Rana Dasgupta - Capital - The Eruption of Delhi

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.

The techniques exported by warrior businessmen extended not only to land use. It turned out that the political skills they had acquired at home, where they bought up sections of the political establishment as an extension of their business infrastructure, served them extremely well in the new battlegrounds of Africa. Far from being a primitive, dying breed, India’s ‘robber barons’ saw a bright future for themselves in the twenty-first century. In Africa, central Asia and the other key territories of contemporary resource battles, they had a great number of competitive advantages over, say, American corporations. They possessed large amounts of unmonitored capital which could be turned into cash for bribes or unofficial purchases. They knew far better than American CEOs how to navigate the political corridors of post-colonial countries. And they had a warlike sense of mission that almost nothing could contain.

It is no surprise, therefore, that one began to see, in several countries outside India, new and aggressive Indian elites who were feared by local populations and often treated as new imperialists. An example would be that of the Gupta brothers, who left Mickey Chopra’s home state of Uttar Pradesh in 1994 to explore business opportunities in South Africa. Their father was a small-town businessman who sent his sons to high school under armed guard; he set up a trading company in Delhi which the three sons went on to run in the 1980s, gaining their business spurs in the Indian capital in the years either side of liberalisation. During that time, they heard it was possible for Indians who had lived under South African apartheid to receive, like blacks, special business privileges. Having never lived under South African apartheid, they were not eligible for ‘Black Economic Empowerment’ status, but they managed to secure it all the same. As one newspaper commented, speaking of the commercial advantages won in this way by aggressive businesspeople like the Guptas, “Critics of black economic empowerment legislation say it has increasingly served a small elite, creating Russian-style oligarchs who enjoy vast wealth while doing little to serve the plight of the millions of poor.” 53

The brothers’ father sent money from Delhi to fund the early development of their business and, on their arrival, they:

… rapidly made contact with rising stars of the new black elite. Today, the Guptas are known for their billionaire lifestyles and open-door access to the highest levels of government, including the president Jacob Zuma. Living in a 52 million rand [$6.5 million] mansion in Saxonwold, a Johannesburg suburb lined with century-old oak trees [and a $3-million house in Johannesburg, formerly the home of Mark Thatcher] the brothers are alleged to have used close political links for participation in contracts legislation had set aside for blacks…