Rana Dasgupta - Capital - The Eruption of Delhi

People like Mickey talk about Delhi as a kind of El Dorado, where fortunes pour in overnight, almost without your asking. In this country, at this time, they say, you’ve got to be an absolute fool to go wrong. But for all the talk of ‘new money’, most Delhi fortunes are not, strictly speaking, new. They have certainly exploded in the last few years, and small-town powerhouses have indeed turned into metropolitan, and even global, ones. But they rest on influence, assets and connections built over many decades, and in that sense they are wholly traditional. The sudden prominence of a new, provincial elite should not lead one to think that the economy has become somehow democratic. People like Mickey have always had money, and they see the world from that perspective. The gruelling, arid Delhi of so many people’s experience is not a city they know.

“Where do you place yourself in the pyramid of Delhi wealth?” I ask. “There can’t be many people turning over a billion dollars?”

“You have no idea.” He smiles condescendingly. “Most people don’t go public with their money. They don’t want scrutiny. I would never list my company.”

“Who’s the most powerful person in Delhi?”

“It all depends on politics. You can have a billion but if you have no connections, it doesn’t mean anything. My family has been building connections for two generations and we know everyone. We know people in every political party, we never suffer when the government changes.”

“So why do you travel with bodyguards?”

“The Uttar Pradesh police intercepted communications about a plan to kidnap me, and they told my father. People want money and they think of the easiest way, which is to take it from someone who has it. They can’t do anything constructive themselves so they think short-term. We need more professionalism in India. More corporate governance. Then we’ll show the entire world.”

For good reason, Mickey is grateful to India.

“Since I was fourteen I’ve realised India is the place. I love this place, this is where it’s at. Elsewhere you may have as much money as Lakshmi Mittal but you’re still a second-class citizen. This is your fucking country. You should do it here.”

Mickey tells me about his dislike for America.

“Why should Walmart come in here? I don’t mind Gucci and LV — they do nothing to disturb the social fabric. But keep Walmart out of here. We were under slavery for 700 fucking years. We’ve only been free for sixty. Give us another thirty, and we will buy Walmart. I tell you, I was at a party the other day and I had my arms round two white people and I suddenly pushed them away and said, ‘Why are you here? We don’t need you guys anymore.’”

Twenty-eight years old, well travelled and richer than most people on the planet, Mickey’s resentment towards white people is unexpectedly intense. I ask him how the world would be different if it were run by Indians.

“It will be more spiritual,” he says. But then he thinks for a moment and says,

“No. It will be exactly the same.”

I bring our conversation to an end. Mickey pays the bill, and we walk outside to the quiet car park.

“Thanks,” he says, shaking my hand. I don’t really know why.

His driver opens the back door of his BMW, and Mickey gets in. The gates open, the BMW sweeps out, and behind it an SUV full of bodyguards.

Mickey lives about 200 metres away.

I drive home, thinking over our conversation. I ponder a little detail: during my loo break he took advantage of my absence to send a text message to our common friend. Just checking that I really knew her. Somewhere in Mickey is something alert and intimidating.

I’m still driving when he sends a text message to me, asking me not to quote certain things he has said. I write back:

ok if you answer one more question. what does money mean to you?

He responds straight away:

one of the end products of my hard work, it does mean a lot I respect it, it gives me more hard work and on the side a bit of luxury (:

• • •

Like other political strongmen concerned with hygiene and reproductive discipline, Sanjay Gandhi had been consumed by the dream of developing for his country a ‘people’s car’.

Sanjay loved cars and planes. He had no academic inclinations, and did not attend college; instead he spent three years as an apprentice at Rolls-Royce Motors in England. In 1967 he returned to India, aged twenty-one, and told his mother, India’s new prime minister, of his idea for a new car company. He called it Maruti Motors Ltd, ‘Maruti’ being an epithet for the ultra-mobile monkey god, Hanuman. Using the power of the Congress political machine he also acquired 297 acres of land for a factory in nearby Haryana. The name and the land were his two significant contributions to the company at the time of his death. The subsequent partnership with Suzuki, and the revolution that Maruti brought about in middle-class car ownership in India, were the work of others.

But Sanjay Gandhi’s decision to locate Maruti in Gurgaon was, in the long-term, momentous. It came at a time when the city of Delhi was reaching the limits of its commercial real estate. Neither the British nor Nehru had allocated space in the city for the large number of businesses it began to host from the 1970s, and many of them operated out of houses and hotels. The developmental monopoly, the DDA, made one concession to this need: Nehru Place, a warren of now-rotting commercial buildings in the south-east of the city. But to anyone who could look at the city with the perspective of twenty years, it was set to overflow in a massive way.

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.