Rana Dasgupta - Capital - The Eruption of Delhi

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.”

“Another time, we were transferred to Bikaner,” says Meenu, “and I had discretionary authority over people’s jobs, which meant I was very powerful.”

“Meenu was the first woman bureaucrat to be there,” Amit adds. “Men didn’t know how to address her. They used to call her Sir .”

“When we arrived, all the small business owners came queuing up to offer favours. The dry cleaner said, ‘Please use my shop,’ and I asked him for a price list. He was very offended. ‘It’s free, Madam.’ Because these people want access to senior bureaucrats and they will pay for it. The payback comes when they bring people to your house in your private time and ask for favours. ‘Please don’t send my brother-in-law to a less attractive posting.’

“For instance, the man who worked the platform going towards Delhi made a lot of money from tips and bribes from passengers wanting to get on the train, whereas the platform going in the other direction made much less. What most bureaucrats do is to rotate people among these jobs. So those who have the lucrative positions have to lobby to hold onto them.

“At another time, I was in charge of New Delhi railway station. Every day 1 lakh [$2,000] used to come up from the ticket windows and was distributed to officers.”

“Have you ever bought a ticket at those windows?” says Amit. “Have you ever wondered why it’s such a nightmare? It is deliberately kept like that. Half of Indian chaos is the deliberate strategy of the bureaucracy. Because if things were efficient, there would be no reason to pay bribes. Ticket counters in stations are big sources of unofficial money.”

“At the centre of this business is the man behind the reservation window,” explains Meenu. “When I arrived in Delhi I got a call from a cabinet minister who wanted to propose a particular candidate for this job. I was astonished that one of the most powerful people in the country would personally make a call about the ticket seller in New Delhi station whose salary is maybe 6,000 rupees [$120] a month.

“I wanted to improve work conditions in the station. I felt that my workers were not getting decent breaks. I went right back to the railway regulations written by the British, to see what the rules were about employee breaks, and I found that they were supposed to have two fifteen-minute breaks a day. I got rid of the tea boy who came round serving tea to people while they worked, and I set up a special tea room where people could relax in their breaks.