India (33 page)

As more and more people in India acquired mobile phones and handheld devices, Mittal thought he might be moving towards easier times. He was wrong. “We get regulatory curveballs all the time—new rules, a minister denying spectrum, issuing licences. It’s still war.” He was now seeking to move beyond telecom, in various directions. “The number of dollars I have doesn’t interest me. I love the journey. What excites me is the new.” What was new now? “Our work in Africa. The possibilities for retail in India. There’s huge waste in fruit and veg, and we don’t have a cold supply chain. A lot of stores are run by family, but the sons and daughters want to work in modern shops.” He was starting gradually, and had opened about 100 stores in partnership with Wal-Mart. They were branded—innocuously—“Easy Day.” Although his point about the waste in the system in India was true, many family-run shops like dry-goods stores and chemists were highly efficient and versatile. Changing this embedded system, which was linked to ideas of family and caste, was not likely to be easy.

Did he think the economic revolution over the last two decades in India was too narrow? Had it helped only a handful of clever, lucky business people? “Well—each year 20 million more people are having a second meal
every day. I don’t like the vulgar display of wealth. I think the government should run social programmes and we should pay our taxes and not resent it. The fuel for change comes from the development of the economy. Bharti Airtel employs around 50,000 people today, but we provide indirect employment to around 1.5 million. The Bharti Foundation will soon be sending 100,000 children to school, and the schools we have set up are in very poor catchment areas.” It was, in effect, an affirmative action programme. “Most of our children and most of the teachers come from Scheduled Castes or Tribes or from the OBC category. We provide the children with a uniform, one meal a day and free books, and we take care of the fees.” Was this a way of promoting his brand? “No. It’s a way to unlock India’s potential. A lot of these families wouldn’t know about our business. You can change a whole family if the children get educated. We want to open many more schools like this, at primary and secondary level.”
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Although he did not express it in this way, I felt Sunil Mittal was saying that when you have made a certain amount of money—say $1bn, for the sake of argument—then trying to change the world through philanthropy becomes an attractive way to spend the cash, more interesting than buying another aeroplane, house or company. In his case, the Bharti Foundation was overseen by someone he trusted and who shared his social vision—his older brother, Rakesh Mittal, himself a successful businessman. The annual cost of the schools was 28 crores, a little over $6m. The possibilities for his foundation to effect social change in India—with its comparatively low employment and infrastructure costs—were exceptional. Sunil Mittal had said recently in a television interview that he was inspired by the stories of American tycoons like Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie. “I sit on the Carnegie Endowment board in Washington, and it is incredible how they left most of their wealth for public causes. I think that has to happen here. So if you ask me what is Bharti Foundation’s vision, it’s to be one day known like a Carnegie Endowment or a Ford Foundation or a Rockefeller Foundation. We have started well. Hopefully we will end well.”
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In the past, rich people in India were princely rulers or members of extended business families who had made a fortune in textiles or manufacturing. Industrialists would hoard capital, and there was a limited expectation of seeking to outbid your neighbours in gross ostentation. Since liberalization, an unbound social class had grown with extraordinary speed. Sunil Mittal’s objection to the vulgar display of wealth was not widely shared. For members
of this new global community—the Indian super-rich—geography had become flexible. They could carry their world wherever they chose and station themselves in whichever city they needed to be in at the time. Their passports, and those of their family members, might not always be Indian, but culturally their attachment to their homeland remained strong. One businessman told me he was able to compress time, and that a ten-day journey to his work sites in Mozambique could be reduced to four days by using his own plane. Invitations to house-warming parties were likely to specify any of a number of cities between Los Angeles and Hong Kong. In Mumbai, the industrialist Mukesh Ambani had built the world’s most expensive private residence, a 27-storey confection involving three floors of gardens, swimming pools, a cool room (which in the ultimate Himalayan dream blew flurries of fake snow), three helipads, a six-storey car parking garage and several “entourage rooms”—for who travels without an entourage?
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The steelmaker Lakshmi Mittal (no relation to Sunil) was presently the only Indian richer than Ambani. He held the principal celebrations for his daughter’s wedding in Paris, and even hired the palace at Versailles, which nobody had managed to do before. In 2006, Mittal Steel’s hostile bid for Europe’s largest steelmaker, Arcelor, had been met with dismay. The head of Arcelor, Guy Dollé, said sorrowfully that the predatory company was “full of Indians” and his own Luxembourg-based operation had no need for “monnaie de singe”—meaning money without value, which in direct translation became the insulting “monkey change.”
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Lakshmi Mittal won the battle, Dollé was ousted and Arcelor Mittal was now the world’s largest steel company.

I had first noticed the spread of Indian wealth about ten years ago, when I had to judge a prize in London for “Asian Women of Achievement.” In North America, “Asian” usually means east Asian, but in Europe it is often taken to mean south Asian, or more specifically north Indian or Pakistani. At the awards dinner, new money was on display—in the clothes, in the jewellery, in the willingness to pay for tables for the night. It was small-scale compared to what was going on in Mumbai and Delhi, but it marked a cultural shift. Social competition was high. Punjabis, Sindhis and Marwaris were there in numbers, some from triumphant business families. They observed each other’s necklaces, handbags and rings, chewed over fashion designers like Manish Arora and discussed tax shelters, cricket results and private jets. The Dassault Falcon 900 seemed to be a particularly popular model of plane, because it could do the Delhi–London hop without the ignominy of having to refuel in Dubai or Baku. Many of the women and
men at parties like this one had legal, medical or financial careers, and some pursued unusual lines of work: one man told me he supplied notes to the foreign exchange bureaux of the West End, another that his business was import-export, “mainly shoes and helicopter parts.” Shoes, as in, shoes? Yes, and clothes. And helicopter parts.

It was a change from earlier decades, when south Asians were associated with poverty. Indian, Pakistani or more specifically Punjabi culture was a strong culture, a brash force that could thrive under globalization and not be worried greatly by what was going on around it. We might have been in almost any country, for the guests carried their own ethos with them. It transferred easily to Britain, where the economy was open but assimilation was difficult. This was a product of the British attitude towards immigration, a hangover from colonial times. The expectation after the Second World War was that new arrivals would come to the mother country from the poorer parts of the disbanding empire: Africa, the West Indies and rural India or Pakistan. Unlike other nations which accepted or sought rich immigrants, Britain preferred the poor, to whom charity could be extended through the state. The two largest south Asian communities in Britain came from Sylhet and Mirpur, two impoverished parts of rural Bangladesh and Pakistani Kashmir. Between them, people of Bangladeshi and Pakistani origin made up nearly 2 percent of the UK’s population and had some of the worst indicators for housing, health, education and employment. Other people of south Asian origin, some of whom were Muslims and Hindus who had been expelled from east African countries like Kenya and Uganda in the 1960s and 1970s, had achieved greater economic success. They had flourished away from India during the early and middle years of the twentieth century, and had now moved on around the world. England was for them more like a staging-post or an amenity.

The British did not know quite how to take them. Politicians from all parties, some of them dressed in Indian clothing, made a point of attending the Asian Women of Achievement awards ceremony each year. Unlike the Conservatives, Tony Blair’s Labour Party had been quick at obtaining money and support from subcontinental grandees. Prominent among them was Swraj Paul, who made steel strips, gave large sums to the party and had published a book lavishing praise on Labour politicians like Gordon Brown, Robin Cook and Tony Blair: “Gordon is both tough-minded and sensitive … Gordon is a man of vision [with] a constant desire to do what is right for the country.”
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Paul also showed a talent for winning the admiration of British journalists: a profile in the
Independent
suggested, preposterously,
that he “could have accepted the post of India’s ambassador to Washington when it was offered, and might then have had the chance to succeed Indira Gandhi as prime minister.”
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Tony Blair and Gordon Brown rewarded Swraj Paul by making him a lord, a privy counsellor, an ambassador for overseas business, a stalwart of the Foreign Secretary Robin Cook’s fatuous and short-lived “Cool Britannia” panel and chairman of the India–UK Round Table.
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Paul was a curious choice of envoy to India, since he was well known for funding Indira Gandhi during her wilderness years after the Emergency, and the government at the time of his appointment was led by the BJP, which loathed the Gandhi family. When Indira Gandhi lost power in 1977, Swraj Paul had telephoned her and said, “Indiraji, as long as I have something to eat, you will eat first.”
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Perhaps the Labour Party thought this was not important; they certainly never explained why someone who was non-domiciled in the UK for tax purposes (avoiding paying tax because he intended to return to India, his country of origin) should represent Britain abroad. The India–UK Round Table achieved little, at substantial cost to the taxpayer, but gave Swraj Paul exceptional access in New Delhi. In 2007 he promised to bankroll the Labour Party at the next general election, and distributed 6,000 free copies of Gordon Brown’s dud book
Courage
to schools to celebrate his becoming prime minister; in 2009 he was found to have claimed £38,000 in expenses from the House of Lords authorities by pretending his main home was a tiny one-bedroom flat attached to a three-star hotel he owned in Oxfordshire. The money was repaid. Lord Paul of Marylebone’s net worth was estimated at $750m.
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So Britain continued on its way, drawing in a little cash from the non-domiciled, paying out some more to the economically inactive, continuing with a perception of the world that depended on the imprecations of earlier times. When London needed a monstrous sculpture to commemorate the 2012 Olympic Games, it was designed by Anish Kapoor (ex-Doon School) and paid for by Lakshmi Mittal; the Indian media called it “a permanent Indian presence in London,” the mayor Boris Johnson called it “a piece of modern British art” and Kapoor, presumably conceiving the overstretched tower as a metaphor for Britain, described it as “an eccentric structure that looks as if it’s going to fall over.”
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At high-functioning south Asian parties in London, prestige was graded in commercial terms, to the disapproval of the few Indian representatives of old money, those who played the game that was popular in the 1950s and 1960s of copying the manners of English gentlefolk. Their approach was
out of date; few were interested in people who acted like people who were themselves becoming irrelevant, a social group which relied on the mantra of proud inaction, “Keep Calm and Carry On.” When Lakshmi Mittal entered the room there was an understanding he was the guest of honour, since he was the richest person in Britain—of any ethnicity. I remember waiting by the front door to leave one party and finding myself beside Lakshmi Mittal. He had an intelligent and reserved face. His wife, Usha, a squat woman with movable assets on her neck, ears and fingers, was surrounded by admiring women wearing shimmering metallic outfits. It was something close to the worship of pure wealth, the worship of Lakshmi. One old man was saying over and over again to nobody in particular: “Lakshmi, Usha, so nice,” with a glow on his face like the glow of reflected gold.

Indians were turning global, in Europe, in the Americas, in east and west Asia. In Australia, the fertilizer tycoon Pankaj Oswal outraged his neighbours by building the country’s biggest house in the genteel suburb of Peppermint Grove; his wife, Radhika, banned builders working on the site from eating meat pies and ham sandwiches, saying, “Meat eating is creating bad karma.”
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The unshackling of talent extended far beyond the flamboyant new rich. An idea of Indian exceptionalism had developed, a conviction that the country could achieve something unique at this point in its history.

In India, the middle class had a chance to shape its own destiny in a way that had never been possible before. You could move to your own house using a home loan and live outside the joint family; you could buy a car that was not an Ambassador or a Fiat; it was possible to travel abroad and see how people in other countries lived; you could watch your politicians accept bribes or dance with prostitutes on television in media sting operations while surfing your way to
Desperate Housewives
or
Rahul Dulhaniya Le Jayega
. Alongside this, business people who had been successful on their own merit overseas were projected as national heroes, like Arun Sarin, the CEO of Vodafone, or Indra Nooyi, a graduate of IIM Calcutta who became the head of PepsiCo and one of the most powerful businesswomen in the world.

Abhishek Bachchan—in an inversion of the rebellious roles once taken by his father, the Bollywood star Amitabh Bachchan—could be seen in the popular 2007 movie
Guru
extolling the joys of capitalism. In one dramatic scene he gives a speech to a government inquiry that would have been impossible on the Indian silver screen even a decade earlier. He talks of walking in the steps of Mahatma Gandhi and declares the need for a second freedom. The first freedom was from foreign rule; the new, second freedom
was … freedom to run a successful business without government restriction and make lots of money.
Guru
was based on the story of Dhirubhai Ambani (like Gandhi, a Gujarati from the Modh Bania caste), who founded the brilliantly innovative chemicals, textiles, energy and retail conglomerate Reliance Industries. He was adept at gaining favours from politicians of different parties and at playing the permit raj: he would export spices at a loss and use the resultant replenishment licences to bring in rayon; when rayon started to be manufactured in India, he exported rayon and imported nylon, selling it on again with a 300 percent profit margin. An investor who bought Rs100 worth of shares in Reliance in 1977 would have found that twenty-five years later they were worth Rs16,500.
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His sons, Mukesh and Anil, had been engaged in a protracted family and business dispute, but had used economic liberalization to make Reliance grow.