Capital: The Eruption of Delhi

Fifteen

Everyone wants their house to be done up in the style of a Russian oligarch.

— Interior designer to the Delhi rich

Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination in 1991, purportedly at the hands of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, against whose Sri Lankan terrorist campaign he had made public statements, took place in the midst of the largest financial scandal the country had ever seen. The ‘Bofors’ scandal arose from rumours that the Swedish company had contrived to secure a multibillion-dollar arms contract by paying large kickbacks to several members of the Congress Party, including prime minister Rajiv Gandhi himself. The scandal reached to the heart of the Indian polity not only because of the unprecedented size of the bribes involved — which have been estimated at around $40 million⁴⁶ — but also the fact that they reached to the summit of government and, indeed, to the Nehru dynasty.

The exact truth of these allegations has never been reliably confirmed. But it seems quaint, in retrospect, to see the shock they provoked. And this is because the liberalisation of the economy, which took place a few months after Rajiv Gandhi’s death, greatly expanded both the scale and the frequency of ‘big ticket’ deal-making of this sort. It introduced, indeed, an entirely new system of financial flows which concentrated enormous money in the hands of a small nexus of dealmakers from the worlds of politics and business. It generated a new Indian oligarchy.

• • •

Insofar as public administration was a money-making venture, liberalisation represented, in the short-term, a disaster. The end of the license regime meant that public officials no longer enjoyed their traditional hold over business. Businessmen did not have to approach them for licenses every time they wanted to expand a factory or launch a new product, which meant that, for politicians and bureaucrats, large revenue streams disappeared.

But administration was a business, and like other businesses it found ways to innovate in the face of adversity. Politicians and bureaucrats sought out new revenue streams. They began to collect not small sums from large numbers of petitioners but large sums from a few. And they did not make money any more by charging for the removal of obstacles. Instead they ‘earned’ their money by becoming partners to business and taking over an entire branch of business operations — that branch which required the powers of the state.

This came at a time when big business, for its part, was greatly in need of this manner of partnership. The years after liberalisation saw a large-scale transfer of ownership of basic resources — the so-called ‘commanding heights’ of the economy, which Nehru had reserved for the state — to private hands. These included mines, oil and gas, and that fuel of the new economy, the mobile telephony spectrum — and, of course, land, the basic resource par excellence. Whoever could secure control of these resources would inevitably make fantastic gains. But there was no precedent for the process of transfer: it was — in India as in the former Soviet Bloc in the same years — a makeshift scramble, and its outcome lay, ultimately, in the hands of the political establishment. The businessmen who came out on top, therefore, were the ones with strong political connections — often those who had already been cultivating those connections since Mrs Gandhi’s time. Since the stakes could not have been higher — for whosoever could control the new Indian economy would be propelled to global levels of influence — politicians could also charge handsomely for their preferment. There was suddenly a level of deal-making that made Bofors seem infantile. The early twenty-first-century scandals surrounding corporations’ under-payment for the mobile telephony spectrum and for mines mentioned sums in the tens and even hundreds of billions of dollars. India’s pool of billionaires expanded rapidly, increasing their wealth from less than 1 per cent of national income in 1996 to 22 per cent in 2008. Sixty per cent of this billionaire wealth was built up from sectors closely controlled by government: property development, infrastructure, construction, mining, telecoms, cement and media.⁴⁷

It was no wonder that most people in Delhi, where the largest of these deals were done, believed that the very richest people in the city were not those whose wealth was published in corporate accounts, but the ones who travelled around in ancient white Ambassadors and earned a salary of $1,000 per month. Politicians refrained from acquiring valuable assets in their own names, but somehow their brothers and sons seemed suddenly to own fabulous land and property, and to have investments in a fantastic range of ventures. Was it not suspicious how many political families bid for cricket teams in the Indian Premier League auction? Was it not a sign of how valuable political offices were to their incumbents that campaign spending doubled with each general election⁴⁸ — which in turn put even more pressure on politicians to turn their situation to profit? There were extraordinary rumours about politicians’ personal worth. The media tried to guess what level of riches were involved by tracking consumer indulgences — houses, cars, children at expensive American schools — and there was in those years widespread resentment about the seemingly charmed lifestyle of so-called public servants. But in many ways, this interest in personal property and lifestyle was to miss the point. Because the people playing at the top of this game had long since passed the level where personal enrichment was the objective. They were involved in something far more grandiose than this, and something that enriched their entrepreneur partners more than themselves. That was not the point, however: these people were the power brokers of the new India, and what they were running was a system for privatised commercial development that was its own reward — a system with an entirely different structure to the ‘normal’ economy in which middle-class people earned money and bought things to improve their lives.

• • •

Mayawati, the politician from Uttar Pradesh who presented herself as the champion of dalits like herself, and of the oppressed in general, and who rose to become four-times chief minister of the state, was certainly one of the most ruthlessly extractive of all Indian politicians, and she accumulated an immense private fortune (it was she who purchased the Delhi mansion that had hosted the childhood of Sadia Dehlvi, whom we met earlier). But the paradoxes of Mayawati’s career were not merely of the crude — millionaire-politician-says-she-is-friend-of-the-poor — kind. In Indian politics, money-making was no longer proof of insincerity, especially since a woman like Mayawati, who came from the oppressed classes, who presided over a criminalised state and who had many enemies, could not possibly sustain her position without enormous funds for patronage and re-election. And Mayawati did display a bizarre, carnivalesque commitment to her state’s oppressed classes, not only giving them hand-outs and goodies, but also dignifying their status with a campaign of symbolic building and public sculpture that placed her in a rare category of Indian politician: perhaps none other since Nehru had demonstrated such interest in the political mission of architecture. At the gateway from Delhi, where the road crosses the border into Noida, the large suburb on the Uttar Pradesh side, she laid out a bewilderingly elaborate park where twenty-four enormous sandstone elephants — symbols of her party — attended statues of fifteen dalit icons, including Mayawati herself. Like many female politicians, in fact, she designed for herself a goddess-cult in which her low caste and her great wealth became positive images of a new order: her birthdays became major ceremonial events at which she displayed herself to her followers draped in thousands of banknotes.

But in tandem with all this symbolism of dalit pride and wealth, she set about an aggressive redevelopment of her state, one whose dynamism depended not only on the size of her own war chest but also on her partnership with rich businessmen, especially a Brahmin engineer-turned-businessman. Her role in this partnership was to use state machinery to seize land from farmers and to provide the political support necessary for developing it. He, in return, supplied financial investment and business know-how, delivered well-executed prestige projects to the state and, presumably, shared his profits with her. Neither partner could have achieved this without the other. What they developed together, in fact, was a fast-track system for economic development which was sternly authoritarian — for state support came with the full arsenal of armed back-up — but which, unlike China’s equivalent system, was housed within a democracy. The democratic context certainly added many layers of conflict and uncertainty to the enterprise — Mayawati’s continued patronage was dependent on her winning elections, and on the day in 2012 that she was voted out, shares in the company tumbled. But this system, turbulent though it was, was India’s answer to China’s more explicitly autocratic one. In post-liberalisation India, it was not enough to have capital, for the flow of capital was blocked on every side by legal and bureaucratic constraints: only when big business entered into partnership with powerful and visionary political players could adequate outlets be opened for investment.

To cross the Uttar Pradesh border from Delhi was to be assailed not only by hagiographic images of its chief minister but also by the ubiquitous logo of her construction company partner. A publicly traded company whose shares were still majority-owned by one family, the company was an established giant before Mayawati came along, owning India’s largest private power station and its third-largest cement conglomerate. In 2000, it branched out into real estate, building a ring of golf courses and apartment complexes around Delhi. It had money and expertise, and was perfectly placed to partner with Mayawati when she came to power. It won from her first of all the contract to build an eight-lane highway from Noida to Agra, home of the Taj Mahal, Uttar Pradesh’s most famous tourist destination. The contract required the company to put up the money for the highway but allowed it to collect tolls from users for thirty-five years, after which toll income would revert to the state. To sweeten the deal, Mayawati also ‘gave’ the company the land on either side of the highway, a tract of some 6,000 acres forcibly acquired from farmers at a rate of Rs 580 [$2.60] per square metre, on which it determined to develop several ventures, including private townships and a private international airport, which would over the next twenty years generate a combined estimated income of $27 billion. This boon was in addition to the 2,500 acres that Mayawati bought from farmers for the company to build a private ‘sports city’, which included India’s Formula One racing track. It seems that the financial equation was enhanced in all these deals by the waiving of great tranches of the company’s tax bill.

Realising, belatedly, that the land they had surrendered to the state government for essential infrastructure had ended up in the hands of big business, the farmers began to protest, blocking roads, burning company offices and trying to disrupt the inaugural Formula One event. The protests were dealt with brutally — the police fired into one group of protesters, killing three — and ultimately led to nothing. The company’s expansion continued unabashed, with new ventures in mining, chemicals, hospitality, hydropower and foods.

As legal entities, organisations like this one were mercurial and opaque. Tens or hundreds of companies were owned by groups within other groups, some of them privately held, others publicly traded. The controlling interest of the founding families was usually distributed among many of their members. It was crucial to their success that they shield large amounts of capital from public scrutiny — not only because they did not like to pay taxes, though that was part of it, but also because their operations required them to generate significant quantities of black money for bribes, land purchases and the like. Many of them raised money for business expansion not from banks but by borrowing, unofficially, from each other, in accordance with a clubbish honour code that predated the corporate era. In the background of all this, holding things together, was usually some kind of financial genius; for it was not just anyone who knew how to move billions of dollars of black and white money efficiently through large and complex corporate systems, while at all times insulating the company from suspicion and investigation.

This system of collusion between politics and big business thrived because it allowed insiders to operate with great speed. But it did not leave room for many players. Part of its success, indeed, was due to the fact that it eliminated competition: international companies in particular found it almost impossible to duplicate the political know-how of entrenched local interests, who deliberately kept them out in just this way. No: the system was controlled by a few political and commercial figures, who concentrated enormous capital in their own hands and undertook among themselves a formidably dynamic transformation of the Indian landscape. They were not the apathetic, self-indulgent people that the press so often imagined the new ‘corrupt’ elite to be. Conspicuous consumption was part of their style, but this should not detract from the seriousness of their ambition. The reason they had manoeuvred themselves into this position in the first place was so that they could operate at dazzling scale and break-neck speed. They were enormous investors in the Indian economy and generated huge economic effects. Even those politicians who had swept corrupt gains into Swiss bank accounts during the 1970s and ’80s, when India’s slow-growing economy was no place to keep them, now brought them back to invest in its boom. Much of the foreign direct investment coming into India was not ‘foreign’ at all, but illicit Indian money funnelled out to companies in Mauritius or the Cayman Islands which then invested it back into India. In 2010, it was estimated that the present value of illicit funds taken out of India since Independence was close to half a trillion dollars.⁴⁹ But in the decade after 2000 it was also conspicuous that tiny Mauritius accounted for over 41 per cent of India’s foreign direct investment; as a report issued by India’s finance minister in 2012 commented, “Mauritius and Singapore with their small economies cannot be the sources of such huge investments, and it is apparent that the investments are routed through these jurisdictions for avoidance of taxes and/or for concealing the identities from the revenue authorities of the ultimate investors, many of whom could actually be Indian residents.”⁵⁰ Members of the corrupt elite, in this sense, became highly productive agents in the economy. Politicians and their business partners were like feudal venture capitalists, extracting a forcible tax on a particular turf and channelling it quickly into new business ventures.

This is why even people who observed these goings-on from the outside could be enthusiastic about what they saw: it seemed like this back-room path to development, where members of the political class extracted large amounts of capital which they then poured efficiently into fast-moving, dramatic business projects, by-passing all the friction of political approval and official financial procedure, might be the only way for India’s chaotic energies to be channelled into meaningful action. When I asked Raman Roy, the squeaky-clean father of Indian business process outsourcing we met at the beginning of this journey, what his prognosis was for the Indian economy, he found great hope in this grey zone of politics and business, whose uniqueness he appreciated with almost patriotic affection.

“We are lucky in India to have the windfall of political money. That puts huge capital into the system. And there is also enormous ability, enormous vision. While corporations operate from quarter to quarter, politicians have a five- to ten-year perspective. That’s why the two can work together so well. Look at all these new deluxe hotels: politicians acquire the land and they work with corporations to produce world-class products. It is a tested model. Right now this vision is directed at the cream, but later it will serve the masses. Because now all black money leads back into corporate activities. Our bureaucrats have immense administrative capability, and the coming together of political wealth, bureaucratic skills and the corporate ability to manage leads to magic.”

It should be clear that this system rewarded people with skills conventionally regarded as underhand, and they often aroused intense disdain among so-called sophisticates. Few of the new billionaires came from the old, anglicised elite, to whom the requisite hustle had become alien over the years. Many of them had moved to Delhi, in fact, from surrounding states — such as Uttar Pradesh and Haryana — where they had operated a local political — commercial nexus even before 1991. English was often not their first language, and their tastes were untrained. They put escalators in their houses because they had seen them in five-star hotels, they scattered banknotes around them like feudal overlords, and they paid for Bombay actors and Los Angeles rap stars to perform at their weddings. But perhaps this, now, was ‘taste’. It certainly seemed that the contempt in which the old elite held these people was another sign of its obsolescence. The emerging class’s embrace of naked money, as a principle and as a style, equipped it very well for success, not only in the new India, but in the rest of the world too, which broadly was following suit.

Earlier in this book we saw how fondly and often India was likened to America. But for the most part, this was pure ideology. India had much more obvious similarities to America’s alter ego: Russia. India and Russia had both had systems of state-run capitalism that had foundered by the 1980s, generating a new class of clever, underground entrepreneurs who came into their own after the old systems — almost simultaneously — collapsed. Both countries developed systems, after that point, in which the existence of electoral democracy did not prevent the emergence of a class of oligarchs who used the political system to take control of their countries’ essential resources. Both of them had capital cities, Moscow and Delhi, where the majority watched with resentment as a small number of people used the immense power of large-country politics to their commercial advantage.

And yet, perhaps the distinctions between all these places, even with America, were fading away. In the early twenty-first century, it seemed, the question of over-powerful business elites was local news everywhere. There was a convergence in global culture, and it was not in the direction we were trained to expect. Perhaps everything, in fact, tended towards Russia. We had always imagined that Russia was global capitalism’s primitive past. Perhaps it was its future.

• • •

Mickey Chopra makes a timid entrance into the quiet hotel lounge where he has asked me to meet him. He wears a black turban and suit; he is stocky and muscular and speaks with a faint lisp. He is twenty-eight years old.

He is not talkative. I try to break the ice by telling him that we have a friend in common, and we discuss her for a while. He relaxes.

I ask him about his life.

“Until I was a teenager,” he says, “I thought my dad worked for the government. I used to ask, ‘Why do we have this big house?’ They told me, ‘Your grandfather built it, then we lost the money and now your dad works for the government.’”

In truth, Mickey’s father ran a large assembly of businesses across the states of Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and Punjab. The mainstay of this empire was liquor retail, a business which, in gangster states like Uttar Pradesh, offered rewards only to the shrewd, charismatic and violent.

“Of course there were goons around — you can’t run this kind of business without a strong arm — but my dad always kept them out of our sight. He believed in discipline. He said, ‘If you do bad things, like if you get caught for drunk driving, I can’t get you off.’ A lot of powerful people said to their sons, I can get you off anything. It makes for a different kind of mentality. Of course, later I discovered that there was nothing I could have done that my dad couldn’t have got me out of.”

Mickey’s father is present throughout his conversation as a kind of spiritual touchstone.

“The company was set up by my great-grandfather in 1952. My family were livestock farmers in West Punjab and they lost everything in 1947. They set up in Uttar Pradesh, where they had to fight to make it.

“When my father took it over in the 1980s, the family was in debt. Now the group has an annual turnover of $1 billion. My father’s will to succeed is phenomenal. If he sets out to do something, he will get it done. If there’s someone I want to become, it’s him.”

Mickey speaks about the family business in the first-person plural. He has grown up absorbing business ideas and techniques, and they are a natural part of his speech.

“When our liquor business was at its height, we controlled 19 per cent of Indian liquor retail. At that time, the government auctioned liquor outlets to the highest bidder. Later on it introduced a lottery system to prevent monopolies. But we could still grow the business because we had so many employees. In any lottery in our region, out of 100 entrants, 80 were our men.”

Mickey was sent to a series of expensive schools, but he was repeatedly expelled, and at the age of sixteen he dropped out for good. He went to London for a year or two to have fun: clubs, parties, and everything else that a teenager with a well-stocked bank account can think up.

When he came back, he was put in charge of one of the family’s sugar mills. But his heart was not in it — and the real estate boom was on. In 2001, the family set up a real estate business and Mickey, twenty-one and entirely untrained, was given the task of building the largest shopping mall in northern India.

“When I was in England I spent a lot of time walking around malls, studying how they were made. There’s no point re-inventing the wheel. I know more than anyone in India about how you set up a mall, how you arrange your brands. My father had no experience in a professional context, so everything I know about the professional context I’ve learned myself. I introduced computer systems into the business: I taught myself Oracle programming because the professional contractors were no good. Then I taught myself all about the latest building techniques. My first mall was built with special pre-fabricated steel pillars which had never been used in Indian malls before. Recently, I taught myself finance. I read finance texts online and every time I didn’t know a word, I looked it up. Six months ago I didn’t know anything and now I can conduct finance meetings with PriceWaterhouse.”

Mickey’s mall was famous for having Delhi’s most luxurious and hi-tech nightclub. It was Mickey’s pet project, his personal party zone, with endless champagne for him and his friends — and his nightly arrival there, surrounded by bodyguards, was always a frisson.

“For a time I was the man in Delhi. Loads of people wanted to be my friend. Women wanted to sleep with me. I said to my wife, ‘If I hadn’t been married, things would have been very different.’ A lot of people were very fake.”

Like many Delhi rich boys, Mickey was given a big wedding as a way of winding down his wild years. When he was twenty-two, he married his childhood sweetheart; their reception had 6,000 guests and featured dance routines by Bollywood divas. Mickey still loves parties and, as I discover during our conversation, he becomes relaxed and witty with alcohol, but there is no doubt that he has by now grown into a fully fledged partner to his father. He’s ready to shut down his club: he doesn’t have time to attend to it anymore, and he doesn’t want anyone else to run it. He operates five shopping malls across India, and he has another 1,400 acres under development. And that is just the beginning. He is moving on to much bigger plans.

“We’ve just leased 700,000 acres for seventy-five years; we’re opening up food processing, sugar and flower plantations.”

He is so matter-of-fact that I’m not sure if I’ve heard correctly. We have already discussed how laborious it is to acquire land in India, buying from farmers five or ten acres at a time. I can’t imagine where he could get hold of land on that scale.

“Where?” I ask.

“Ethiopia. My father has a friend who bought land from the Ethiopian president for a cattle ranch there. The president told him he had other land for sale. My dad said, ‘This is it, this is what we’ve been looking for, let’s go for it.’ We’re going in there with Boris Berezovsky.⁵¹ Africa is amazing. That’s where it’s at. You’re talking about numbers that can’t even fit into your mind yet. Reliance, Tata, all the big Indian corporations are setting up there, but we’re still ahead of the curve. I’m going to run this thing myself for the next eight years, that’s what I’ve decided. I’m not giving this to any CEO until it meets my vision. It’s going to be amazing. You should see this land: lush, green. Black soil, rivers.”

Mickey tells me how he has 100 farmers from Punjab ready with their passports to set off for Ethiopia as soon as all the papers are signed.

“Africans can’t do this work. Punjabi farmers are good because they’re used to farming big plots. They’re not scared of farming 5,000 acres. Meanwhile I’ll go there and set up polytechnics to train the Africans, so they’ll be ready when the sugar mills start up.”

Shipping farmers from Punjab to work on African plantations is a plan of imperial proportions. And there’s something imperial about the way he says ‘Africans’. I’m stunned. I tell him so.

“Thank you,” he says.

“What is on that land right now?” I ask, already knowing that his response, too, will be imperial.

“Nothing.”

Mickey is excited to be talking about this. His spirits seem to be entirely unaffected by the recession that currently dominates the headlines. He orders another beer, though we have exceeded his time. All of a sudden, I find him charismatic. I can see why he makes things happen: he has made me believe, as he must have made others believe, that he can do anything. I ask him how he learned to think like this.

“I’m only twenty-eight,” he says. “Why not?”

He becomes flamboyant.

“We’re going to be among the top five food processors in the world. You know the first company I’m going to buy? Heinz.”

I’m interested in his “Why not?” Is it on the strength of such throwaway reason that 700,000 acres of Ethiopia are cleared and hundreds of farmers shipped across the world? I wonder what the emotional register of this is for him. It seems as if, somewhere, it’s all a bit of a lark.

“I sometimes wonder why I work,” he says. “I do ask that question. I don’t need to work. But what else am I going to do? You can’t sit in beach resorts for 365 days a year. So I think of crazy things. I like it when you think up something, and it’s so wild you’re messed in the head and you think, ‘How can I do this?’ — and then you think, ‘Why not?’”

I feel like pointing out that life holds more possibilities for someone like him than just sitting on the beach. “Messed in the head” sounds like language that remains from his wild days, as if the whole thing is about getting a high. I ask him how he wants to spend his money.

“Currently I drive a BMW 750i. It’s good for long drives to the mall I’m building in Ludhiana. The car I really want is an Aston Martin DBS. But I’ll buy it later, when I deserve it more. My father wanted to buy me a nice sports car three years ago but I said, ‘Wait.’ I set myself certain goals. By the time I’m forty I want a 160-foot boat. I want a nice Gulfstream plane. And I want to be able to run them without it pinching me.”

Mickey talks as if he were saving up for a motorbike or a fridge, and it seems strangely banal. This is a man who can dream up earth-bending forms of money-making, but his ideas of spending it are consumerist in the most ordinary of ways. His middle-class vocabulary seems at odds with his multibillion-dollar scale, and I wonder if he is deferring his sports car so as not to run out of future acquisitions too quickly. I wonder if the whole enterprise does not teeter on the edge of senselessness, if he is not in fact still waiting for someone to supply him with a meaning for this money around which his life is organised.

Unprompted, he becomes philosophical.

“I’m not religious. I’m spiritual. My basic principle is: Whatever goes around comes around. It will come back to you, you can be dead sure of that. I live my life in a Vedic way. Disciplined. No idol worship, no stupid acceptance. Also that you don’t just let someone hit you and take it from them. You give it back to them.”

I’m not sure if this last point flows from the basic principle, but I don’t question it. Mickey is deadly serious. He is letting me in on his knowledge. He tells me a story.

“I was at a party recently, and the waiter was handing out drinks and he moved the tray away a little too soon and this guy hadn’t got his drink. So the guy shook up a soda bottle and sprayed it in the waiter’s face. I went straight to the host, and I had him chucked out of the party. You have to know how to behave. Some people only feel they have money when they can screw someone else. You have to know how to treat normal people. You see, there are two kinds of rich. There are people who’ve had money for a long time and they don’t give a fuck who you are: they’ll be nice to you anyway. Like I’m nice to people. You may get bored being around them because all they talk about is how they’ve just got back from Cannes or St Tropez, but they will always be nice. But the people who’ve got rich in the last five years, they turn up at a party and the first thing they do is put their car keys down on the table to show they have a Bentley. They don’t know how to behave.”

Mickey is a little drunk, and he’s policing boundaries that are clearer to him than to me. It’s not the first time he’s said, ‘People have to know how to behave.’ Once again I feel that his stand against the nihilism of the Delhi rich is all the more fervent because he is assailed by it himself. He is intimate with all the thuggish bad boys who have given people like him such a bad name, and he is impressed by parables of restraint.

“I have a friend who’s a multibillionaire,” he says, “and I asked him about the best car to buy for your kids, because I’ve just had kids, and he suggested a Toyota Innova. He could afford to buy a jet for his kids but he doesn’t. They have to earn it. He just buys them an Innova. You see, people say there are bad kids but it’s all the parents’ fault. It’s totally the parents. They have fucked up their kids and once that’s happened it can never be undone. One day the guy is driving a Maruti 800, the next day he’s driving an S Class, and he buys Beamers for his kids when they’re ten years old and they just go crazy. The kids get fucked up.”

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

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

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

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

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

“So why do you travel with bodyguards?”

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

For good reason, Mickey is grateful to India.

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

Mickey tells me about his dislike for America.

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

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

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

“No. It will be exactly the same.”

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

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

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

Mickey lives about 200 metres away.

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

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

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

He responds straight away:

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

• • •

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

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

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

Such a man was Kushal Pal Singh, the man behind Gurgaon’s extraordinary rise. His father, who was a military man from Punjab, set up a real-estate business around the time of Partition, which was instrumental in developing new neighbourhoods for the waves of arriving refugees; this business was however decimated when the DDA was set up. K.P. Singh was charged with reviving the business, later called DLF, and in 1979, unable to operate in Delhi, he began to buy up rural land to the south of the city around Sanjay Gandhi’s then-defunct factory. This is how he describes the process:

I did everything it took to persuade these farmers to trust me. I spent weeks and months with their families. I wore kurtas, sat on charpoys, drank fly-infested milk from dirty glasses, attended weddings, visited the sick. To understand why this was important, it is necessary to understand the landholding pattern. The average plot size in Gurgaon was four to five acres, mostly held by Hindu undivided families. Legally, to get clear titles, I needed the consent of every adult member of these families. That could be up to thirty people for one sale deed. Getting the married daughters to sign was often tricky because the male head of the family would refuse to share the proceeds of the sale with them. So I would travel to their homes and pay the daughters in secret. Remarkably, Gurgaon’s farmers sold me land on credit. I would pay one farmer and promptly take the money back as a loan and use that to buy more land. The firm’s good will made them willing to act as bankers for DLF. But it also meant I had to be extra careful about interest payments. Come rain or shine, the interest would be hand-delivered to each farmer on the third of every month at 10 a. m. We bought 3,500 acres of land in Gurgaon, more than half of it on credit, without one litigation against DLF.⁵²

Even allowing for the romantic distortions of this account, Singh’s enterprise was remarkable. Even if things went well, it would take decades before his investment was recouped. And at that time, in the late 1970s, it required a great leap of the imagination to even glimpse that future pay-off. Gurgaon was a dry, inaccessible place where very little happened beyond the wanderings of goat-herders on the baked earth. There were about eight cars in the whole village and one had to book a phone call to Delhi an hour in advance. There was one little shop whose owner used to dry his grain on the sidewalk; the only place to go for dinner was the local dhaba. When K.P. Singh first called Delhi building companies to trudge out into the far-off brushland and discuss building apartment complexes for the rich and successful, the contractors thought he was mad. As late as 1994, when an entertainment complex was set up with a disco and a bowling alley, Delhi consumers were so scared of going to the wilds of Gurgaon that the owner had to set up his own road lighting along the tiny road and provide roving security vans to make visitors feel safe. But with the corporate influx of the late 1990s, everything changed. When I first visited Gurgaon in 2001, it was a bizarre and thrilling scene of huge, glinting skyscrapers rising improbably from the dust of the Haryana countryside and being crowned, finally, with the banners of some of the world’s largest economic entities: Microsoft, IBM, Ericsson.

It was not just corporations that set up there. DLF proclaimed a better lifestyle, a “new Singapore” of gated communities, golf courses and shopping malls, and before long corporate employees, too, ran from Delhi’s dysfunctional infrastructure and political culture to make their homes in Gurgaon. Flush with boom cash, India’s banks handed out loans to anyone who asked, and house prices were rising so fast that it made sense for everyone to put their savings into property. Gurgaon quickly became the largest private township in Asia, a dusty, booming expanse of hypertrophic, high-security apartment complexes which looked down on a landscape of pure commerce. In 2007, K.P. Singh listed his company on the Indian stock exchanges, and the 2008 Forbes list estimated him to be the world’s eighth-richest man, with a white-money fortune of $30 billion.

By that time of course, there were several other real-estate magnates in the capital. The land surrounding Delhi was an amazing commodity, doubling in value every three or four years, and multiplying its value by sixty times by the simple addition of bricks, concrete and a bit of cheap labour — and the 2000s saw a desperate land rush. Hundreds of thousands of acres of agricultural land were sold on to developers. Companies that had previously made their money from car parts or chemicals now realised the bulk of their profits from real estate, and major banks such as Deutsche Bank and Morgan Stanley queued up to fund them. Small-time developers from drab little towns like Ghaziabad became serious property moguls, who sent their sons to US business schools to learn how to run billion-dollar businesses. Delhi became dominated by real-estate wealth, and this was a certain kind of wealth. Real estate was a scramble, and it was nearly impossible to operate at any significant scale without a wide network of paid connections among politicians, bureaucrats and the police. Brute force was often essential. Real-estate mafias grabbed country houses in Haryana and employed the police to silence the owners by filing false criminal charges against them. In Uttar Pradesh, they forced farmers and tribal communities to sell their land under threat of violence, employed the local police to clear the locals off, and sold it on at a large profit. There was a general escalation of criminality and violence, and the people who came through with new fortunes were a formidable breed. They knew how to hijack state power for their own private profit, and they enjoyed the support of the police and of much-feared extortion gangs. Such people had cracked the muscular equation of contemporary India, and they spurned its liberal platitudes as just so much pious cant.

Land provoked in them a remarkable, almost religious fervour, as nothing else could. The centuries-long precariousness we have already described led people from this part of the world to esteem the ownership and control of land above all other values — often above even family relationships, which is why so many families were split by property battles. Both K.P. Singh and Mickey Chopra came from Punjabi families hit by historical losses, and there was something very Punjabi about the excessiveness of their land ambitions. K.P. Singh’s piecing together of his Gurgaon empire, bit by bit, over two decades, has an obsession to it that goes beyond simple commercial ambition. It is a personal crusade, a life’s work. At first glance it may seem like pure acquisitiveness, but that is only in retrospect, when the work is done and the land has been turned into money. In the act itself there is something glorious and even selfless that returns us to the warrior ethos we have previously observed in north Indian business. So too in Mickey Chopra’s scheme to buy three quarters of a million acres of Africa and farm it with Punjabi farmers: it has a commercial logic which should not detract from the fact that it is also a kind of grand chivalric feat. In the early twenty-first century, warriors from north India were riding abroad, and the impact of their vehemence was as turbulent outside the country as it was at home. One of the many reasons Africa was so attractive to Indian land speculators, in fact, was that rural communities often had a more slender claim to the land they lived on there than in India, and they could be much more easily turfed off in the name of total ownership. In such places as Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Ghana, Sudan and Namibia, Indian businessmen scrambled to acquire mines and especially agricultural land under the sponsorship of their country’s politicians, who organised business tours of these places and informed their African counterparts that only India, with its experience of the Green Revolution, could bring to their countries the skills and knowledge they lacked. While some of the people who had previously farmed this land were of course employed as wage workers on the new plantations, the majority were not. Many of these lands were highly fertile and had historically supported very dense populations, only a small proportion of which were now given a place there. In the African countryside too, therefore, Indian money helped accelerate the evacuation of the countryside, leading waves of refugees into the cities, and the escalation of slum living.

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

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

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

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

It is unclear just how the brothers made all their wealth, although they do own one of the largest distributors of personal computers in South Africa. What is known is that the Guptas, together with the president’s son, Duduzane Zuma, 28, have become increasingly linked to deals that have been lucrative in the extreme.

The three are part of a consortium that will give them a stake in the global steel giant ArcelorMittal worth more than 3 billion rands [$4 million]. The brothers have been linked to plans to build a 350-billion-rand [$45 billion] high-speed railway system using state and Chinese funding.

They are also said to have become involved in the 9.7 billion rand purchase of the V&A Waterfront in Cape Town, the country’s most valuable piece of property, from a consortium that included Dubai World. The Waterfront was sold to a local group that included a state-owned pension fund. Somehow, the Guptas and Duduzane Zuma were able to come on board as black partners, a legal requirement in any deal involving a state entity. The three have denied any impropriety in their deals…

It has not helped that the Guptas’ lifestyle is so at odds with how most South Africans live. An application for a helicopter landing pad at their compound drew wide media coverage last year. Their launching of a daily newspaper, viewed as a counter to the continuing negative publicity they and their ruling party connections have received, has also not helped.

Now it appears that some in the ruling African National Congress (ANC) have had enough. Allegations that the Guptas have grown so powerful they can summon cabinet ministers to their compound and authorise the appointment of senior officials at state-owned enterprises appear to be the last straw for some. The party’s powerful youth league said this week the brothers were “colonising this country”. The country’s trade union federation, Cosatu, which is part of the ANC’s governing alliance, has also said it will launch an investigation into alleged “plundering” of the economy by the Guptas.⁵⁴

The Gupta empire, which they controlled directly and through a series of family-owned investment companies, may have begun with computers, but it quickly moved into other sectors, especially those sectors most controlled and regulated by politics: uranium and coal mining, media, aviation, etc. The business was plagued by scandal but it managed to maintain its position through a business network that included not only South African businessmen and politicians but other members of the global Indian business elite, such as the steel tycoon Lakshmi Mittal (who himself had to face allegations of improper political influence, this time within the UK government of Tony Blair; a year after the Mittal ‘cash-for-influence’ scandal, the Blair administration had to answer another set questions about the nature of its relationship to the billionaire Hinduja brothers, who appeared to have the power to fast-track their own UK citizenship applications). The dismay caused by public revelations that the Gupta family in summer 2013 made use of a high-security military base, not only to land a jet bringing guests to their family wedding, but also to absolve them of immigration requirements, showed just how much concern there was about the levels of control enjoyed by the family over systems and installations of the state.

While the Gupta family’s fortune certainly derived from its interests in Africa, its style — the pious rhetoric of vegetarianism and the extended family, the public extolling of the brothers’ saintly father and simple mother, the friendships with Indian film stars and the personal and financial investment in cricket — all came from its north Indian roots. As did the name of their original company, Sahara Holdings, named for Saharanpur in Uttar Pradesh, but which in the African context took on a different meaning. The brothers liked to joke that they turned things into a desert for their competition.⁵⁵

• • •

More than a year after my first meeting with Mickey, I meet him for another drink. He and a friend are booked for a massage at a five-star hotel; he arranges to meet me there beforehand.

He seems to have put on perfume just before getting out of the car; it overpowers me as we shake hands. He’s thirty now, and he looks more polished than I remember. His suit is beautiful. He carries nothing except an iPad and an iPhone.

His friend sits down with him and absorbs himself in some activity on a big touch screen. Mickey orders a bottle of Krug. The waiter treats him in the way I suppose he is treated in every five-star hotel of the city.

We start talking about Africa.

“The Ethiopia thing fell through,” he says. “There was a change of government and the new government wanted ten times the price. We lost $3 million on that. We had to shift the whole project to Guinea. We took more precautions this time: now we have sovereign guarantees. We managed to get our equipment out, though, which was the important thing. Our South African sugar refinery is safe.

“There are loads of Indians in Africa. Many of them are doing roses. Some rice. The Chinese don’t understand farming as well as we do, so we have an advantage. I have the sense that the Chinese are not so liked either, because they make big guarantees about the employment they will give but they end up bringing crowds of their own people.

“Over here, our real estate business is growing very fast. We’re building two big developments in Noida. One of them has a 240-metre tower, with a swimming pool and restaurant on the sixtieth floor. We’ve acquired 8,000 acres across the border in Uttar Pradesh where we’re building a complete private township. We’ve got civic authority status and we’re going to do everything ourselves. Garbage, sewers. It’s going to be a model city and we will train the population how to live in a modern city. How to divide up their garbage, not just throw it out in the streets. We have a system for collecting fees from all residents to pay for all these services.”

I already know about this new development because Mickey’s company seems to have bought up pretty much every billboard in Delhi to advertise it. Computer-generated images show a sparkling metropolis of skyscrapers and glass. The rumours are that Mickey spent significantly in excess of a billion dollars acquiring the land for his new city. Given the costs of developing that land, and all the other projects he is funding right now, one has a sense of the scale of financial backing he has.

“We’re outsourcing our architecture to the US. We couldn’t find people in India who could do the work and have now got an architect in North Carolina whose office does all the work for our projects over here.”

While he is talking, Mickey surreptitiously dials the phone number of the friend who is sitting next to him. The friend’s tablet starts to ring and he puts it to his ear. It is about the size of a hardback book. Mickey bursts out laughing.

“I just love seeing him put that thing to his ear. It’s so big he can’t even hold it in one hand.”

We talk about other things. I ask Mickey what he thinks of the calibre of other Delhi businessmen.

“Most of them are not very impressive. They’re not thinking big. You should meet a friend of mine who makes car parts. Rakesh. He’s expanding into the Middle East and Europe, he knows how to compete with China — he’s the one person I look up to. The story I hear most often is people selling out. Going to live in Europe. They can’t deal with it here — it’s too difficult — they have to pay people off at every level and get involved in politics and they just want to sell their father’s business and go to Europe. I say, ‘What are you gonna do there? What are you gonna do with the cash?’

“People are giving up their family business, moving out of their parents’ house and losing their values. I think it’s shameful. Why do you need to move out of your parents’ house? Are you Indian or not?”

Since I last saw Mickey he has moved, with his parents, into the enormous farmhouse he has been building for the last two years. I have never seen this place, but its scale and opulence have created waves of rumours I hear everywhere I go. The golfing carts for navigating the grounds. The underground swimming pool surrounded by bullet-proof glass panels on steel rollers. The interior decor of gold tiling, red velvet and crystal masterminded by a British nightclub designer

“And those people are idiots,” he continues, “because the opportunity is now. This is the time that money your family built up in the last generations can really explode. We’re approaching a global food crisis. The climate is changing and a lot of established food markets are having major problems. Look at Australia. There is so much scarcity. The next oil is food.”

He says it with exaltation, and I remember this feeling from my last conversation with him: that he is a businessman bred for the era of catastrophe, delighted by food shortages, climatic disturbance and turbulence of all sorts. Unlike American elites, who might have come to maturity in an age that believed that the future would be less assailed by catastrophe, Mickey comes to maturity in an age that believes that catastrophe is just beginning.

“Our next big venture in India is poultry. We’re looking to deliver 500,000 chickens per day. They’ll be properly packed and hygienic. Currently chicken farms are very dirty. The knife they cut with and the base they cut on are so dirty. We just have to tell people the knife they cut with is dirtier than your toilet seat and they’ll all abandon the old suppliers. This will be a very important product for us.”

He seems to have even more energy than the first time I met him. Any one of the many projects he is managing would defeat most other people I know. I say he must be working hard.

“Of course it’s difficult. I don’t get to see my kids. My wife goes on at me about it. I see them for half an hour in the morning and maybe two evenings a week. But I tell her — when they’re nineteen, at least they’ll have money. Imagine if we didn’t have money and they were complaining that they couldn’t go to good schools or anything. What would I say to them? ‘Well, at least I spent time with you’?”

It is time for Mickey’s massage.

“It’s a great time,” he says, rising, “the greatest time ever in Indian history. There’s money to be made in every corner. Everywhere you look there’s scarcity. It’s very corrupt — you have to work very hard — but it’s a great scene.”

“Would you like it to be less corrupt?” I ask.

“No!” He laughs at length, and turns to his friend in mirth.

We walk out through the hotel. He and his friend head towards the spa. We say goodbye and I walk away. He calls out to me.

“And by the way!”

I turn around.

“I still want to buy Heinz!”

• • •

Driving past Delhi’s sole dealer of Bentleys and Lamborghinis, I stop in on a whim and ask to speak to the manager. He’s not around and I’m sent to have coffee with the PR girls. They are appropriately attractive and, judging by their diamonds, from the right kind of family. (“I’ve driven a million Porsches and Ferraris,” says one. “They’re nice cars. But when you get into a Lamborghini, it’s something else.”) For them, Delhi is a place of infinite money-making, and they fall over themselves trying to express this fantastic fecundity.

“When someone comes in here looking to buy a Bentley, we don’t ask him what he’s driving now. Just because he drives a BMW doesn’t mean he can afford a Bentley. We ask if he has a jet or a yacht. We ask if he has an island.”

“Are there many people with jets in Delhi?” I ask.

The girls wax apoplectic.

“Everyone has one. And not just one — they have two, three, four.”

We chat about nice cars and expensive living. A Lamborghini is driven into the showroom: the noise is so deafening that we have to stop talking until it’s in place. I ask the philistine’s question: what’s the point of spending 30 million rupees [$600,000] on a car that can do over 300 kilometres per hour in a city where the traffic doesn’t move? They tell me about the car club that meets at night in the diplomatic enclave, where the roads are straight, wide and empty.

“You have to have at least, like, a BMW or a Mercedes to join. They meet at midnight and they race their cars. The prime minister’s office is always calling us to complain.”

“Why?”

“Because the prime minister can’t sleep. These engines make so much noise they keep him awake. So he calls us to complain, but obviously there’s nothing we can do.”

As I drive away, I cannot help thinking of prime minister Manmohan Singh tossing and turning in bed, his snowy hair unturbaned on the pillow, his dreams interrupted by the rich boys’ Ferraris screaming up and down the roads outside. Manmohan Singh is of course the man who, long ago, as finance minister, opened the window to the storm of global capitalism and set the course for a new oligarchic elite.