Is
it a house or a home? A temple to the new India, or a warehouse for its ghosts?
Ever since Antilla arrived on Altamont Road in Mumbai, exuding mystery and
quiet menace, things have not been the same. “Here we are,” the friend who took
me there said, “Pay your respects to our new Ruler.”
Antilla
belongs to India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani. I had read about this most
expensive dwelling ever built, the twenty-seven floors, three helipads, nine
lifts, hanging gardens, ballrooms, weather rooms, gymnasiums, six floors of
parking, and the six hundred servants. Nothing had prepared me for the vertical
lawn—a soaring, 27-storey-high wall of grass attached to a vast metal grid. The
grass was dry in patches; bits had fallen off in neat rectangles. Clearly,
Trickledown hadn’t worked.
But
Gush-Up certainly has. That’s why in a nation of 1.2 billion, India’s 100
richest people own assets equivalent to one-fourth of the GDP.
The
word on the street (and in the New
York Times) is, or at least was, that after all that effort and
gardening, the Ambanis don’t live in Antilla. No one knows for sure. People
still whisper about ghosts and bad luck, Vaastu and Feng Shui. Maybe it’s all
Karl Marx’s fault. (All that cussing.) Capitalism, he said, “has conjured up
such gigantic means of production and of exchange, that it is like the sorcerer
who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has
called up by his spells”.
In
India, the 300 million of us who belong to the new, post-IMF “reforms” middle class—the market—live
side by side with spirits of the nether world, the poltergeists of dead rivers,
dry wells, bald mountains and denuded forests; the ghosts of 2,50,000
debt-ridden farmers who have killed themselves, and of the 800 million who have
been impoverished and dispossessed to make way for us. And who survive on less
than twenty rupees a day.
Mukesh
Ambani is personally worth $20 billion. He holds a majority controlling share
in Reliance Industries Limited (RIL), a company with a market capitalisation of
$47 billion and global business interests that include petrochemicals, oil,
natural gas, polyester fibre, Special Economic Zones, fresh food retail, high
schools, life sciences research and stem cell storage services. RIL recently
bought 95 per cent shares in Infotel, a TV consortium that controls 27 TV news
and entertainment channels, including CNN-IBN, IBN Live, CNBC, IBN Lokmat, and
ETV in almost every regional language. Infotel owns the only nationwide licence
for 4G Broadband, a high-speed “information pipeline” which, if the technology
works, could be the future of information exchange. Mr Ambani also owns a
cricket team.
RIL
is one of a handful of corporations that run India. Some of the others are the
Tatas, Jindals, Vedanta, Mittals, Infosys, Essar and the other Reliance (ADAG),
owned by Mukesh’s brother Anil. Their race for growth has spilled across
Europe, Central Asia, Africa and Latin America. Their nets are cast wide; they
are visible and invisible, over-ground as well as underground. The Tatas, for
example, run more than 100 companies in 80 countries. They are one of India’s
oldest and largest private sector power companies. They own mines, gas fields,
steel plants, telephone, cable TV and broadband networks, and run whole
townships. They manufacture cars and trucks, own the Taj Hotel chain, Jaguar,
Land Rover, Daewoo, Tetley Tea, a publishing company, a chain of bookstores, a
major brand of iodised salt and the cosmetics giant Lakme. Their advertising
tagline could easily be: You Can’t Live Without Us.
According
to the rules of the Gush-Up Gospel, the more you have, the more you can have.
The
era of the Privatisation of Everything has made the Indian economy one of the
fastest growing in the world. However, like any good old-fashioned colony, one
of its main exports is its minerals. India’s new mega-corporations—Tatas,
Jindals, Essar, Reliance, Sterlite—are those who have managed to muscle their
way to the head of the spigot that is spewing money extracted from deep inside
the earth. It’s a dream come true for businessmen—to be able to sell what they
don’t have to buy.
The
other major source of corporate wealth comes from their land-banks. All over
the world, weak, corrupt local governments have helped Wall Street brokers,
agro-business corporations and Chinese billionaires to amass huge tracts of
land. (Of course, this entails commandeering water too.) In India, the land of
millions of people is being acquired and made over to private corporations for “public
interest”—for Special Economic Zones, infrastructure projects, dams, highways,
car manufacture, chemical hubs and Formula One racing. (The sanctity of private
property never applies to the poor.) As always, local people are promised that
their displacement from their land and the expropriation of everything they
ever had is actually part of employment generation. But by now we know that the
connection between GDP growth and jobs is a myth. After 20 years of “growth”,
60 per cent of India’s workforce is self-employed, 90 per cent of India’s
labour force works in the unorganised sector.
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