Rana Dasgupta - Capital - The Eruption of Delhi

8% growth has some people flex with Lexuses

In South Ex shop for Rolexes and diamond necklaces

Land developers come down hard build power nexuses

They build more malls and shopping complexcesses

State militia vacate villages — next Exodus

So you can cash checks of Sensex indexes.

What did ‘ordinary’ middle-class people feel in those years?

As we noted at the beginning of this book, middle-class people were still not really, in this context, ‘ordinary’. But there were a lot of them nonetheless. In Delhi they numbered in the low millions. And as in any other group of that size there was essentially an infinity of experience. Happy, unhappy. Extraordinary, ordinary.

But the city was a powerful force of its own, and it did supply certain kinds of consistency to middle-class moods. It was possessed of immense energy, and energy is magnetic, whatever its effects: so people were animated and industrious to an unusual degree — until they were claimed by fatigue, which was also prominent in the city. In its protean shifts and transformations, Delhi was also fantastically interesting , and people were extremely preoccupied with their own urban condition, discussing the city’s moods, developments and events all the time, ad nauseam, for good and for ill. But Delhi was not particularly hospitable to the more carefree moods. It was unusual to find contentment, except in the old. Pure joy was rare, except in the very young. And there was a diminution of spontaneity, too, over the course of the century’s first decade, so that these lighter moods became more endangered over time.

During the 1990s, the middle classes had seen a lot of immediate, and mostly gratifying, changes in their lives. Many of them had been relieved to see the end of state controls: they had been stimulated by new jobs, TV channels, products and travel possibilities — and they had reached the year 2000 with a sense of ever-expanding horizons. They felt this was their moment , not only in a local but in a global sense. The world’s age-old domination by the West was coming to an end, and with it their country’s indignity. They looked out with imperial hopes on the rest of the world, and relished every story of Indian corporations buying Western companies.

But the festive atmosphere turned considerably more gloomy and cynical in the second half of the decade. The middle classes continued to make money, and they were the beneficiaries of a substantial re-allocation of resources from the country’s poor. But their lives also became more risky and expensive, and their expanded capitalist incomes did not buy as much as they had thought. Wealth and opportunity seemed to have been won at the expense of a parallel escalation of savagery in their city, and they found themselves more fearful and anxious even as they owned better cars. Wondering what kind of society they were creating, they became wistful for things they had resented while they were still around: cows in the streets, and pavement vendors with improbable trades. Their own get-rich-quick ethos came back to sting them, because in this period of astonishing wealth creation rather little care was taken of the future; and when the new economy’s ‘low-hanging fruit’ had all been plucked, it began to seize up for want of long-term planning and investment. After verging on double digits several times during the decade, GDP growth slowed to around 5 per cent in 2012. One of the reasons for this stalling was that the boom had remained too confined to the educated minority, and had offered rather little opportunity to the great numbers of the unskilled — and it had done frustratingly little to alter the situation of the majority of the Indian population. Development indicators for the country as a whole were lower than in much poorer Bangladesh next door — sixty-one children out of every 1,000 born live still died before the age of five (even in Delhi the number was twenty-eight; China had achieved a nationwide fifteen) 56— a fact which itself went some way to quelling any excessive pride in the nation’s economic achievement. But in their own lives, the middle classes found that infrastructure remained terrible, it was almost impossible to secure a world-class education for one’s children, bureaucracy choked all entrepreneurial whims — and the middle classes realised that their own continued rise was far less dependable than they had come to believe.

They also came to the unpleasant realisation during this decade that they were not the ones in charge. It dawned on the Delhi middle classes that their emerging urban society was administered, to a great extent, by a shadowy cabal whose interests were very different, and even inimical, to their own. As time went on, this backroom elite seemed to monopolise more and more of the opportunities and resources of their city, for even very modest entrepreneurial ventures — such as opening a café or a bookstore — demanded levels of political connections that were difficult or impossible for ordinary people. The new consumer landscape of designer bars and fashion boutiques, which might have signalled some multifarious capitalist heterogeneity, therefore felt oddly uniform and, indeed, sleazy: just more profits for the same corrupt gang. By the end of the decade, many middle-class people were blaming these unelected managers for the fact that Delhi, despite its influx of wealth, was still so dilapidated and under-resourced. They began to feel that Delhi was being run as a private racket, and with a depressing lack of care for its development. They felt that their own feelings and opinions were entirely irrelevant to Delhi’s evolution, and that many of the things they had dreamed of for their city were never going to materialise. They felt that they were living in a kind of fantasy and that reality was elsewhere, for even their newspapers hardly mentioned the enormous proportion of the economy that operated invisibly to the state and to the financial community because they had no independently verifiable information about it. The picture one got of Indian business from the press was therefore an entirely corporate one, but this picture said nothing about the great eruptions of new power and money in India, and it therefore failed to explain why life had taken on the bizarre contours it had. This is why society was so awash in rumour and conspiracy theories, which seemed the best way to express the doubts one has about the fiction of reality.

Perhaps it was with the scandals preceding the 201 °Commonwealth Games that middle-class hopes of their society’s future became dashed. For many people, these scandals, which blew the lid on a set of mechanisms usually hidden from view, explained much about why their landscape took the particular form that it did. With some sixty countries attending, the Games had been anticipated as a moment of international visibility and prestige. The affluent classes were in general sympathetic to the avowed ambitions of Delhi’s political managers, who saw the Games as an opportunity to secure extraordinary budgets and powers for a profound transformation of the city: building much-needed new transport infrastructure, restoring and cleaning up the city, evicting the poor from informal settlements on what was now much-prized land. For many of the poor, it was a catastrophe, but it seemed to the middle classes that if the gains came at a price, the best people to pay it were the ones who were miserable anyway.

But as 2010 approached it became clear that many of these supposed benefits would never materialise. Even the mainstream press, usually so enamoured of power and money, hurled daily abuse and accusations at the power nexus that had thrown itself into the scramble for the Games budget. This budget was large and, as it proved, highly elastic since, having agreed to host a mega-event, administrators could hardly refuse to pay if key contractors suddenly inflated their prices a few months before the opening ceremony. It was estimated that preparations for the Games, including the attendant development projects, ultimately set public finances back by 70,000 crore rupees [$14 billion] 57— forty times the original budget — and it was obvious that much of the increase could be blamed on an immense racket of bureaucrats and their friends in construction and trade, who over-charged (toilet paper was supplied to the organisers, famously, at $80 a roll) and under-delivered. The sturdy, well-equipped city that the middle classes had dreamed of never arrived: instead there arrived a kind of temporary plaster facsimile of such a thing which, in the end, bore no resemblance to the computer-generated images with which the whole decade-long endeavour had been sold.