because they know which leaves to eat, which fruits to eat. They can eat dogs, they can eat rats, and they have very good cuisine. They don’t overdo anything. And here these Hindu-type people: they can’t eat this, they can’t eat that. They are the ones really living in famine, if you ask me.
“If a natural catastrophe comes to this city, all hell will break loose. I see that coming. I see this city going into ruins, just tumbling into the dust. When an earthquake hits, when the water runs out, Delhi people will not help each other. They will slaughter each other.”
Jaswant is quite merry as he says all this.
“The other day I was sitting in my car, in the market, listening to some music. Three police cars were parked next to me and the policemen were playing cards. I got out and asked them what they were up to. They said they were protecting the son of a cabinet minister. ‘He’s come to spend some money, he’s an irresponsible, useless fellow, all he does is chase women and get drunk. We are his security team, three police cars.’
“That is the society we live in. Our policemen are not supposed to do anything for society. All they’re supposed to do is protect rapacious elites from it. But the people who are protecting them have total contempt for them. One day, if things continue like this, they will shoot them dead.”
Fifteen
Everyone wants their house to be done up in the style of a Russian oligarch.
— Interior designer to the Delhi rich
Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination in 1991, purportedly at the hands of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, against whose Sri Lankan terrorist campaign he had made public statements, took place in the midst of the largest financial scandal the country had ever seen. The ‘Bofors’ scandal arose from rumours that the Swedish company had contrived to secure a multibillion-dollar arms contract by paying large kickbacks to several members of the Congress Party, including prime minister Rajiv Gandhi himself. The scandal reached to the heart of the Indian polity not only because of the unprecedented size of the bribes involved — which have been estimated at around $40 million46 — but also the fact that they reached to the summit of government and, indeed, to the Nehru dynasty.
The exact truth of these allegations has never been reliably confirmed. But it seems quaint, in retrospect, to see the shock they provoked. And this is because the liberalisation of the economy, which took place a few months after Rajiv Gandhi’s death, greatly expanded both the scale and the frequency of ‘big ticket’ deal-making of this sort. It introduced, indeed, an entirely new system of financial flows which concentrated enormous money in the hands of a small nexus of dealmakers from the worlds of politics and business. It generated a new Indian oligarchy.
• • •
Insofar as public administration was a money-making venture, liberalisation represented, in the short-term, a disaster. The end of the license regime meant that public officials no longer enjoyed their traditional hold over business. Businessmen did not have to approach them for licenses every time they wanted to expand a factory or launch a new product, which meant that, for politicians and bureaucrats, large revenue streams disappeared.
But administration was a business, and like other businesses it found ways to innovate in the face of adversity. Politicians and bureaucrats sought out new revenue streams. They began to collect not small sums from large numbers of petitioners but large sums from a few. And they did not make money any more by charging for the removal of obstacles. Instead they ‘earned’ their money by becoming partners to business and taking over an entire branch of business operations — that branch which required the powers of the state.
This came at a time when big business, for its part, was greatly in need of this manner of partnership. The years after liberalisation saw a large-scale transfer of ownership of basic resources — the so-called ‘commanding heights’ of the economy, which Nehru had reserved for the state — to private hands. These included mines, oil and gas, and that fuel of the new economy, the mobile telephony spectrum — and, of course, land, the basic resource par excellence. Whoever could secure control of these resources would inevitably make fantastic gains. But there was no precedent for the process of transfer: it was — in India as in the former Soviet Bloc in the same years — a makeshift scramble, and its outcome lay, ultimately, in the hands of the political establishment. The businessmen who came out on top, therefore, were the ones with strong political connections — often those who had already been cultivating those connections since Mrs Gandhi’s time. Since the stakes could not have been higher — for whosoever could control the new Indian economy would be propelled to global levels of influence — politicians could also charge handsomely for their preferment. There was suddenly a level of deal-making that made Bofors seem infantile. The early twenty-first-century scandals surrounding corporations’ under-payment for the mobile telephony spectrum and for mines mentioned sums in the tens and even hundreds of billions of dollars. India’s pool of billionaires expanded rapidly, increasing their wealth from less than 1 per cent of national income in 1996 to 22 per cent in 2008. Sixty per cent of this billionaire wealth was built up from sectors closely controlled by government: property development, infrastructure, construction, mining, telecoms, cement and media.47
It was no wonder that most people in Delhi, where the largest of these deals were done, believed that the very richest people in the city were not those whose wealth was published in corporate accounts, but the ones who travelled around in ancient white Ambassadors and earned a salary of $1,000 per month. Politicians refrained from acquiring valuable assets in their own names, but somehow their brothers and sons seemed suddenly to own fabulous land and property, and to have investments in a fantastic range of ventures. Was it not suspicious how many political families bid for cricket teams in the Indian Premier League auction? Was it not a sign of how valuable political offices were to their incumbents that campaign spending doubled with each general election48 — which in turn put even more pressure on politicians to turn their situation to profit? There were extraordinary rumours about politicians’ personal worth. The media tried to guess what level of riches were involved by tracking consumer indulgences — houses, cars, children at expensive American schools — and there was in those years widespread resentment about the seemingly charmed lifestyle of so-called public servants. But in many ways, this interest in personal property and lifestyle was to miss the point. Because the people playing at the top of this game had long since passed the level where personal enrichment was the objective. They were involved in something far more grandiose than this, and something that enriched their entrepreneur partners more than themselves. That was not the point, however: these people were the power brokers of the new India, and what they were running was a system for privatised commercial development that was its own reward — a system with an entirely different structure to the ‘normal’ economy in which middle-class people earned money and bought things to improve their lives.