Such a man was Kushal Pal Singh, the man behind Gurgaon’s extraordinary rise. His father, who was a military man from Punjab, set up a real-estate business around the time of Partition, which was instrumental in developing new neighbourhoods for the waves of arriving refugees; this business was however decimated when the DDA was set up. K.P. Singh was charged with reviving the business, later called DLF, and in 1979, unable to operate in Delhi, he began to buy up rural land to the south of the city around Sanjay Gandhi’s then-defunct factory. This is how he describes the process:
I did everything it took to persuade these farmers to trust me. I spent weeks and months with their families. I wore kurtas, sat on charpoys, drank fly-infested milk from dirty glasses, attended weddings, visited the sick. To understand why this was important, it is necessary to understand the landholding pattern. The average plot size in Gurgaon was four to five acres, mostly held by Hindu undivided families. Legally, to get clear titles, I needed the consent of every adult member of these families. That could be up to thirty people for one sale deed. Getting the married daughters to sign was often tricky because the male head of the family would refuse to share the proceeds of the sale with them. So I would travel to their homes and pay the daughters in secret. Remarkably, Gurgaon’s farmers sold me land on credit. I would pay one farmer and promptly take the money back as a loan and use that to buy more land. The firm’s good will made them willing to act as bankers for DLF. But it also meant I had to be extra careful about interest payments. Come rain or shine, the interest would be hand-delivered to each farmer on the third of every month at 10 a. m. We bought 3,500 acres of land in Gurgaon, more than half of it on credit, without one litigation against DLF.52
Even allowing for the romantic distortions of this account, Singh’s enterprise was remarkable. Even if things went well, it would take decades before his investment was recouped. And at that time, in the late 1970s, it required a great leap of the imagination to even glimpse that future pay-off. Gurgaon was a dry, inaccessible place where very little happened beyond the wanderings of goat-herders on the baked earth. There were about eight cars in the whole village and one had to book a phone call to Delhi an hour in advance. There was one little shop whose owner used to dry his grain on the sidewalk; the only place to go for dinner was the local dhaba. When K.P. Singh first called Delhi building companies to trudge out into the far-off brushland and discuss building apartment complexes for the rich and successful, the contractors thought he was mad. As late as 1994, when an entertainment complex was set up with a disco and a bowling alley, Delhi consumers were so scared of going to the wilds of Gurgaon that the owner had to set up his own road lighting along the tiny road and provide roving security vans to make visitors feel safe. But with the corporate influx of the late 1990s, everything changed. When I first visited Gurgaon in 2001, it was a bizarre and thrilling scene of huge, glinting skyscrapers rising improbably from the dust of the Haryana countryside and being crowned, finally, with the banners of some of the world’s largest economic entities: Microsoft, IBM, Ericsson.
It was not just corporations that set up there. DLF proclaimed a better lifestyle, a “new Singapore” of gated communities, golf courses and shopping malls, and before long corporate employees, too, ran from Delhi’s dysfunctional infrastructure and political culture to make their homes in Gurgaon. Flush with boom cash, India’s banks handed out loans to anyone who asked, and house prices were rising so fast that it made sense for everyone to put their savings into property. Gurgaon quickly became the largest private township in Asia, a dusty, booming expanse of hypertrophic, high-security apartment complexes which looked down on a landscape of pure commerce. In 2007, K.P. Singh listed his company on the Indian stock exchanges, and the 2008 Forbes list estimated him to be the world’s eighth-richest man, with a white-money fortune of $30 billion.
By that time of course, there were several other real-estate magnates in the capital. The land surrounding Delhi was an amazing commodity, doubling in value every three or four years, and multiplying its value by sixty times by the simple addition of bricks, concrete and a bit of cheap labour — and the 2000s saw a desperate land rush. Hundreds of thousands of acres of agricultural land were sold on to developers. Companies that had previously made their money from car parts or chemicals now realised the bulk of their profits from real estate, and major banks such as Deutsche Bank and Morgan Stanley queued up to fund them. Small-time developers from drab little towns like Ghaziabad became serious property moguls, who sent their sons to US business schools to learn how to run billion-dollar businesses. Delhi became dominated by real-estate wealth, and this was a certain kind of wealth. Real estate was a scramble, and it was nearly impossible to operate at any significant scale without a wide network of paid connections among politicians, bureaucrats and the police. Brute force was often essential. Real-estate mafias grabbed country houses in Haryana and employed the police to silence the owners by filing false criminal charges against them. In Uttar Pradesh, they forced farmers and tribal communities to sell their land under threat of violence, employed the local police to clear the locals off, and sold it on at a large profit. There was a general escalation of criminality and violence, and the people who came through with new fortunes were a formidable breed. They knew how to hijack state power for their own private profit, and they enjoyed the support of the police and of much-feared extortion gangs. Such people had cracked the muscular equation of contemporary India, and they spurned its liberal platitudes as just so much pious cant.
Land provoked in them a remarkable, almost religious fervour, as nothing else could. The centuries-long precariousness we have already described led people from this part of the world to esteem the ownership and control of land above all other values — often above even family relationships, which is why so many families were split by property battles. Both K.P. Singh and Mickey Chopra came from Punjabi families hit by historical losses, and there was something very Punjabi about the excessiveness of their land ambitions. K.P. Singh’s piecing together of his Gurgaon empire, bit by bit, over two decades, has an obsession to it that goes beyond simple commercial ambition. It is a personal crusade, a life’s work. At first glance it may seem like pure acquisitiveness, but that is only in retrospect, when the work is done and the land has been turned into money. In the act itself there is something glorious and even selfless that returns us to the warrior ethos we have previously observed in north Indian business. So too in Mickey Chopra’s scheme to buy three quarters of a million acres of Africa and farm it with Punjabi farmers: it has a commercial logic which should not detract from the fact that it is also a kind of grand chivalric feat. In the early twenty-first century, warriors from north India were riding abroad, and the impact of their vehemence was as turbulent outside the country as it was at home. One of the many reasons Africa was so attractive to Indian land speculators, in fact, was that rural communities often had a more slender claim to the land they lived on there than in India, and they could be much more easily turfed off in the name of total ownership. In such places as Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Ghana, Sudan and Namibia, Indian businessmen scrambled to acquire mines and especially agricultural land under the sponsorship of their country’s politicians, who organised business tours of these places and informed their African counterparts that only India, with its experience of the Green Revolution, could bring to their countries the skills and knowledge they lacked. While some of the people who had previously farmed this land were of course employed as wage workers on the new plantations, the majority were not. Many of these lands were highly fertile and had historically supported very dense populations, only a small proportion of which were now given a place there. In the African countryside too, therefore, Indian money helped accelerate the evacuation of the countryside, leading waves of refugees into the cities, and the escalation of slum living.