Capital: The Eruption of Delhi

Thirteen

[The bourgeoisie] has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors’, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment’… It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade.

— Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 1848

It will come as no surprise that the warrior ethos did not allow much room for concern about the weak. Life was war. Too bad for the ones who could not fight.

The members of the flourishing bourgeoisie that is the subject of this book constituted, of course, a small minority of the Delhi population. They owed much of their prosperity, indeed, to the fact that they were situated in the middle of an ocean of poverty. Sweeping away from Delhi’s south-eastern edge was the vast swathe of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, where 300 million people earned an average of $500 per year. Not only were they very poor, they were also politically weak and their lives were getting worse. They constituted therefore a cheap and near-infinite resource for the labour-intensive industries — such as construction, mining and manufacturing — that made Delhi wealthy.

The fact that their lives were getting worse was not despite the boom in the Indian economy but because of it. The boom was fuelled, in part, by a corporate occupation of the countryside which pitted big money against poor agricultural and tribal communities, turning rural India into a turbulent and volatile battleground. Expanding business needed land, and most of India’s land was in the hands of small farmers, whose legal ownership of it had been well secured during the Nehru years. Since most farmers owned only a hectare or two each, and since most of them did not wish to sell, acquiring hundreds or thousands of hectares of contiguous land was almost impossible to pull off legally and within businesslike timeframes. So the post-liberalisation period was witness to various forms of seizure involving millions of hectares of rural land.

Sometimes this was achieved by so-called land mafias. Many large fortunes were acquired in those years by ‘land-aggregators’ who got farmers off their land with gang violence, or who used connections in the political establishment not only to arbitrarily re-allocate land but also to enforce the order with state resources — such as the police. But often the land grab was enacted by the state according to the terms of the Land Acquisition Act of 1894, an instrument introduced by the British empire to legalise the expropriation of lands from their historical owners to the colonial power — and indeed the rampage of Indian elites in their own country bore a significant resemblance to that of nineteenth-century European imperialists in other countries. Land was repossessed under an authoritarian law, little or no compensation was given to the people who previously made their living from it, and it was sold on, often at ten times the price, to corporations, which then used it in ways that actively destroyed the living of that place — employing the former landowners, now conveniently destitute, as construction workers, miners and factory labour.

Farmers who protested against the forcible acquisition of their land for the purposes of Special Economic Zones or automobile factories sometimes found themselves jailed or, in extreme cases, shot. But such a large-scale and devastating revolution could not proceed without widespread resistance. At any one point there were hundreds of protests across the country over land appropriation. Most distressingly for the political establishment, an armed Maoist rebellion swept the country’s most devastated rural regions, and in many places usurped all state control. By 2006, armed groups were organised throughout the eastern states of Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal and Andhra Pradesh, and were said to occupy a fifth of India’s forests. Prime minister Manmohan Singh declared in that year that they represented the ‘single biggest security challenge ever faced by our country’³³ — which was something of a shock to urban elites, most of whom found it difficult to imagine, by that time, that they shared their country with hundreds of millions of beleaguered farmers, hunter — gatherers and other such mythological creatures.

But the wars of which they remained, for the most part, so blissfully ignorant were violent and consequential. In the mineral-rich state of Chhattisgarh, the government sold mining leases for land on which large populations subsisted by hunting and gathering; in order to clear these people away, the state government used the services of a people’s militia, the Salwa Judum or ‘Purification Hunt’. The Salwa Judum was an armed movement fostered by the mainstream political parties in the hope that it could drain and defeat the Maoist insurgency that was threatening the state in those desperate years; under the impetus of this new political mission it went beserk, looting and burning villages, raping and killing and herding tribal populations into prison camps. Hundreds of thousands fled the onslaught, thus transporting conflict and competition over resources to other places.

But even those rural communities who managed to escape such land battles found that it was increasingly difficult to survive doing what they had previously done. Given their dependence on the rains — the right amount at the right time — many farmers had been for a long time balanced precariously between success and failure. The processes unleashed by liberalisation helped to tip them irreversibly to the side of the latter.

This was partly because of altered ecological conditions, particularly as regarded water. The expanding cities found themselves in a greater and greater water deficit, and had to pull it in from further and further afield, drying out villages and agriculture to a radius of hundreds of kilometres. New factories in the countryside needed large and predictable water supplies — some of them made fizzy drinks, after all, or even bottled water — and the corporations looking to make these investments did so only if the state would guarantee these supplies through wet times and dry. Where the availability of water was already precarious, it could now become unviable.

But liberalisation also changed the economics of agriculture, introducing new earning options to farmers which also carried with them much higher levels of risk. Many farmers were anyway pushed towards such new options because the high-intensity farming introduced in the 1960s — the ‘Green Revolution’ — had by that time exhausted their land and they were obliged to explore the possibility of new crops and chemical supplements. At the same time, the arrival of global corporations looking to India’s farmers to supply raw materials for processed foods presented them with new revenue and indeed lifestyle opportunities. Many farmers therefore opted to stop growing food and to pursue higher returns by growing cash crops such as sugar cane, coffee, cotton, spices or flowers. But this left a financially vulnerable group highly exposed to market fluctuations — the price of food, for instance, which they now had to buy, soared during those years — and sometimes the gamble ended in ruin.

Also, in the years after 1991, successive Indian governments signed up to international trade agreements that committed them to accepting and enforcing foreign corporations’ demands regarding the use of their products; these included protection for the new generations of patented seeds issued by global biotech corporations. Farmers subscribed to these products in large numbers precisely because agricultural conditions were so bad and the seeds were offered as a solution. But according to the licenses, these seeds had to be bought each season from the manufacturers, and many of them were engineered to produce sterile offspring, so that farmers could not, as they traditionally had, save seeds from one season to plant the next. The seeds were also designed, often, to be used in conjunction with certain fertiliser and pesticide products which required not only significant cash outlay but also extensive training, which was usually lacking. In an environmental context that was already becoming more stern, many farmers exhausted their land with the new chemicals and entered an impossible spiral of debt, usually incurred to local money-lenders who charged extremely high rates of interest (in this, as in so many things, the poor paid more than the rich for the same resource).

Together, all these things were fatal. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, some 15,000 Indian farmers committed suicide every year. The only way out.

• • •

Given the great numbers of people affected by the crisis of the Indian countryside, slight exacerbations were enough to unleash very large tides of refugees who departed, naturally enough, for the cities. Most of the 7 million who were added to Delhi’s population between the censuses of 1991 and 2011 were poor rural migrants such as these. They were the stock characters of modernity’s now-venerable story: the shattered tribes whose land had been cut open for minerals, the desperate farmers who could no longer feed themselves from the land, and the embroiderers, potters and wood carvers — sometimes the last of ancient lines — whose work had been made obsolete by new factories.

Some of these people ended up protecting and enhancing the very wealth that had derailed their lives in the first place — for Delhi’s affluent households were hungry for servants. The fact that it was so easy to purchase cheap labour, in fact, was essential to urban middle-class identity. Even modestly off families often employed a chauffeur, while a maid to come early in the morning and clean the floors of the previous day’s dust was de rigueur. Wealthier households had security guards sitting permanently in plastic chairs outside their gates, their main qualification for this non-job being that they were alive rather than, say, not.

This entourage of labour gave the rich dignity in their own eyes, and defined for them, indeed, what was seemly. It was not normal or appropriate for wealthy people to do certain things for themselves, and this had an impact on the very shape of the city. The fact that there was nowhere to park, for instance, did not bother them because they did not drive themselves: their chauffeurs dropped them off in front of a restaurant and circled until they came out. The fact that every ordinary task, from posting a letter to buying a train ticket, involved so much interminable jostling in crowds received no middle-class censure, because these were things they almost never did. In general, a kind of affected incompetence characterised the behaviour of the city’s rich, who would ring for a servant to look for their car keys, or summon a waiter to pick up the wine bottle that stood in front of them and pour its contents into their glass.

The power to employ labour was real power. Much of the daily effort of middle-class Europeans and Americans was foreign to their Indian counterparts — washing the dishes, doing the laundry, making the kids’ dinner — who could often be more productive in other domains as a result. And yet their relationships with their domestic servants were frequently, and bizarrely, resentful. If you listened to middle-class people complaining about their maids, you could be forgiven for feeling that the role of these women was not to perform essential labour in the house but rather to lose keys, steal jewellery, break dishes, waste electricity, ruin clothes, put things in the wrong place, teach bad habits to the children, allow fruit to go rotten and, above all, to destroy everyone else’s life by missing a day’s work because — so they said — they were sick, or their children had been mauled by wild dogs or electrocuted by live lines submerged in the flood, or their slum was being demolished or their husband had died or their sister was getting married in some godforsaken village — or some other equally improbable tale. Such maid-inflicted woes were a staple of middle-class conversation, to the extent that one wondered why so many privileged people seemed to be so invested in the perfidy of the poor. There seemed to be some historical intensity to the way in which the middle classes placed the blame for everything that was wrong in their lives on the heads of their maids. A few generations ago, after all, many of Delhi’s propertied classes were themselves refugees, and it was as if, looking into the eyes of these new migrants who now cooked their meals and looked after their children, they were put in mind of violent and unpleasant things they would rather not remember.

The corollary of all this was that, in middle-class minds, servants did not deserve their salaries. Servants’ salaries were not a reflection of their contribution to the household but rather a kind of charitable donation given in spite of their incompetence. The middle classes were fond of seeing themselves as under-appreciated benefactors and their image of the poor was not as a productive engine but as a pack of parasites living off their own intelligence and hard work. It was they, the middle classes, who contributed real value to the economy, and they were determined to ensure that the fruits of that economy’s growth remain confined to their own kind. Even as their own incomes multiplied manifold, they fought furiously against pay rises for the people who served them. When you moved into a new middle-class neighbourhood, the old residents, some of them owners of million-dollar properties, would come to tell you that the garbage collector would charge Rs 100 [$2] per month but you were only to give him Rs 50 [$1], “otherwise the price will go up for all of us”. The scandal of a maid who was asking for her Rs 2,000 [$40] monthly salary to be raised to Rs 3,000 was frequently discussed over Rs 3,000 dinners.

The people who were complaining about these things presumably knew that working-class rents were rising as quickly as everyone else’s; they certainly knew that the price of food was going up by as much as 12 per cent a year. But these demands from working-class people were still seen as pure opportunism. Being ‘fleeced’ by the poor was a near-obsession with the city’s middle classes, who described the vegetable sellers who came to their doors as ‘thieves’, while rickshaw drivers were all out, so the truism went, to ‘take you for a ride’. India’s boom belonged to the middle classes: it was their moment, and they would fight furiously for it. In a country where the mean income was $1,400 per year, the slightest move to average out incomes would be catastrophic for the few who earned, say, $60,000 per year. So the 90 per cent were excommunicated from the middle-class project of India’s rise, and their claims on better incomes and better lives pronounced illegitimate. As if in reaction to the perennial dictum of the post-Independence period — “Remember the poor!” — it was now, so it seemed, time to forget.

And yet it goes without saying that the poor were instrumental to the new accumulation of middle-class wealth. The disaster of the Indian countryside unleashed not only a handy supply of domestic servants; it also generated a vast supply of labour for construction firms and factory owners. The labour of these millions produced fortunes for factory owners, of course, but it also funded the management consultancy firms and advertising agencies where professionals worked, it produced the gratifying stock market returns from the mining and construction companies in which they had their investments, and it built the roads on which the car-owning classes drove and the houses in which they lived. But once again, the balance was firmly in the hands of elites, because of the sheer quantity of willing labouring hands. Employers never had to worry about where the next workers would come from. They could pay almost nothing, and demand pretty much any level of toil. It was common for factory workers to work sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, thirty days a month. Most were not paid the minimum wage of $4 per day, and almost none were granted pensions or insurance. The fact that Indian factories were now producing for consumers all over the world added to the intensity of workers’ lives but made almost no difference to their salaries: if liberalisation brought extra revenues into the system, they were generally taken by contractors, not by the workers themselves.

The decade following liberalisation, in fact, saw an aggressive assault by industrialists on workers’ bargaining power. At the beginning of that decade, some 90 per cent of workers in the factories around Delhi were employed on a permanent basis, which meant not only that they enjoyed higher salaries but also pensions, health insurance and various legal protections. Many workers worked an entire career in one factory. But with the new pressures of globalisation, this situation became increasingly unattractive to factory owners, who sought pretexts to fire permanent workers, often en masse. By 2000, 70 or 80 per cent of workers were temporary, and their legal and economic situation correspondingly more precarious. Workers could not make individual complaints about their situation, since there was a long line of people waiting to take their place, but mass protests were dealt with harshly and often with the assistance of police batons and tear gas — the police seemed always to stand unquestioningly by the side of factory owners even when protests were provoked by worker deaths or by reports of bizarre and sadistic violence on the part of the management.

Unlike in China, where so many workers were housed and fed in dormitories and bussed to the factory, Indian employers made little investment in workers’ lives outside the workplace. Workers had only makeshift shelter to return to, often without running water, and it was therefore difficult to achieve even the bare minimum of self-preservation — staying healthy and getting enough rest to return to work a few hours later. Needless to say, factories produced a great accumulation of human detritus: those who had fallen sick and could no longer work, those who had, aged thirty-five, grown too old, those who had lost fingers and hands in machines and who could do little, henceforth, except beg in the streets.

But this uncontrolled situation was inconvenient for employers too, because their workers had no stake in their enterprise, and came and went without warning. They suddenly went back to Bihar when employment prospects there were rumoured to have improved, they took a week off for a religious festival — or they simply moved to the factory next door when the owner temporarily offered higher wages in order to complete an urgent order. Textile manufacturers supplying major Western chain stores had sixty to ninety days to produce and deliver their clothes on pain of harsh penalties; ensuring, in such labour conditions, that everything happened on time presented enormous problems. But employers seemed to think of their workers as alien, and incurably insubordinate beings, and did not believe in the possibility of coming to any kind of accommodation with them. The only interface they had with the inscrutable worker psyche was money, so this was where they applied their pressure. In some factories, workers who were paid the minimum wage of around Rs 6,000 [$120] per month had one-third of that amount categorised as an ‘attendance bonus’, which was withheld if they missed a single day of work, even for sickness. But even such measures could never entirely preserve the mechanised and predictable space of the factory from the immense turbulence whence it derived its human resource. These workers were living on every kind of edge, and were stalked by emergencies of all sorts — as were their parents, siblings, wives and children in far-off parts of the country (unlike in China, most factory workers were men). Even when the financial consequences were as serious as they were, it was frequently impossible for them to work all their waking hours for thirty days in one month.

The situation of the poor in twenty-first century India certainly owed much to local dynamics: traditional caste hierarchies, for instance, and the failure of human sympathy to pass between the city and the countryside. But in many respects the poor who laboured here were not just ‘India’s’ poor. They belonged to the world. By the early twenty-first century, in fact, it could be said that much of the global economy was running off the desperation of the Asian countryside. If the 1990s had seen so much manufacturing moved to places like India and China it was because of, and not in spite of, the authoritarian system that operated in both those places, albeit in different ways. ‘Normal’ bourgeois life, whether in Delhi or New York, required one to consume immense amounts of embedded labour, which was only possible if that labour was kept very cheap. The force that was pressing down on Indian and Chinese labour, ultimately, was not the class contempt of wealthy Indians so much as the global consumerist logic of new, fast and cheap. This logic was merciless, and insatiable in its thirst for human labour. The death of rural life in Asia, which affected many hundreds of millions of people, provided the hopeless reservoir on which this logic could draw.

As one unusually self-critical textile factory owner observed to me, reflecting on the system in which she played a nodal role, “There used to be a time when you could be a capitalist with personality. You could make your own decisions about what kind of ethos you wanted to create. Now it does not matter if you are a ‘nice’ person. It is completely irrelevant. We live in an age when we all know what we do is disgusting but we still carry on doing it. The system we are part of feeds on desperation. And any system that demands such levels of desperation will produce more and more disorder, and the only way to keep everything in check will be the increasing militarisation of the world.”

• • •

When asked about how he would solve the problems of the countryside, a Congress finance minister said, essentially, that he would liquidate it: 85 per cent of Indians, he said, now needed to live in cities. He said these words at a time when 70 per cent, or more than 700 million people, lived in the countryside: his breezy percentages conjured up upheavals of mythic proportions. They reflected the fact that urban elites had lost the ability to imagine the countryside, and therefore the vast majority of their own compatriots, and they wished it would simply disappear. Pastoral billboards advertising real estate developments called ‘Provence’ and the like presented India’s countryside as just so much empty ‘Lebensraum’ waiting for the middle classes to move in. But what city people had ceased to understand was that agriculture could support far more people than industry and that, with its destruction, India would be faced with a violent crisis. The cheapness of labour in early twenty-first-century India derived from the fact that there was a huge excess, which meant not only that it was easily available but also, by definition, that it could not all be used. A great number of India’s poor were not sucked up by the capitalist machine. They were just left over. Like the residents of Bhalswa, they maintained only the most tenuous connection to the frenzy of the mainstream economy, and were squirrelled away in an improbable parallel universe of lassitude and decline.

“We are storing up immense problems for ourselves,” observes the owner of a large private equity fund. “People talk about India’s ‘population dividend’, referring to the advantages that recent high birth rates might deliver in terms of a youthful, energetic population. But I am unable to see it like that. We have 15 to 20 million people entering the labour market every year and there is nothing for them to do. The only thing that can absorb such numbers is electronics and textile manufacturing on a scale out of all proportion to what we have.

“We make a lot of our IT industries, but India’s IT and BPO sectors together only employ 2 million people. Retail and restaurants have created new jobs, but those account only for another 4 to 5 million people. Compare that to China’s electronics and textiles manufacturing, which employs 100 million people. India has failed entirely to get hold of this kind of business, and there is no indication that we can offer jobs to our young people. It is a colossal failure.”

This failure raised profound questions about the future of societies such as India’s. More historically minded observers thought back to the destruction of rural life during the industrial revolution in Europe, which also produced enormous waves of newly destitute people to the cities — far more, again, than could be employed in new factories and mines, far more even than could be accommodated in prisons, workhouses or workforces on infrastructure projects. The carving up of traditional agrarian lifestyles was for the majority a catastrophe that would only be healed many generations after their own, and during their lifetime they could expect no better fate than membership of the thronging, surplus ‘underclass’. But nineteenth-century Europe allowed itself an astonishing possibility which twenty-first-century Asia could not, and that was the ‘New World’. North America in particular, but also Brazil, Argentina and Australia, were essential to European industrialisation, acting as a safety valve for the great number of people that it rendered homeless and unemployed. Some 70 million people left Europe for the ‘New World’ between the Napoleonic Wars and the Second World War, which is to say one-third of the European population at the start of that period — and this is in addition to the fact that some 130 million Europeans also died in the two world wars. (In the same period, of course, many tens of millions of the ‘New World’s’ native inhabitants were wiped out by a combination of war and disease.)

The situation was different in the twenty-first century. A third of India’s population was close to 400 million people, and there was quite obviously no place on the planet where such a surplus could be stowed. How they would be integrated into a fast-changing society in a way that did not involve genocide or more world wars was still an open question.

It should not be imagined that immense intelligence and resources were not devoted to the resolution of this question, nor that there were no debates, conflicts or breakthroughs. On the contrary. Early twenty-first century India was, in addition to everything else, a giant laboratory of social and economic experiments, in which every sector of society participated. Farmers displayed great ingenuity in developing — sometimes with the help of the government or of the countless NGOs at work in the Indian countryside — new economic and agricultural strategies to reduce the precariousness of their situation so they might not join the mass exodus from the land. Factory workers became conspicuously more creative and organised in the way they contested the progressive erosion of their rights: by the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, Gurgaon car manufacturers could no longer depend on workers fighting, ineffectually, all against all, and found themselves having to sit down to serious negotiations. The government too, despite its reputation for incompetence and corruption, was capable of visionary innovation. These years saw the introduction of the first-ever financial safety net for rural communities, which offered adults 100 days of guaranteed employment every year at a salary of Rs 100 per day — a vital measure for communities so assailed by financial unpredictability. This was the time also of the groundbreaking Right to Information Act, a transparency law which dramatically empowered poor communities, whose fate was so heavily decided, as we have seen, by the machinations of government: armed with this act they could now find out when they were being lied to, or by how much the money that reached them was less than what had been paid out.

And even the wealthy were furiously divided over what should be the style and human cost of India’s economic transformation. Television scenes of farmers protesting against the seizure of fertile agricultural land and its conversion into factories, and of bloody showdowns between them and armed representatives of the state, caused people of all kinds to meditate on their relationship to this ‘new India’ — and some of those members of the urban, affluent classes who were most dismayed by these meditations worked to mitigate the harsh fall-out of change. NGOs, some of them with brilliantly creative visions of what modern life could be and how its benefits could be better distributed, sent educated people into the remotest corners of the country. Some of these were funded by foreign governments and foundations, which also pumped in billions of dollars of developmental aid over this period. The press remained, for the most part, free, and the media could be powerfully illuminating and acerbic with respect to contemporary society’s inequities.

The first decade of the century also saw gathering waves of urban protest against its corruption and cruelty. It was increasingly common to see the city taken over by gatherings of a hundred thousand or more united in outrage towards society’s ills or the machinations of its rulers. Though some of this discontent could be accommodated within the prevailing rubric of self-interest — middle-class resentment towards the fortunes made by corrupt politicians could be seen in this way, for instance — it was clear from the grief and euphoria on display at such gatherings that there was more than this at stake. There were other, humbler ambitions at play: the desire to live in a more tender society; the desire for a loftier idea of human relations, for something other, indeed, than self-interest; the desire for a respite from the world’s conspicuous cruelty. Cruel societies are often the most dynamic and productive — nineteenth-century Europe was one of the most creative societies ever to exist — but even if you are one of those borne up on this dynamism, cruelty is less easy to live with than one imagines. Only the most hardened warriors are able to assume total ownership of their cruelty, and indeed of the mercilessness of capitalism. Middle-class Indians did not actually want to be responsible for cruelty any more than middle-class Canadians or Swedes did. It is part of the ideology of our ‘neoliberal’ moment that only self-aggrandising drives are ‘natural’ to human beings, but in fact sympathy for others is more difficult to defeat than we imagine.

It was remarkable, in Delhi, for example, how many women from the richest families, women who treated their inferiors with deliberate fear and contempt, devoted their spare time to caring for stray dogs: taking out food and blankets for them, taking them to the vet when they were injured, taking them into their homes when they were sick. You couldn’t help feeling, watching such women, that human beings were endowed with a specific quantum of sympathy, and if its expression were entirely blocked in one direction, it had to emerge from another.

But the question of what would happen to the great mass of India’s economic refugees was impossibly taxing, and good feelings were not enough to solve it. It was a question, in fact, which undid the entire logic of India’s new economy — and indeed of global capitalism itself. And yet it seemed impossible to imagine that there could be another way of organising things, for everything was now aligned in that way. So the only ‘solution’ to the question, ultimately, was to ignore it. And that, pretty much, was what middle-class India did. The hundreds of millions of their country’s poor were dazzlingly absent from their world, not only as a matter of individual obliviousness but as a matter of policy. Delhi’s official urban strategy was to not see those millions of people, to treat them as ghosts who periodically contributed their labour to the feast, but who did not themselves require food or shelter or anything else.

Worker housing — that simple acknowledgement that workers had a bodily existence — did not exist. Faridabad, the industrial city set up in 1947, had no worker housing, for instance: workers were expected to find or build a place wherever they could. This became the norm for all of the Delhi region’s ‘planned’ cities — Okhla, Noida, Gurgaon — which had immense labour requirements but conspicuously — obstinately — no place for workers to live. It was as if labour were an immaterial force, one that magically operated machines and built houses, but one that had no physical existence, or needs, outside of these activities. Large numbers of workers bounced between Delhi and their villages: men, especially, left their families behind in the countryside and came for a few months to earn what cash they could working on a construction site or driving an auto-rickshaw, and they sought to spend as little as possible on accommodation or anything else. They rented basement rooms fifteen at a time, they lived in tents on construction sites, they slept in rickshaws or on the pavement. But this still left great numbers whose work kept them all year in the city and who had to find some way of subsisting in it. This is why the other great boom in Delhi, apart from its property prices, was that of informal living. In the late 1970s, it was estimated that Delhi’s total slum population was 20,000. By the early twenty-first century, many millions — perhaps one half of the city’s population — lived in some kind of unauthorised housing — slums, squatter settlements, lean-tos and the like — while many tens of thousands lived without any shelter at all.³⁴

The places where the poor collected were constantly under attack by the authorities, who wanted to ensure at all costs that they never began to imagine some real claim on city space. After a devastating series of slum demolitions spearheaded in the 1970s by Nehru’s grandson, Sanjay Gandhi, many of Delhi’s working poor bought plots in new slum areas in order to secure their situation in a city that suddenly seemed much more inhospitable. Slums had a thriving real-estate market of purchases and rentals, much like the rest of the city in fact, with the exception that the entire enterprise was unauthorised: the land belonged, theoretically, to the government, which could dismantle the whole system at will and so deprive people of a lifetime of investment. And as we have seen, the turn of the twenty-first century was the time when the government called in all these dues. There was a new spate of slum demolitions, so that even those of Delhi’s working classes who had come to the city in the 1970s and ’80s often found themselves suddenly homeless. At a time when a hundred thousand or more poor migrants were washing up every year in Delhi from a rural situation that had become so desperate that they could no longer survive there, the total space where poor people could make a semi-permanent home in Delhi was systematically decreased. The ‘surplus’ piled up in the millions: people who could not go back and could not stay.

Some of those slum demolitions were by official order, in accordance with the Land Acquisition Act and under the banner of the 201 °Commonwealth Games; some of them were carried out after a series of suspiciously convenient fires destroyed the slums and scattered their residents. A number of these slums had been established soon after the demolitions of the 1970s, and by now they each housed 100,000 people who had, during that time, built themselves brick houses, water and sewage systems, schools, temples and mosques. They were vibrant townships that were an essential resource for the city as a whole, since they housed so many of its factory workers, domestic servants, security guards and the like. When bulldozers were sent in to these places, it brought to mind nothing so much as a devastating military assault. Grown men and women sat on the mountains of bricks, weeping at the destruction of what they had often built with their own hands; some of them argued with the police and bureaucrats who had come to superintend the process. Children roved what had once been streets, wide-eyed at the miracle of the razed houses and schools. Many of them had already been set to work gathering undamaged bricks for new builders to use: they piled them in great walls at the edge of the site and were paid 2 rupees for every hundred bricks. On the main road, Biblical lines of refugees set off with pots and pans and bundles of clothes, looking for a place to settle.

Those who could prove that they had lived in these places for many years were given land in compensation, though the process was tortuous. Since there was only a limited number of these plots the government was forced to inflate the requirements whenever they found out that too many people qualified. “We said you have to be able to prove that you have been living here since 2000. Well, now you have to prove you have been here since 1998… ” And when one visited the new areas — like Bhalswa — one was incredulous at the condition of the land and the distance from jobs. But most did not get any place to live at all. Some went back to villages to see what remained for them there. Some joined the human detritus living in underpasses around Connaught Place, blasted out of their minds, shivering under tattered blankets. Some joined the armies living under blue and yellow tarpaulin around factories and building sites.

In these latter places the punishment would go further. It was not enough to deny workers physical space. They should be given nothing, in fact, to suggest they were anything other than entirely dispensable units broken off from the infinity of India’s masses. Often not even shoes or gloves, which might have given the mistaken impression that their bodily well-being was significant, were provided to the construction workers who built Delhi’s much-vaunted real estate. Construction workers were regularly injured and even killed because they had no helmets or harnesses and only the most rudimentary information about what they were doing. During the ‘beautification’ of the city prior to the Commonwealth Games, one could see men, women and children painting kerbs and fences with their bare hands, their arms stained with paint up to their elbows. It was as if the whole thing were a cold joke played on the underclass, reminding them constantly that their existence, outside the pure fact of their labour, was nothing and would never be acknowledged. Building contractors, many of whom made enormous fortunes during the boom, did absolutely everything to shave bits off their workers’ salaries. Not only did they not pay minimum wages — let alone the mandated social security payments — but they charged workers rent to erect tents on the building site and they deducted money for the boots and gloves they handed out. It was so emphatically petty that it felt that money was not even remotely the issue. It seemed to be not so much a financial strategy as a class lesson: people like you have no claims to comfort and safety, you are not people like us, you are on the outside of this story and you may never come in.

This strategy — of choosing not to think about the enormous reservoir of human suffering off which the Indian boom fed — was mostly successful. Wealthy Indians did not spend too much time thinking about the plight of poor Indian workers, anymore than wealthy Americans or Australians did, for the level of remoteness was the same. But there were moments when the feeding frenzy came back to them in unexpected ways.

• • •

The suburb of Noida was conceived during the slum demolitions of the 1970s as a modern extension to the capital that would be able to absorb its population growth and industrial expansion. It lay just across the Yamuna river in the state of Uttar Pradesh, whose chief ministers gradually acquired land for the project and laid out the kind of grid-like structure suited to a rationally planned new town. By the late 1990s, Noida was a fully realised city, bustling with the new middle classes and their flats, offices and shopping malls.

In 2005, migrant labourers living in a slum area of Noida called Nithari began reporting to the police that their children were going missing. The police did not file these reports: these were poor people with no influence, tens or hundreds of thousands of such children were missing across the country and no one was going to spend time trying to track down these ones. Among the Nithari community, however, there were suspicions that some methodical predator was at large, and these suspicions began to close in on a house inhabited by a businessman and his domestic servant. Behind this house was a large drainage ditch, and some were convinced that the remains of the missing children had been dumped there.

In December 2006, two men who had failed to interest the police in the story of their missing daughters approached the head of the local residents’ association, who agreed to accompany them on an inspection of the ditch. As they began clearing out accumulated trash, they found a severed hand and called the police. Over the following days, the police retrieved from the drain evidence of a series of terrible murders: the complete and partial remains of four women, eleven girls and four boys, packed up, mostly, in some forty plastic bags. In the house were found surgical knives and gloves, blood-stained clothes and the school bags of several children. The businessman and his servant were both immediately arrested.

As it happened, a different lead had already led the police to start asking questions of the fifty-two-year-old businessman who lived in the house, Moninder Singh Pandher. Pandher was from a well-connected family in Punjab: he had attended Delhi’s prestigious St Stephen’s College and counted many members of the north Indian elite among his friends. Most people who knew him had only good things to say: he was life-loving and ‘normal’, they said — though his family relations were strained. He was separated from his wife and was entangled in a bitter land dispute with his brother which involved half-a-dozen separate legal cases; the brother’s family, fearful of Pandher’s political influence, had filed complaints to the police about possible abuses of justice that they suspected Pandher might commit.

Pandher lived as a bachelor in Noida, where his house was the venue for various politicians, bureaucrats and policemen to retire for late-night drinking sessions. In addition to this, he frequently invited call girls to his house for what journalists later called ‘orgies’. A woman named Payal had not been seen since one of these assignations. Her concerned father, who received a fee for her services directly from a local madam, and knew about her movements, had alerted the police to Pandher’s possible role in her disappearance. The police had seen that Pandher had spoken to Payal several times a day right up to her disappearance and had questioned him about her on three occasions over the previous six months, even, most recently, searching his house. Later, there was suspicion as to how Pandher had made this investigation go away: was it because the police were themselves involved in — beneficiaries of, even — his patronage of local prostitutes?

As DNA tests linked the recovered human remains to missing Nithari children, residents from the area gathered in large numbers outside Pandher’s house. Parents carried photographs of their dead children. The crowds shouted abuse at the police and bombarded Pandher’s residence with flower pots and bricks, breaking doors and windows. The police realised this was a situation of the greatest sensitivity and they quickly attempted to make up for their past omissions: various policemen were suspended for their failures to respond to complaints, and the drainage ditch was dug up in accordance with the demands of the Nithari residents.

The investigation was handed over by Uttar Pradesh officials to the Central Bureau of Investigation, which followed leads across state lines. They searched Pandher’s properties in Ludhiana and Chandigarh, and re-opened the investigation of a series of child kidnappings in the latter place, which was Pandher’s hometown. Pandher’s well-documented patronage of prostitutes made it seem to some that he might be capable of any kind of perversion, and there was speculation that the mutilated bodies might be the leftovers of a pornography operation of a particularly horrifying kind. Police announcements that they had recovered photographs showing Pandher surrounded by naked children fuelled this speculation. But the children in the — perfectly innocent — photographs were revealed to be Pandher’s grandchildren, and this line of enquiry led nowhere.

But the sheer number of corpses led to the widespread suspicion that this affair centred not on the spasms of perverted desire but on some altogether more systematic, even industrial, enterprise. For many it was evident from the beginning that the remains in the drain were the detritus of a large-scale organ-stealing enterprise. It was discovered that one of Pandher’s neighbours was a doctor who had been accused — though never convicted — of such a trade some years before, and Nithari villagers, for whom organ stealing was a convincing explanation for what had happened, surrounded this second house and pelted it with stones.

Organ stealing was in the air at that time: a year after the Nithari discoveries, and while the trials were still going on, a multimillion-dollar kidney-stealing scheme was uncovered in Gurgaon. Poor migrants from Uttar Pradesh were lured to a private house on the pretext that they would be offered work; when they arrived they were offered money, reportedly Rs 30,000 [$600], for their kidneys. Those who refused were drugged and their kidneys were forcibly removed. These kidneys were then transplanted into wealthy patients from all over the world for a fee of some $50,000. It was later estimated that the racket had been going on for six years, during which time some six hundred transplants had been conducted. The doctor in charge, Amit Kumar, owned a large house on the outskirts of Toronto, where his family pursued the global bourgeois dream: SUV, swimming pool, children at private school. In 2008 he was arrested in Nepal, where he had gone into hiding.

When this latter case hit the Indian newspapers, the residents of Nithari became convinced that there was a connection with their own tragedies. They declared that they had seen Amit Kumar visiting Moninder Singh Pandher on several occasions; they also said that they had seen ambulances parked outside the latter’s house and nurses emerging from inside. It was observed that many body parts were missing from the remains found in the ditch. As one father said, commenting on the remains of his eight-year-old daughter, “They found only the hands, legs and skull of my daughter. What happened to the torso?”³⁵

The police quickly abandoned the idea that this was an organ-stealing operation. They found enough intact organs to make it unlikely, and they did not feel that the risk and inefficiency of such an operation fitted with Pandher’s highly successful business in heavy machinery. But suspicions of organ-stealing persisted for a long time. It was a story that fitted many people’s picture of the society in which they lived: a rich man with brutal indifference to the personhood of the poor steals their organs to give to people of his own class and to enrich himself. Indian journalists and their readers alike were used to seeking out the financial motive, which they felt was the prime mover in most mysteries. They were often unconvinced by mystical explanations such as psychopathologies, which seemed to them excessively American. It was in this direction, however, that things began to move.

Both Pandher and his housekeeper and cook, Surender Koli, were interrogated under the influence of a ‘truth serum’. Since these statements were not admissible as evidence, they were not made public. But it seems that both men implicated themselves in the murders, and both were charged. The media engaged in endless speculation as to the nature of the relationship between the two men. How extraordinary, that two serial killers should find each other in this manner! A psychiatrist from Chennai commented, “In this case, it is probably coincidence, where an ordinary employer — employee relationship developed into a mutually beneficial one. The affluent one with the power and confidence to blatantly express himself, and the other, also with poor scruples and a dark side to match his master’s, and who got the chance to find a dangerous outlet.”³⁶ Stories went like this: Koli was given the responsibility of fulfilling Pandher’s insatiable need for sex with poor and powerless women and girls. He went out to look for anyone he could find and brought them home. After Pandher had finished with them, Koli raped them and then killed them. Sometimes Koli brought boys by mistake, and they simply killed them.

A psychological profile compiled by the Directorate of Forensic Sciences described them as “emotionally deprived and sexually deviated men, separated from their wives and family, living in a single house and trying to cope on their own in their different ways, without feeling concerned for, or bothered about each other”.³⁷

In February 2009, Pandher and Koli were found guilty of the murder of a fourteen-year-old girl named Rimpa Haldar and both were sentenced to death. Koli was subsequently found guilty of other murders, and awarded further death penalties.

But doubt was growing as to the contribution of the employer, who had at first been assumed to be the evil ringleader of this bleak circus. Though as the Supreme Court judgement later put it, house number D-5, Sector 31 “… became a virtual slaughter house, where innocent children were regularly butchered,”³⁸ and though it was therefore impossible to believe that Pandher was ignorant of what was going on, despite the fact that he had been able to provide evidence that he was out of the country at the time of some of the killings, Koli’s confessions had been so lurid as to remove all need for a second man’s involvement.

In his statement, which he made voluntarily in court because he needed, he said, to “lighten himself”, Koli described how he used to lure children, usually girls, into the house by promising them work or sweets. (Two girls from the community testified that he had attempted to lure them into the house, but they had refused to go with him.) Once they were inside the house he would strangle them. He would often attempt to copulate with the dead bodies, but by his own admission he failed to do so. He would then cut up the bodies, sometimes taking organs from them, cooking them and eating them. The first time he tried the liver of one of his victims, a young girl, he said, he vomited; but he continued to make meals of his victims. The remains he put in plastic bags and dumped in the drain outside.

In this statement he offered to take the police to places where they could recover more knives, personal effects and body parts; he later did so, and his leads turned out to be authentic.

Koli came from a small town in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand where his wife — eight months pregnant at the time of the revelations — and young daughter remained while Koli worked as Pandher’s housekeeper and servant. During Pandher’s absences he had the house to himself; while Pandher was there he was frequently witness to debauched gatherings and, of course, the comings and goings of prostitutes. He cooked meals for Pandher’s guests and knew exactly what was happening in the house. Sometimes, he said, Pandher spent the night with two or three girls in his bed. He claimed that all this used to build up in him an intense pressure of arousal and desire. As he said in his confession, “once Pandher’s wife moved away to Chandigarh, Pandher started bringing call girls to the house daily. I would cook for the girls, and serve them. I would see them and crave sex. Later, bad thoughts entered my mind: to kill them and eat them.” Mostly it was not these girls but others whom Koli killed: with Payal, however, Koli satisfied his urge to kill and “consume” one of Pandher’s own sexual partners.

During one period of six months when the presence of a house guest made it impossible for Pandher to entertain prostitutes at home, Koli said that peace returned to him and he felt no impulse to kill.

Koli also told the police that he would often dream of a girl in a flowing white dress who laughed at him and taunted him. Each time he dreamt about her, he would tremble, lose his appetite and be unable to sleep until he found a victim, and relief.

Despite all this, when Pandher was acquitted of murder by the High Court in Allahabad at the end of 2009, there was widespread scepticism. One magazine pronounced, “despite the manner in which the Noida police bungled the case, there is little doubt that Pandher is as guilty as the man who actually carried out the serial killings, his accomplice Koli.”³⁹ Journalists had their own class prejudices, according to which the poor had no vision of their own and could only obey the orders of their superiors, and Pandher’s leadership was necessary to this conception. That the servant would end up taking the punishment for both of them was consistent with a widely accepted idea of Indian society, according to which the elite always managed to export the blame to a scapegoat when things went wrong. Pandher’s much-documented connections to the political and commercial elite of Punjab and Delhi, as well as the frequent presence at his parties of senior policemen, made it easy for many to imagine how he would have engineered his own acquittal.

Surender Koli’s guilt is established beyond reasonable doubt. If Moninder Singh Pandher had an active role in these deaths, it has yet to be proved. But perhaps he had nothing to do with them. Perhaps the truth is just what it appeared to be. Perhaps Pandher was so inattentive to the lives of his subordinates that he really did not notice anything amiss, even as the domestic servant with whom he lived enticed at least seventeen young people from the surrounding streets into his home, murdered them, cut them up and disposed of the body parts behind the house.

But perhaps there is still hidden meaning in the story. Perhaps it is an allegory, and perhaps it is more terrible than anyone even thought.

Moninder Singh Pandher ran a JCB dealership in Noida. He supplied the kind of earth-moving equipment so much in demand in the Delhi region at that time — the equipment with which Delhi’s slums were destroyed and the ground was prepared for the new landscape of elite housing and shopping. From this dealership he allegedly made some 30 lakhs [$60,000] a month. With this money he enjoyed raucous evenings with his club of influential men, the sexual services of as many poor women as he liked and, of course, the labour of Koli himself.

What erupted in Koli in reaction to all this was not some democratic sentiment whereby the privileges of the rich would be abolished. Quite the reverse: Koli wanted exactly what Pandher had, which was the power to consume the poor. And if he could not consume them with Pandher’s abstract appetites, he would — literally — eat them.

Pandher’s son, visiting his father during the months of Koli’s crimes, observed a change in his father’s servant. “When we hired Surendra, he was docile and obedient. But there was something amiss about his behaviour lately. When I went to Noida in November, I found him cocky and rude, which was not what I had known him to be. Most of the times I found him talking on his mobile on the roof. I had told my mother about his cocky behaviour.”⁴⁰ Perhaps Koli had ingested something of the spirit of the speaker’s own class. Perhaps he wanted to be as cocky as the tiny percentage of crowing, wealthy, endlessly consuming elites with whom he had some acquaintance. Perhaps he wanted to emulate the appetites which defined those elites, and placed them so securely above everyone else.

• • •

I meet with a psychologist who was involved in counselling the parents of the Nithari victims.

“How could a place like that exist?” he says. “A lot of police officers were going there for parties. It channelled the worst aspects of the collusion between police and corrupt business. There were orgies and call girls, but no one was questioned when people started going missing. Such people have complete impunity. Businessmen like that pay off the police and arrange girls for them as part of their normal business operations.

“What kind of culture have such people created for us? They have treated everyone as abject, and people have therefore become abject.

“I was conducting a grief session for the parents of Nithari victims. Someone came into the room and announced that a politician had arrived outside. Everyone ran out of the room except one parent because rumours of compensation money were circulating. These rumours were untrue and after a while people began to file back in again. A discussion began in the room about the 5-lakh [$10,000] sums that had been rumoured. And parents said, ‘If we had known there would be 5 lakhs for a dead child, we would have sent two children.’

“And I sat there and I thought, why have I bothered to come? Why am I here?

“You think that there are certain primordial events that eclipse all others. You think, for instance, that no suffering can be so great as that of a parent who has lost a child. But there are things that are even worse, forms of suffering so great that they harden people even to the death of their children. And you can see them everywhere in this country.”