Capital: The Eruption of Delhi

Fourteen 1984

In a new shopping mall you cannot escape the voice of a woman jabbering into a mike: “… seventy-eight Gandhis, seventy-nine Gandhis, eighty Gandhis, eighty-one Gandhis… ”

You drift into a shop. You come out. The noise is still going on. Now her speech is more excited and rapid. She shouts, “one-forddy Gandhis one-forddy-one Gandhis, one-forddy-two Gandhis… ”

You wonder what all this is about. You look for the voice. By the time you reach the central atrium, where she stands on a publicity podium with her arm around a beaming couple, her counting has reached near-hysterical excitement.

“Two twenny-seven Gandhis — two twenny-eight Gandhis — two TWENTY-NINE GANDHIS — we have a WINNER!”

The couple’s two tubby kids are sprinting around in mad orbits, ecstatic with victory. The presenter holds up a wad of notes to the audience. “Look at all these Gandhis, people!”

The contest is this: they are giving away a free Reebok watch worth Rs 2,500 [$50] to whomever is carrying the most thousand-rupee notes — on which there is a picture of Mahatma Gandhi — at the mall this evening. The winning couple has pulled out from a handbag 229 of them [$4,600] thus demonstrating more fidelity than anyone else to the nation and its hermit-father.⁴¹

It should not be any surprise that this was a highly corrupt place.

Corruption does not stem primarily from wicked or greedy individuals; it comes from destroyed social relations, and, as we have seen, history had placed a great strain on Delhi’s social relations.

Delhi had become a society that had, in its bleakest moments, ceased to believe in the idea of society — which was why the state, and religious identities, and other surrogates for ‘society’, were so fetishised. And when there is no society, you might as well despoil away, because you cannot harm a society that does not exist. If you don’t do it, everyone else will, and for just the same reason.

It is often thought that it is effective law enforcement that keeps corruption in check, and of course this is partly the case. But it is also prevented by inner restraints and in Delhi these inner restraints had been significantly dismantled. You met them often, the old bureaucrats whose first words on meeting you were, “I never took anything from anyone, I could have made millions but I never took one rupee,” and you could see what obsessive zeal it had required to keep hold of that principle. You wondered if they were still trying to convince themselves it had been a good idea.

Delhi’s cynicism arose from its history, and from its age-old feeling that the human world existed to steal away, destroy and desecrate what you possess. It would have been corrupt in any circumstance. But the reason that, by the beginning of the twenty-first century, its corruption had reached the dizzying levels it had, was that it was the capital, and the seat of federal politics.

• • •

Jawaharlal Nehru died in 1964. He was succeeded by Lal Bahadur Shastri, another high-minded Congress man, who had been a close colleague of Nehru’s ever since the freedom struggle. But Shastri survived Nehru by only two years, and in 1966 the party faced a succession question.

India had been in the hands of the one party since its inception, but cracks were appearing everywhere. The lofty momentum of the freedom struggle had run out, and, by the mid-1960s, the Indian reality was mired in dysfunction. Despite twenty years of managed development, the country was in the grip of an agricultural crisis, and depended heavily on food imports from its ideological foe, the United States — a measure which did not prevent a famine in the eastern state of Bihar in that same year, 1966. A mushrooming population was partially responsible for these deficits: while in 1947 the growth rate was just over 1 per cent per annum (doubling the population in seventy years), by 1966 it was nearly 2.5 per cent per annum (doubling the population in thirty years) — and India had become the preferred case study for the renewed Malthusian fears of the international managerial class. Meanwhile, wars with China (1962) and Pakistan (1965) had necessitated exceptional purchases of arms from abroad and further diminished India’s already precarious foreign currency reserves; inflation now ran as high as 15 per cent. Partly as a result of these problems, many regions and communities had become disenchanted with the very idea of India: the state faced secessionist struggles in Andhra Pradesh and in the north-east, an increasingly militarised and desperate relationship with the region of Kashmir, and, in south India, widespread demonstrations, even self-immolations, in protest against the imposition of a foreign language, Hindi, as the lingua franca of politics (the policy from above was to phase out the other lingua franca, English, which would have greatly disadvantaged the non-Hindi-speaking south). In a Hindustan Times article entitled ‘The Grimmest Situation in 19 Years’, one senior journalist remarked, “The future of the country is dark for many reasons, all of them directly attributable to 19 years of Congress rule.”⁴²

It was a dangerous and volatile time, then, for the Congress Party, and one that required flexibility and pragmatism. The best way forward, in the view of the powerful collection of party bosses and chief ministers known by their opponents as ‘the Syndicate’, was to have a weak leader who could be controlled easily from behind the scenes. This was why, in 1966, they lent their support to the candidacy of Nehru’s daughter, Indira. She was a woman and she was young — forty-eight — and they supposed she would put up little fight. They could not have been more wrong. Indira Gandhi — she was the widow of a Parsi politician and administrator named Feroze Gandhi — turned out to be one of the most ruthless political fighters of the twentieth century.

She had worked closely with her father during his premiership, but there is no sign that Nehru ever intended her to inherit his position: the idea of a ruling dynasty would have sat awkwardly with his democratic, anti-feudal sentiments. And he may not have considered Indira a plausible candidate: certainly she possessed very different attributes from her conspicuously — perhaps even squeamishly — cerebral father. She failed to complete, for instance, her degree at Oxford. The political speeches she gave were pragmatic and slogan-filled, and displayed none of her father’s preoccupation with big ideas. And indeed her long period of influence — which lasted until her assassination in 1984 — turned Indian politics into so naked and brutal a struggle for power that post-Independence utopianism was entirely driven out. For most observers it has been difficult to believe, since her time, in any reason for political action that does not arise from the simple lust for power and money. Of any set of possible explanations for an event, in fact, the most craven will attract the widest belief.

• • •

The newly appointed Indira Gandhi responded to India’s currency crisis by falling in line with World Bank and International Monetary Fund demands for the devaluation of the rupee. Hitherto pegged at 4.76 to the dollar, the rupee was, in March 1966, devalued by nearly 60 per cent to 7.5 to the dollar.

Such deference to capitalist imperialism was an offence to many, particularly those on the far left. It seemed to align the prime minister with the voice of free markets and free enterprise. This voice was increasingly articulate at that time: an emerging party, the Swatantra Party, had been set up to promote a free-market reaction to Nehruvian controls in 1959, while the Congress Party itself was moving further in this direction under the influence of the Syndicate, which was close — notoriously so — to big business.

It became clear in the 1967 elections that the free-market impulse carried little appeal with voters. The young and poor, who were particularly disenchanted with the ruling party, turned to the left (the communist and socialist parties) and towards parties of regional preferment (such as the Akali Dal in Punjab). Congress suffered terrible defeats.

After these elections, her prime ministership intact but fragile, Indira Gandhi suddenly took a startling and radical turn leftwards. She determined to crush the right-wing, business-oriented wing of the party — which included not only the Syndicate but also her rival for party leadership, Morarji Desai — and to make a new populist appeal to the electorate. Having built up her own power base, she fired Desai from his post as finance minister, nationalised the banks, banned contributions to political parties — a direct assault on the Syndicate, which drew income from corporate donations — and introduced even greater restrictions on big business and foreign capital.

In speech after speech, Indira Gandhi vowed to root out the insidious few who exploited the hapless many. Her rhetoric was populist, and though it was, in the light of her actions, only that — rhetoric — it was dazzlingly effective. She developed an extraordinary gift for communicating with crowds, and she channelled that peculiar power that is disdained only by those who have never seen a demagogue in action. She revolutionised the structure of Indian political relations by cutting out the business owners, trade union leaders and feudal landowners who had previously interfaced between politicians and the masses: in her campaign for the 1971 elections, under the banner of “Garibi Hatao!” (“Put an end to poverty!”) she spoke to those masses directly. Her image acquired the aura of something primordial and awe-inspiring, and her victory in the 1971 elections was overwhelming.

She followed this up with a well-judged, and wildly popular, military intervention in the war between the two wings of Pakistan, East and West. This had begun as a secessionist campaign by the eastern wing, or ‘Bangladesh’, which had resulted in terrible retribution by forces from West Pakistan — an episode of terrifying genocide and hundreds of thousands of rapes that displayed again what wild energies circulated between these cut-off siblings of South Asia. After months of military escalation on both sides of the India — Pakistan borders, Pakistan bombed north India and a war began on both northern and eastern fronts.

Great international interests were at stake. The USSR provided support to India while the US, afraid that an Indian victory might spread Soviet influence further across the region, supported Pakistan. But the war was over in a few days. It was a decisive and powerfully symbolic victory for India, which took from Pakistan some 90,000 prisoners of war.

Indira Gandhi rode high, and her style became cultish. Her image was everywhere, and, like the goddess she appeared to be, she brought forth twin eruptions of creation and destruction which gave great symbolic charge to the imagination of India in those years. One was the Green Revolution, which had begun under her predecessor but which began to have a real impact on food production levels only in the early 1970s. Based on new fertilisers and high-yield crops, the Green Revolution transformed the wheat production, and indeed the entire economy, of the Delhi hinterland of Punjab and Haryana. The other achievement was a successful nuclear test explosion in 1974, which brought to its culmination the line of research initiated by Nehru back in the 1940s, and established India as the only nation to possess this technology outside of the original five nuclear nations — though it would not be until the 1990s that a nuclear missile became a military reality.

They were uncanny days, when giant symbols floated gaily above a sclerotic reality. When people speak dismissively today of the state controls and strangled energies of ‘Nehruvian’ India, it is often not the Nehru period but that of his daughter that they remember. Under Indira Gandhi, business was in a stranglehold, and corruption, already rife after twenty years of one-party rule, became an epidemic. With ‘official’ corruption now banned — that is to say, corporate donations to political parties, which was the normal mode for business to buy influence under Nehru — businesses resorted to buying off individuals, thus giving rise to the era of ‘briefcase politics’. Politics became a business; bureaucracy provided the structure for a particularly intense and original kind of entrepreneurialism.

Ironically but predictably, it was at this moment when Delhi was most ideologically opposed to big business that big business began to gravitate towards Delhi, thus preparing the way for the capital’s emergence as a commercial hub in the early twenty-first century. Under Nehru, Delhi had been an administrative town, as it had been under the British: business was afforded little place, entrepreneurs remained small in scale and big companies stayed away. Under Mrs Gandhi, however, it became impossible for big business to avoid Delhi. Approvals were required for absolutely everything and — since Indira co-opted great slabs of authority from the states in order to weaken her rivals and concentrate all power in herself — those who were far from Delhi started to feel cut off. Several British-era business houses from Calcutta moved to Delhi at that time, fleeing the strikes and commercial lockdown of West Bengal, which the Congress had lost in 1967 to a coalition of socialists and communists. Many companies from other north Indian states moved to Delhi in order to make political connections and so reach the next stage of their growth. Several companies which have today acquired global proportions started up in Delhi during Indira Gandhi’s time. Even businessmen who remained in other centres began to keep houses and apartments in the capital (which contributed, later, to the incredible overvaluation of Delhi property). Delhi public life was infiltrated by a new fervour of networking and soliciting.

Delhi did not in general attract businesspeople with startling ideas; as we have seen, it was in Bangalore that the best software companies were set up, also during the Indira Gandhi era. No: the people who were pulled in to Delhi in those years were the ones who needed to hack into the political establishment in order for their business to work. This included those who sought control over basic resources — real estate, minerals, petrochemicals; those who operated in highly regulated areas — such as telecoms or media; or those for whom the state was a major client — such as construction or heavy industries. All of these needed powerful patrons in the political and bureaucratic machinery if they were to get land, resources and approvals, and if they were to avoid critical operational delays, harassment of every imaginable kind, and even total shutdown for some trumped-up reason or other.

• • •

The enclaves built for Delhi’s high-ranking bureaucrats are invisible to most people. Set back from the road, and cut off by guard posts, they are pretty hamlets of quiet streets embraced by lush trees. Inside, chauffeurs dust off bureaucratic cars while gardeners water and prune the plants. The houses are well designed and maintained. There are different grades of accommodation for inhabitants of different ranks: the most splendid residences are large and cut off by hedges and private drives even from the rest of these cut-off places.

The house I come to is not one of these; it is on a street in a row of similar houses. But it is a comfortable dwelling, faintly reminiscent of the American suburbs: there is a basketball hoop at the end of the driveway. Meenu answers the door, apologetic for the fact that I have got so lost on my way. There is nothing for her to apologise for: these enclaves are designed to be found only by those who already know where they are.

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.

“But unknown to me, this caused a big problem. Because the real significance of the tea boy was not that he delivered tea but that he took away all the accumulated cash from the reservation windows. There could be a raid at any time and if you’re caught with all that cash you have no way of explaining it. So the tea boy was the person who took it away and kept it until the end of the day. He was essential to their livelihood. They were furious when I took him away. I’m sure he’s back again now.

“Such things made me very unpopular. I was disrupting the entire economy of the station, and everyone felt I was their enemy. Once the vigilance inspectors came round to check what was going on. They are the people who investigate corruption, and they’re obviously highly corrupt. They collect bribes and they’re foul-mouthed. They insult everyone. The unions wanted me to shut them out, which I refused to do: in fact, I was quite happy about them coming.

“The unions are very big in stations. They have links to the top and they’re very powerful. They got 500 people to surround me, shouting in chorus, ‘Meenu Sharma murdabad!’ (‘Death to Meenu Sharma!’). Just because I let the vigilance inspectors in.

“Nowadays, the first thing I do when I go to a new posting is get rid of all the chairs in my office so that large numbers of people cannot sit down. They like to intimidate you like that. It’s difficult to get people out when they are sitting.

“People also play the caste card a lot. There was a man who used to come to me every day when I was working in the station to say, ‘My name is Sharma.’ I used to think he was an idiot, telling me his name every day. I’m naive about these things. It took me so long to realise that he was telling me he was from the same caste community as me and therefore expected special favours.

“But I ended up gaining respect there. Because I made no exceptions. If you make exceptions, you make money, but you also arouse resentment. I would transfer everyone, according to the rules. No one could pay to avoid it.

“In my early years in the railway service, I had an amazing boss. He was a very intelligent man who really taught me how to do my job. His lesson to me was that all documentation had to be well argued. You couldn’t just write, Request rejected. Enormous money was at stake and people could always come back afterwards and accuse you of things. Why did you reject that request? He was a wonderful mentor to me. He worked very hard, and he used to keep the most amazing documentation.

“Later on, I discovered he was exceedingly corrupt. He could make precise arguments for anything but they were always the arguments that earned him the most money. While I was working with him, he was looking to purchase cleaning equipment for Indian railway stations. He asked me to draw up a detailed comparison of all the products on the market. But what I only knew later was that one multinational company had paid him a large fee to give them the contract. He did very extensive research and then he wrote the tender such that only his client’s equipment could fulfil it. It looked like an open tender, of course, but the guidelines only matched one company.

“He was very smart. He could never be caught on file. He worked very long hours — he used to call me at 6 a.m. from the office.”

“People make a lot of money,” says Amit. “They have the same problem as criminals: where do they hide their cash? A couple of weeks ago one of our senior colleagues was found with 10 lakhs [$20,000] concealed in his toilet cistern.”

The bureaucracy is a vast cash generator, which is why there is so much cash in the Delhi economy. In central Delhi markets you see hundreds of banknotes in customers’ wallets. The big jewellery stores feel like banks, which is, in a way, what they are: people use them to convert cash into gold, many thousands of dollars at a time. The cashiers’ desks are noisy with the constant whirr of counting machines flicking banknotes.

The ultimate destination, however, for all this cash, is property. It is still common in Delhi for people to pay for 60 per cent of, say, a $4 million property in cash, a practice which has been clamped down upon much more quickly in, say, Mumbai. In Delhi the booming, multibillion-dollar property market owes its very existence to the constant need to offload large amounts of cash, so things do not change so fast. In any property deal the two key pieces of information are the price of the property and the proportions of ‘white money’ — declared money, paid by cheque or bank transfer, and ‘black money’ — cash.

Amit says, “Friends of my parents in Patna say to them, ‘You have not one but two bureaucrats in the family! Soon you will have more cars and houses than you can count!’ Unfortunately, they don’t know us.”

He grins.

“They gave me a job in vigilance,” says Meenu, “investigating corruption. I registered charges against several senior bureaucrats, which was a huge insult. They removed me very quickly. They never expected me to do that.

“Getting a reputation as a difficult junior is a serious thing. If you don’t laugh at a senior’s jokes, if you’re not corrupt enough, if you make your boss look bad in front of his boss — you get a reputation for being difficult, and you don’t get promoted.

“At the same time, you need a lot of skill to play that game and honestly I don’t have that skill. If someone does you a favour — a senior bureaucrat gives you a desirable posting for instance — how will you repay it? My boss called me and said, ‘I’m taking my family on a trip to a resort in your district. I need a place to stay, transport, etc.’ I didn’t even realise what he was asking. I just said, ‘Thank you for telling me.’ But he expected me to organise free tickets and hotels for him. Later on, he punished me by transferring me five times in rapid succession and making my life hell. But the thing is that even if I had realised what he wanted, I wouldn’t have known how to do it. He expected me to have a whole network of relationships with small businesspeople in the state — travel agents, hotel people — from whom I could ask favours. But it’s a very complicated thing to maintain. Once you accept favours from those people, you’re vulnerable to anything they ask.”

“There was a businessman who was constantly offering to send me on luxurious trips,” says Amit. “He would call me and say, ‘Let me sponsor a trip to Goa for your family. Or would you prefer to go to Italy?’ If I had accepted, he would have held it over my head for ever. He wanted me to push through a scheme for a new railway to Assam.”

“This is a constant problem for bureaucrats. The ideal bureaucrat is able to avoid getting to close to any particular businessman, because if he does, it means he is unable to offer favours to others and he appears to be exclusive.”

I ask them why they think things work like this. Amit says, “Politicians have become more invulnerable in these years of fragile coalition governments. The government needs its coalition partners so much, it will protect them from anything. They may be pathetic ministers but they are too important to the ruling coalition to be allowed to fail.”

Meenu continues, “I blame it on the business class, which is always willing to pay for advancement. Everybody wants to be in the fast lane. If you go to the parties that the income tax people hold, it is as if the entire business class of Delhi is out to please them. They take these guys out and give them whatever they want.”

“Party culture is very important,” says Amit. “Networking is crucial to business and politics in Delhi, and these parties give you a heady feeling. Golf: who you play golf with is very important. Do you play with this secretary from this ministry or just someone lowly? That establishes your position. These days a bureaucrat can’t just sit around, do his work and pull rank like in the old days. You have to go to the parties and network. Then you get to do favours for powerful people, which is where it all leads. It’s such a buzz that many people don’t even do it for money. They just want to be at the centre of the network.”

At times one can feel, it is true, that this city’s motto is: I network, therefore I am. People carry their networks with them everywhere, cite them, name-drop them, as if without them they would cease to exist. Facebook has slotted in perfectly into the life of the city, being only a technological representation of what already existed. Sometimes when you go to Delhi society parties you feel you are in a kind of Facebook reality game. People come up to you that you hardly know, they seem strangely, even excessively happy to see you again and greet you sentimentally. You didn’t even realise you were friends, but after such a display you feel the need to show some curiosity. “How have you been?” you ask. But by then they have moved on, and they look at you in surprise, as if to say, “You? You’re still here?” They are already scanning for the next encounter, and you realise that what has just happened is not something that belongs to the real world of bodies mingling and conversing in a space, but something that belongs to online. You have been ‘poked’.

“Delhi is being taken over,” says Meenu, “by contractors who know how to manipulate these systems. Bureaucrats are willing to sell themselves, partly because they come, increasingly, from deprived backgrounds. They have genuine problems, they feel they’ve suffered in the past, and they think it’s their right to get something back from everyone else. If you talk to them, they’re never doing it for themselves; they want to improve the lot of their whole community. And such people place a lot of significance on markers of status — chauffeurs, networks, contacts, invitations.”

“Does no one fear getting caught?” I ask.

“Of course. They’re very concerned about getting caught. It’s very embarrassing to be caught. But what I’ve noticed recently is that this has stopped being a deterrent. Getting caught is increasingly unrelated to anything you have actually done. There’s a kind of fatalism about it. Recently a senior bureaucrat came to give a training session and he asked attendees what might lead to them getting caught. ‘Accepting bribes,’ suggested the students. ‘No.’ ‘Breaking procedure.’ ‘No.’ ‘Accepting favours.’ ‘No,’ said the instructor. ‘You will get caught when your destiny turns bad.’ You hear that more and more often. Somebody else said recently, ‘Being caught doing something wrong is like being hit by a car. It could have happened to anyone, but it happened to you. It’s entirely random. There’s no way you can predict it.’

“There is no longer any constraint except bad fate. Which you can’t do anything about anyway. So you might as well carry on.”

• • •

Indira Gandhi’s cult of the self inevitably provoked resentment and consternation, and in 1975 she went to the Allahabad High Court to answer allegations of malpractice in the 1971 elections. The court decided against her on two counts, which thus rendered the election result void. An appeal was registered with the Supreme Court. Before any verdict could be reached, however, Mrs Gandhi declared a national state of emergency. Explaining this extreme measure on national radio, she said, “This is nothing to panic about. I am sure you are all conscious of the deep and widespread conspiracy, which has been brewing ever since I began to introduce certain progressive measures of benefit to the common man and woman of India.”

A dictator by personality, Indira Gandhi flourished under the autocratic conditions of the Emergency. She jailed her opponents, including two future prime ministers and one future deputy prime minister — Morarji Desai, Atul Bihari Vajpayee and Lal Kishanchand Advani respectively — and the remarkable Jayaprakash Narayan, who had long been campaigning for a wholesale renewal of Indian political and social life through what he called a non-violent total revolution. Narayan’s imprisonment provoked especial outrage, including in the international press, since he was a powerfully principled leader who had at one point been very close to the Nehru family — it was as if Mrs Gandhi were imprisoning an uncle — but the prime minister’s rampage had hardly begun. She had always disliked the dispersal of powers inherent to India’s federal structure: when state government terms ended in Tamil Nadu and Gujarat she cancelled elections and administered the states directly from Delhi. Freedom of the press was cancelled, and sweeping changes were made to the constitution to remove curbs on prime ministerial power. Amnesty International estimated that 140,000 people were imprisoned without trial and, in many cases, tortured, during the twenty months of the Emergency. The Emergency traumatised universities, many of which were vocal in their opposition; it also gave great moral standing to the Sikh parties and radical Hindu groups, many of which maintained principled criticism in the face of Indira Gandhi’s onslaught.

For some, the Emergency did not seem so bad. There was a new-found, nervous order to social life, which stood in marked contrast to the political disruptions of the previous years. Business enjoyed the comparative regularity of labour and supplies, and the unusual efficiency of the bureaucracy in issuing licenses. It seemed to many that the experiment of Indian democracy was over, and some — such as that punning courtier who supplied the refrain, “Indira is India, and India is Indira” — began to sing the praises of the new dictatorship.

But in Delhi, the Emergency left a particularly violent imprint through the astonishing rise to power, during this period, of Indira’s adored eldest son, Sanjay. The first of Delhi’s political bad boys, he was one of those dangerous patriots who love the idea of their country but hate its reality. He was plagued by nightmares of filthy, exponentially reproducing masses, and he longed to destroy, to root out, and to impose hygiene and order. Twenty-nine years old in 1975, balding, and with a curled mouth that seemed to display some dark and disturbing sensuality, Sanjay suddenly became his mother’s closest adviser, and indeed began to enact, of his own personal will, major social policies. It is a sign of what dizzying extraordinary powers Indira Gandhi had managed to win for herself that her son, who held no political position of his own, was able to depend on such obedience from his coterie of powerful sycophants

In Delhi, he launched a major programme of slum demolition, which delighted the ambitious vice chairman of the Delhi Development Authority, Jagmohan Malhotra. Malhotra sent bulldozers to demolish the slums of Old Delhi, producing a stream of 700,000 refugees who settled in the south and east of the city (where they would encounter a fresh wave of merciless demolition in the mid-2000s). But this upheaval was rendered all the more traumatic because these people were also especially targeted by Sanjay’s other big scheme of male vasectomy. Administered through public servants, such as policemen and school teachers, who were required not only to go through the operation themselves, but also to deliver prescribed numbers of men for vasectomy every day if they wanted to keep their jobs and receive their salaries, this immediately turned into a brutal and arbitrary process whose burden fell disproportionately on the poorest and most powerless.

Among the poor Muslims of Old Delhi, these two schemes together brought back perennial fears that the purges of 1947 would one day be taken to their completion, and the tension escalated into the most terrifying battles between communities, police, demolition vehicles and vasectomy squads. The Indian state, which had arisen, in part, out of outrage against the excesses of the British against ordinary citizens, seemed to have parted its cloak to reveal some genocidal organ of its own — and there was thenceforth no level of sickness and cruelty where the imagination could not reach, especially where the poor were concerned.

But it was by no means only the poor who were targeted by Sanjay Gandhi’s sterilisation scheme. It was supposedly a universal programme that was compulsory for all men who had already had three children or more, and some of the first people to whom it was applied were those to whom the government had easiest access: its own employees. Bureaucrats, policemen, school teachers — these people too were obliged to fall in line, often in so crude a way that the state was totally discredited, along with all its opinions about such private matters as childbearing.

For many of these middle-class families who had given themselves to the Nehruvian ideal and who sought out work as servants of the state, the imposition of male vasectomy represented another kind of disappointment with the entire national project. In north India, especially, where men were still trying to escape the emasculations, real and figurative, of the partition thirty years before, this symbolic castration by the very state in which they had taken refuge, to which they had pledged their life energies, rankled deep.

• • •

On 31 October 1984, prime minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards, who shot her thirty times as she was taking a walk in her garden in the heart of bureaucratic Delhi. The bodyguards surrendered to arrest: one was immediately shot dead; two more were imprisoned in Tihar Jail where they were later hanged.

In the 1977 election, Mrs Gandhi had been voted out of government to be replaced as prime minister by Morarji Desai, who now stood for the Janata Party, which had been newly constituted as an anti-Emergency coalition. But India’s first ever non-Congress government quickly collapsed amid infighting, and in the elections of 1980, Indira Gandhi took the country back under the banner, no longer of helping the poor, nor really of any big idea save that of her own power. This power, however, required some positive manifestation. Indira needed to produce economic growth to retain her legitimacy, and her economic policies took a marked shift to the right. She surrounded herself with new business-friendly advisers, deregulated key commodities such as cement and sugar and took a big loan from the World Bank to boost productivity.

But her enterprise was beset by adversity. Indira’s major source of personal strength, her son Sanjay, who was now a member of parliament himself, was killed shortly after the election while flying loops over Delhi in his private plane. She found herself embattled in the states, where parties catering to caste identities, religious ideals and hopes of regional autonomy were everywhere on the rise. A generation after Independence, Indian politics had grown beyond one-party federalism towards what some would call a more genuinely democratic variety, and Indira Gandhi found herself adopting strong-arm tactics to maintain the power of the centre.

Nowhere was this battle more serious than in Punjab, where demands for territory and autonomy had been growing under the leadership of the vehement and well-organised Akali Dal party. In order to divide the Akali Dal’s support, Indira Gandhi supported the agitations of the ultra-Orthodox break-away leader Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale. But it soon became impossible to check the rise of Bhindranwale, who made increasingly overt calls for the armed liberation of Punjab from Hindus and from Delhi, and before long the Congress had a major problem on its hands. In 1981, a senior journalist who had been critical of Bhindranwale was assassinated. Bhindranwale was arrested, but at the cost of the death of several of the civilians who gathered to prevent it; widespread rejoicing broke out in Punjab when he was released three weeks later for lack of evidence. The central government had become hated and discredited, and in the wildness of 1980s politics no tactic, including political assassination, was disallowed to the leader who would take it on.

Terrorist acts became more and more persistent, and in 1984 Mrs Gandhi decided to take military action. Bhindranwale and his fighters took refuge in the Sikh holy of holies, the Golden Temple in Amritsar, where they built up a great arsenal of arms and defences. On the night of 5 June 1984, several regiments of the Indian army stormed the temple. A huge battle ensued which resulted in the death of Bhindranwale and hundreds of his men.

Ramachandra Guha writes:

The Golden Temple is ten minutes’ walk from Jallianwala Bagh where, in April 1919, a British brigadier ordered his troops to fire on a crowd of unarmed Indians… The incident occupies a hallowed place in nationalist myth and memory; the collective outrage it provoked was skilfully used by Mahatma Gandhi to launch a countrywide campaign against colonial rule. Operation Blue Star differed in intent — it was directed at armed rebels, rather than a peaceable gathering — but its consequences were not dissimilar. It left a collective wound in the psyche of the Sikhs, crystallizing a deep suspicion of the government of India. The Delhi regime was compared to previous oppressors and desecrators, such as the Mughals, and the eighteenth-century Afghan marauder Ahmad Shah Abdali. A reporter touring the Punjab countryside found a “sullen and alienated community”. As one elderly Sikh put it, “Our inner self has been bruised. The base of our faith has been attacked, a whole tradition has been demolished.” Now, even those Sikhs who had previously opposed Bhindranwale began to see him in a new light. For, whatever his past errors and crimes, it was he and his men who had died defending the holy shrine from the vandals.⁴³

And so: the murder in Delhi, a few weeks later, of the prime minister.

The city-wide anti-Sikh rampage of murder and destruction that followed this assassination blew open the troubled heart of the city. Sikhism was, far more than Islam, the sibling of Hinduism: its founder, Guru Nanak, was part of a sixteenth-century movement of reform and renewal within the Hindu religion. Until recently many Hindu Punjabi families gave their first-born son to the Sikh religion, often in fulfilment of a vow made when a childless couple prayed for children. Like the events of 1947, then, the violent eruption of 1984 had all the fervour of a struggle over the nature of the family. Sikh militancy had been fuelled by the sense that Hindus treated Sikhs as India’s illegitimate offspring; Sikhs had in turn rejected an Indian state they described as “effeminate” and unleashed instead their own principle of virile, martial valour:

In one of his speeches Bhindranwale propounded the idea that it was an insult for the Sikhs to be included in a nation that considered Mahatma Gandhi to be its father, for his techniques of fighting were quintessentially feminine. He (Gandhi) was symbolized by a charkha, the spinning wheel, which was a symbol of women. “Can those,” asked the militant leader, “who are the sons of the valiant guru, whose symbol is the sword, ever accept a woman like Mahatma as their father? Those are the techniques of the weak, not of a race that has never bowed its head before any injustice — a race whose history is written in the blood of martyrs.”… To be able to claim true descent from the proud Gurus (the ten acknowledged founders of the Sikh religion), it was argued, all corruption that had seeped into the Sikh character because of the closeness to the Hindus was to be exorcised… The dangers of a “Hindu” history, it turned out, were not just that Sikhs were denied their rightful place in history but that the martial Sikhs became converted into a weak race: “The Sikhs have been softened and conditioned during the last fifty years to bear and put up with insults to their religion and all forms of other oppression, patiently and without demur, under the sinister preaching and spell of the narcotic cult of non-violence, much against the clear directive of their Gurus, their Prophets, not to turn the other cheek before a tyrant, not to take lying down any insult to their religion, their self-respect, and their human dignity.”⁴⁴

The Sikh male identity — which included the wearing of a beard, and the carrying of the sword (or, in a different context, the Kalashnikov) — thus brought him naturally into conflict with the Indian state and, ultimately, to the assassination of its female leader. But for many Hindus, the idea of the supreme mother was paramount, and Indira Gandhi’s death was immediately seen as an obscene assault on their idea of the Indian ‘family’. Leaping as outraged sons to avenge her death was a clear duty: “Indira Gandhi is our mother and these people have killed her,” yelled the Hindu crowds.

It should be evident that, for both sides, this crisis of 1984 had everything to do with the unfinished business of Partition, which had done so much to call into question the masculine credentials of both siblings, Hinduism and Sikhism. It was thirty-seven years since Partition, and many of those involved in the present atrocities, on both sides, were seeing these scenes for the second times in their lives. Sikhs who had spent that time rebuilding their lives found themselves subjected to rape and murder all over again; once again they lost their homes and livelihoods. Hindus who had mulled for decades on the ignominy of their flight from West Punjab found themselves taking frenzied revenge on their one-time fellow refugees. The violence which began on 1 November 1984 was fuelled by paranoid rumours, some of which drew explicitly on the unresolved nightmares of 1947: trainloads of dead Hindus, it was said, were arriving from Punjab, where Sikhs had unleashed a campaign of annihilation. It was also rumoured that Sikh militants had poisoned the Delhi water supply, and there was a crisis of drinking water in the city; people travelled far to regions they thought unaffected to collect water for their families.

For four days the violence raged. Mobs patrolled the city with knives, guns and tanks of kerosene, which they used to incinerate people, houses and shops. It is not known how many people were killed; estimates range between 3,000 and 10,000. What was clear to all, however, was that the organs of the state were conspicuously lax in trying to quell the reprisals. It is all but certain, in fact, that members of the Congress Party sponsored the entire episode, handing out weapons and liquor to Hindu avengers and promising them rewards for murders. Congress MPs who owned gas stations provided kerosene for their operations, and in some cases sent vehicles stocked with kerosene to accompany them on their forays. Congress Party officials handed out lists of addresses of Sikh families so that they could be targeted systematically. Rather than acting to control Hindu mobs, the police further incited them with rumours that Sikhs were plotting to bring down the state. Hospitals refused to treat Sikh victims and police stations refused to file reports of crimes against Sikhs.

Indira’s surviving son, Rajiv, who was sworn in as prime minister on the night of her death, gave his own infamous — and indifferent — explanation of this violence: “When a great tree falls, the earth shakes.”

For the city of Delhi, the ‘Sikh riots’ turned ‘the law’ into an obscene nonsense. One commentator relates an incident in the west-Delhi neighbourhood of Sultanpuri, one of the areas where violence was at its most intense, where a Sikh community leader and his two sons were set on fire. The three men were shrieking for someone to bring water. Observing all this, the police inspector shouted that no one should think of coming to their assistance, but he said it in these terms: “if anyone dare[s] to come out and interfere with the law (kanoon ke khilaf kisi ne hath uthaya — literally, raise their hand against the law) he [will] be shot dead.” The Hindu mob had become the law, the kerosene fire had become the law. Another policeman went around announcing by megaphone that any Hindus who were caught hiding Sikhs from the mob would have their houses burned down because it was illegal to do so.⁴⁵

The discrediting of the law was complete. For people in Delhi, whatever other reason there might be to comply with the law, it could no longer be a moral one, for the law had no moral content whatsoever. This impression was only strengthened as successive investigations of the massacre failed to find significant evidence of wrongdoing in the Congress establishment: to this day, no one has been held accountable for what happened. The official response has been a thirty-year-long shrug. The law has no comment.

Delhi was corrupt anyway. But the riots now sent a definitive message that the law was a degenerate part of Indian social life and one’s only moral duty was to oneself. One had to look after oneself, since no one else would do it, and now there were no legal constraints on how one should go about it. It is from this date that the ‘compound’ feel of Delhi’s residential neighbourhoods dates. No more those gentle practices of the past — those middle-class boys who took beds down to the street to sleep incautiously in the open air on hot nights. Such trust of the outsider and the street was put away, and middle-class families replaced their thigh-high walls with ten-foot spiked steel gates. The subsequent boom in private electricity generators has to do not only with the erratic nature of Delhi’s power supply but also with the mentality of self-reliance: no one else should be able to interfere with one’s electricity. The same goes for private wells. The rumour of poison in the municipal water was only that, but its effects persist.

The riots were a breaking point for many. Many Sikh families left Delhi for ever after 1984. But for those that remained, and indeed for Hindus, Delhi would never feel the same again. For many of my generation, who were children or teenagers in 1984, the Sikh riots were the foundational coming-of-age experience, revealing, as they seemed to do, the deep truth of Delhi’s social relations. Bloodshed, it seemed, had not ended with Indian independence. This time it could not be blamed on the British, or on Pakistan, or on the insider within. It was eternally inherent to the city.

• • •

Jaswant is a member of Delhi’s Sikh aristocracy, the descendant of one of the contractors who built the 1911 city. In his early seventies, he has a rakish flair about him: he wears a floppy hat and carries sunglasses in his shirt pocket.

“In the 1970s, this lurking sense that the elite could do what the hell they wanted turned into a syndrome. People became giddy with power. They sucked up to Indira Gandhi, and Congress made sure they did well. So many of Delhi’s big businessmen got their start during the Emergency, when those who supported Indira got big breaks and favours.”

Jaswant is horrified by the Delhi elite of which he is a part, and his comportment is deliberately calculated, in part, to irritate and offend this class. Other members of his circle dislike him intensely. “He is mad,” they say. “He does crazy things. In a party he just unzips his thing and starts pissing in the bushes in front of everyone. He dresses in a crazy way, talks in a crazier way. He has crazy parties.”

Jaswant is indeed eccentric. His life has been full of turbulent, ambiguous relationships and immense private tragedies, and he has emerged from all of this more headstrong and contrary than ever. But among all the people I speak to about Delhi, he is unique in his readiness to speak about the violence and exclusion to which so many of them are immune because of their class. And in this respect his eccentricity seems well directed.

“Look at this Delhi culture. The refugees from West Punjab came to Delhi and they became cart pushers. They showed astonishing enterprise and they have amazing stories. But now they’re filthy rich and they have no social conscience at all. They’re racists, they’ve totally forgotten their own origins. They were refugees themselves but they have no care for the millions of refugees who are in Delhi today. Our north-eastern people who come to Delhi to work are molested and raped every day. It’s horrible. I mean, my blood boils. I don’t know how I stop myself from going out and throwing stones.

“If you want to know the personality of this city of Delhi, go to Kashmir or the north-east and see what happens under Delhi’s orders. India only holds onto those territories by military brutality, intimidation and rape. If there were any rule of law, whole jails would be full of the Indian soldiers who have raped and mutilated. Including members of my own family, who have given the orders. But they are protected by the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act. Of course this is antithetical to the constitution, which guarantees the right to life. But it doesn’t matter anymore because there is no rule of law. This is a completely lawless society. Nobody is accountable to anybody. The people who run this country are all lawbreakers.”

Jaswant’s horror at what surrounds him was crystallised during the Sikh attacks of 1984, which did not pass by people like him. Delhi people had always sought out positions and connections to insulate themselves from the wildness of things, but the mobs of 1984 were willing to take on any Sikh target, no matter how powerful.

“After Indira Gandhi’s assassination, with the encouragement of the press and politicians, not less than 15,000 Sikhs were killed in Delhi. The official figure was 3,000, but it was far more than that, and it happened in the most brutal way possible.

“The petrol station my family owned next to the Imperial Hotel was surrounded and they were threatening to burn it. The manager called to tell me what was going on and I said, ‘Why don’t you call the police?’ and the manager said, ‘The police are the ones who are doing it!’ Eventually the crowd was dispersed by shots fired from the Imperial Hotel.

“I was alone in the house with my kids. Hindu friends came to stay with me to help us. They knew what kind of state I was in, and they wanted to make sure I didn’t do anything stupid. I gave way to self-harming behaviour. I decided to cut my own hair off rather than have state-sponsored goons do it. I smashed my parents’ crystal and cut my hair off. I still have the hair.

“I lost faith in everyone. Including my friends who were trying to help but whose behaviour I found patronising. I was from Delhi and they were from outside. Who were they to protect me? My family built this damn city. I should have been protecting them.

“Two years later I was at a traffic light and my car stalled because it was cold. There was a motorcycle behind me and the rider was annoyed. He leaned in my open window and said, ‘Did you Sikhs never learn your lesson?’ There was not a hint of remorse in Hindus: they were delighted to have ‘taught us a lesson’, and they continued to display the most menacing, ghoulish behaviour.

“Another time I was walking in Connaught Place and a girl saw me in the street and asked if she could say something to me. I was afraid of the insult she was about to give me. But instead she said, ‘Can I just say how handsome you look in your turban?’ I was incredibly moved by her compliment, you can’t imagine what it meant to me.

“But in general I was outraged by the fact that no one really came out against the genocide. All around me people were trying to suck up to the Congress and they refused to say anything against what had happened. Even the Sikhs. My brother was a socialite and a businessman, and he refused to be affected by any of this. He just went along with the dirty flow of the city.

“One time, at a party at the house of an ex-army officer — a man who later killed a guy he suspected of having an affair with his wife — I got into an argument about how the press should not have said that the bodyguards who murdered Indira were Sikh. And that man said to me, very coldly, ‘You should watch what you say. You know what can happen to people like you.’

“I know those people well: the ex-army, the ex-navy, the ministers, the landowners. They’re all violent, indecent people who make a mockery of the excellent education they have had. Arms dealers, contractors, suppliers of women to powerful men, all paying each other off, getting their pound of flesh. Arms dealing has a lot of prestige in this circle because it makes you rich and you can say you’re being nationalistic, keeping the military supplied. That’s what they say. They are proud of what they do. And their wives are proud of it too: if they have to sleep with a general or somebody, they’ll do it.

“But they’re also very nervous. They escape all the time: they escape into golf and bridge. They escape to London for the weekend. Their money escapes to the Channel Islands and Switzerland and Panama. They are an effete elite. They have all had bypass operations. They all have pacemakers. They are riddled with diabetes and arthritis. They are corrupt not just in their money-making but in their bodies and souls. They’re very superstitious: their fingers are covered with stones which are supposed to protect them from evil forces, and they have little gods and goddesses in every corner of their house. Because they don’t know who they are, and their confusion expresses itself in prejudice and violence.”

Jaswant’s romance with India’s marginalised populations irritates a lot of his peers, who find it pretentious and perverse. But after what he experienced in 1984, Jaswant feels at home among such people in a way he does not among his own kind, who fill him, in fact, with the most profound despair. It is only among the poor and oppressed that he finds some reason for human optimism.

“What happened in Delhi in 1984 was an organised massacre of people and I don’t think the city has a capacity to absorb what happened. The scars don’t heal. In me, personally, the scars have not healed. The only release I have had is through my discovery of other people who have been subjected to that kind of violence — though in a much more sustained way — at the hands of the Indian state. Almost every village in Nagaland has been raped by the Indian army. Consistently. Their villages have been burnt and they have been relocated in other areas so that they are forced to encroach on other people’s territory. That produces violence. Then the state comes in with violence to stop that violence. So the north-east is a cauldron.

“When I encountered those people, I realised that my suffering was nothing compared to theirs. They have suffered immeasurably, but that is their strength, their resilience. Their hands have been cut off and their villages destroyed but they still put their high-caste oppressors to shame because they have dignity. They are capable of looking after themselves. They are brilliant. They are survivors. When everything explodes, they will survive. The elite will not, because when all this is dismantled, they will have nothing to rely upon except dignity and character, which they do not have.

“In the north-east, they know everything about their surroundings and they eat everything. There is no shortage of food. They know how to survive in famine because they know which leaves to eat, which fruits to eat. They can eat dogs, they can eat rats, and they have very good cuisine. They don’t overdo anything. And here these Hindu-type people: they can’t eat this, they can’t eat that. They are the ones really living in famine, if you ask me.

“If a natural catastrophe comes to this city, all hell will break loose. I see that coming. I see this city going into ruins, just tumbling into the dust. When an earthquake hits, when the water runs out, Delhi people will not help each other. They will slaughter each other.”

Jaswant is quite merry as he says all this.

“The other day I was sitting in my car, in the market, listening to some music. Three police cars were parked next to me and the policemen were playing cards. I got out and asked them what they were up to. They said they were protecting the son of a cabinet minister. ‘He’s come to spend some money, he’s an irresponsible, useless fellow, all he does is chase women and get drunk. We are his security team, three police cars.’

“That is the society we live in. Our policemen are not supposed to do anything for society. All they’re supposed to do is protect rapacious elites from it. But the people who are protecting them have total contempt for them. One day, if things continue like this, they will shoot them dead.”