Indian Instincts

by Miniya Chatterji

  I told him I was pleased to make his acquaintance, and then wandered off into the crowd with my girlfriends.

  Two days later, it was by providence that we met again—Chirag came by unannounced to a party I had been invited to. We had not planned to meet there. The loud music made it the worst place for a conversation, keeping us on our feet and dancing instead.

  And so it was only the day after when he took me out to dinner that we really talked.

  From across an oversized platter of sushi and dumplings, Chirag patiently explained to me that forty years ago his father, barely seventeen years of age then, had jumped on a ship that had taken him from India to the shores of opportunity in Dubai. Illiterate and without a coin in his pocket, his father had earned his living initially on a shop floor selling Indian saris in Dubai. Later he joined an electrical and waterworks company and fixed electrical appliances and pipes in people’s houses. Chirag’s mother, a graduate from Bombay University, belonged to the Sindhi community like his father, but until they married in Dubai, they did not know each other. She was sent to him from India, a marriage arranged by Chirag’s grandparents. She bore him a son and a daughter in Dubai.

  When Chirag turned fourteen, his father packed him off to faraway New Zealand, accompanied by his mother and infant sister. That country seemed to offer better education and living conditions than impoverished India and the cultural ‘bling’ of the UAE at the time. Meanwhile, his father stayed on in Dubai. The oil economy was taking off, and the desert was being transformed into a peninsula of multi-storey modern homes, offices, shopping malls and entertainment centres, flanked by the sea on both sides.

  His father felt that the opportunities for profit in Dubai were unparalleled anywhere else in the world. He established a small company, employing about a hundred labourers and two dozen engineers—all migrants from India, like himself—who installed electrical and water equipment in large infrastructure projects across Dubai.

  I understood that Chirag was distinctly entrepreneurial in his own right, despite living in the shadow of a rather strong-willed father. Hardly had he turned twenty than Chirag set up his own business in real estate and construction in Auckland. He also began to shuttle between Auckland and Dubai, where he helped his father in the business.

  After dinner that night, I drove Chirag around central Delhi for his first glimpse of the magnificent treasures of the old and dusty city I lived in. I wished he would see—as I did—that no other city in the world could hold a candle to the elegance of Delhi by night.

  Red palash flowers swung from the trees, bowing towards the road. Monumental relics in carved stone from the times of the Mughal emperors sat firmly on the crossroads like old guards of the city. Sprawling bungalows watched us from behind iron gates as we drove past. A gurdwara and a few temples decorated with strings of coloured bulbs shone in the dark. The public gardens were coquettish, promising to reveal lawns sprinkled with more Mughal relics only at dawn. So for now, the black night came alive solely by the blazing force of the neon-lit circular pandemonium around India Gate.

  Parking our car by the kerb, we paused to take a good look at the war memorial. I came here often to watch the crowds, I confessed to Chirag. Here, people old and young, driving Rolls Royces, BMWs and rickshaws, speaking in different languages about different things, were united in their love for ice cream, kabuli chana and the hullabaloo. The memorial’s history largely forgotten, it was the congregation of a heterogeneous and unrelated mass of people that had breathed new meaning into the space. This spot, for me, was India’s epicentre. It throbbed with extraordinary diversity, and the deeply distressing contrasts between the exorbitantly rich and the despicably poor that co-exist in India, I told Chirag.

  I was neck-deep in work the following day when I received a message on my phone from Chirag—at an hour past the time of his flight back to Dubai. He asked if he could take me out for dinner once more.

  It was not the only time that Chirag would forsake his flight out of Delhi for me, and certainly not the last of our dinners. Over the next three months, our weekends were spent together, either in Dubai or Delhi. Chirag’s trips to Delhi would usually be extended by a few days, each visit longer than the last, until the evening he unilaterally took a decision and announced it to me in the parking lot of Khan Market when I reached there after work to pick him up and go home.

  ‘I have decided I am not leaving!’ declared Chirag, hastening towards me in the characteristic duck walk he does when he is excited.

  ‘How come?’ I replied, surprised, looking at him through the window of the driver’s seat.

  ‘I just spoke to dad and told him that the market is great here in India, and I’m setting up my own business,’ he said, his face beaming as he got in the car and gave me a peck on the cheek.

  ‘That is a wonderful surprise,’ I said, after taking a few moments to realize that both our lives would now change forever.

  It was also hard for me to miss the irony: the land his father had once desperately quit to sail off to more lucrative pastures in Dubai now seemed to Chirag a bed of business opportunities—far more than Dubai.

  Chirag’s business idea was to manufacture and set up India’s first isolation tank at a central location in Delhi. He described it as ‘a well-established medical procedure for mental wellness that replicates the Dead Sea in a controlled environment.’ Isolation tanks were popular in the US and a few other parts of the world, including New Zealand, where Chirag had experienced it, but he had discovered that they were not yet available in India. Chirag felt there was a ready market in Delhi for this luxury experience, not only for those Indians who had tried it while travelling or living abroad, but also the increasing number of Delhi residents who had the money to spare.

  Our discovery of Delhi from that moment on was of a different face of the city. The volume of money flowing into Delhi was massive. Investors had come in with fat chequebooks, vying for projects that promised them a windfall of profits. Government officials had padded up their bank balances, middlemen had flourished, and some businessmen seemed to have struck pure gold. While the centre was calm, it seemed that Delhi was stretching at the seams. New roads, bridges and overground and underground Metro lines were being constructed to connect the expanding corners of the city. As Chirag went across town looking for locations to set up shop, we learnt of all the action on the city’s periphery. On the fringes of the city, several hundred apartment buildings were being built and many more were needed, to cater to a wide range in terms of affordability. Large global firms had set up offices here, attracting talent from around the world to live in the neighbourhood. These people wanted the services and goods they might have seen when they travelled or lived abroad, creating new opportunities for businesses. There was more of a demand than supply of hospitals and doctors, as also of new schools in every budget bracket. Everywhere, there was a thirst for newer malls, shopping choices, cinema halls and fresh entertainment. Yet the money and opportunities coming into the city did nothing to reduce the numbers of children sleeping on the streets. Entire families would be living under bridges, exposed to the harsh Delhi sun and the fuming vehicle engines on all sides. Twenty-something men would be sitting on pavements outside marketplaces with nothing to do.

  Flush with new money, filled with destitute poverty, the ugly contrast in Delhi seemed to have created ample room for not just entrepreneurship, but also exploitation, bribery, extortion and nepotism.

  Thousands of Indians—about 2,85,000 a year1—were moving to the Indian capital, whose population swelled to three times that of Switzerland and double that of Sweden! People’s motivations were varied—labour, skilled jobs, education, marriage . . . They felt there were opportunities for everyone, and so they would come here from various towns and villages. While some came to roll out big businesses, others were searching for just a livelihood, having relinquished their small towns to move here. All arrived with hope in their eyes and a few things or skills to se
ll. In a big city, chance is blind, the stakes are high, and fortune can favour anyone who dares to try. As Chirag ventured out to procure land, government permits, manufacturers and labour for construction, we noticed a dire eagerness among the people we met—wealthy or impoverished—to bend every rule for profit. There was no rule written in stone—this ‘flexibility’ created both confusion and opportunity, depending on how one leveraged it.

  The combined force of the deluge of manpower and financial capital was clearly transforming the architectural landscape as well as the ethical boundaries of the city. And what we experienced intimately in Delhi while setting up a small business was a clear reflection of the broadening income inequality I saw as I travelled to many places in India, working for the Jindal Group and interacting with other large companies.

  In India, the richest 1 per cent own 53 per cent of the country’s wealth, the richest 5 per cent own 68.6 per cent, while the top 10 per cent have 76.3 per cent. At the other end of the pyramid, the poor half jostles for a mere 4.1 per cent of the national wealth.2 India dominates the world’s poorest 10 per cent with 22 per cent of the population living below the international poverty line. We even had the unfortunate honour of being home to the largest number of malnourished children in the world in 2016.3 India is already the second most unequal country globally,4 and the rich are only getting richer.5 I believe that if the incomes of all Indians congregating on a Friday evening at India Gate are to be compared, then the spectrum would well reflect the overall inequality of the entire country, and also show that it has only widened over the past seven decades.

  It seems that as long as inequality thrives, businesses in India profit. Take a look around and you will see that successful businesses are those that have tapped into the country’s obscene income gap—producing where incomes are low and selling where they are high. For example, the labour cost for the production of, say, wooden furniture is a pittance compared to the purchasing power for that furniture when retailed even at ten times its cost price in the same neighbourhood. The salary of a twenty-year-old who speaks broken English is far lower than the money he generates for his employer, who caters to companies that outsource their business processes to him. Labour in a steel manufacturing unit is cheap, whereas the final product can be sold at a price commensurate to the high demand from infrastructure development projects. The salary of teachers, even in private schools, is meagre compared to the utterly exorbitant fees charged by some schools. The salaries of trained hotel staff, even in the most luxurious of hospitality establishments—and you can check any—are shamefully low compared to the room rates the hotel’s guests are charged. The CEO of India’s top IT firm earns 416 times the average salary of an employee in his company.6 In every sector, profit margins in India are based on income inequality.

  He had leveraged the cost advantage in India by getting the complex machinery designed and manufactured by a small waterworks company in Pune, using cheap labour at half the cost quoted to him by a manufacturer in Germany.

  His was just one example among thousands of entrepreneurs in the country who are enamoured by the market opportunity here; they benefit from leveraging the income inequality, and are hounded by corruption and nepotism. The Indian middle class is dependent on the poor to keep itself afloat, and they have no desire to alter this. If the poor in India were not so desperately needy, how would the middle class convince them to work at the most abysmal wages? The unfortunate and gaping disparity in resources available to the poor and the middle class creates opportunities for cost arbitrage that are useful for the middle class’ business. In fact, sociologist Dipankar Gupta writes that in India there is no middle class. He demonstrates that upwards of the middle class, social strata actually comprise the rich of Indian society—standing out not necessarily because of their accomplishments, but because those below them live in such desperate, unenviable conditions.7 As I have written in more detail earlier, for an individual to be perceived as ‘higher’ in the social hierarchy, there must be many others perceived as being ‘lower’.8

  I have also explained earlier the peculiar nature of politics in India, in which, again, success depends upon the continuation of poverty.9 Politicians cannot win elections without wielding power over their minions. In villages, political power comes from the existence of a vast number of landless farmers, who are socially and economically in a despicable condition. And in both rural and urban India, the poor have neither the voice nor the will to oppose the drops of patronage coming their way.

  Government officials, acting as agents of governance, often thrive on poverty as well as excess income. The salary from a government job in India is paltry, but the potential to earn through parallel means is enormous. Unless the official is altruistic and unusually committed to developing their specific sector, area or the country, the benefits of illegal earnings outdo the costs. However, to prosper, they need the coexistence of both classes—the poor and the wealthy. In India, government officials use their influence to wield power over the public, and cater to the whims of those who have money to pay them to get their work done. People with excess income have the spending power to pay off government officials, while government officials need the poor, needy and marginalized, whom they can easily bully, to get the wealthy person’s work done.

  Obviously, my central argument here is that accumulation of wealth in India is often at the expense of widening India’s frightful income inequality. So then, I ask, why should it be in the interest of the wealthy to improve the condition of the poor? Why should we be surprised if the rich get richer and the poor even more impoverished?

  Economic necessity often creates a tight network of relations for ‘wheeling-dealing’. In India, the rich need the poor—the wealthy get major benefits from maintaining an economic structure that ensures the financial exploitation of the poor. The two ends of the spectrum need to coexist, with as much disparity between them as possible, for maximum profitability for those who are already wealthy. It is this tightly knit structure which I believe also provides an ideal breeding ground for corruption.

  We should be careful with the assumed causality between poverty and corruption, but corruption does easily infest an established and well-oiled ‘need-based’ structure between the rich and the poor. Corruption is not just monetary. When juxtaposed with a pre-existing need-based structure, it becomes a gradual institutionalization of misbehaviour, which contributes to legitimizing that behaviour and socializing others into it too. It is a process—one that leads to an overall ‘culture of corruption’.10 In such a scenario, in which corruption operates as an institutionalized practice, individuals who are not corrupt would need to engage with the corrupt structure. In India, corruption has entered a pre-existing structure that provides financial gain to the group that holds the most power. The outcome could be anything—the corruption of one or several members within an organization, individuals acting on behalf of the organization, or the entire organization.

  Chirag and I were told that we were lucky to have been granted an audience by the South Delhi Municipal Corporation’s development councillor himself. Indeed, we were privileged beneficiaries of the long-standing symbiotic relationship between the Jindal Group and the local outfit. I had been introduced to the councillor by the company just a day ago. Now, in his office at the scheduled time, the councillor’s attendants explained that their boss would be away for a short while to clear out an illegal occupation of the city’s public space by homeless squatters.

  Sitting in the damp room, I looked around at the walls lined with old, stained file-stacked cupboards. The table in front of us had more papers and a plate of fresh fruits, sliced up and waiting for the councillor. Across the table was a tired faux leather swing chair, its head covered with two faded pink hand towels, its arms cracking to reveal yellow sheets of foam.

  The councillor, once he arrived, wiped off the sweat beads from his forehead with one of the towels on his chair, and dug his stainless steel fork in
to the sliced mango on the plate before him.

  ‘Is this a commercial or a residential street in Green Park?’ Chirag asked, pointing his finger at a map of Delhi spread open on the table.

  ‘Depends on what you want it to be,’ the councillor replied, munching on his fruit.

  ‘The rules are not clear in the book,’ said Chirag, gently pushing a fat print publication, pretentiously titled Delhi Rule Book 2017, across the table.

  ‘Yes, these rules do get complicated. Come back tomorrow. I will ask my team to search our files and tell you.’

  There was no news from the councillor the next day. Two days later, and after another hour’s wait in his office, we were blessed to meet him again.

  The councillor arrived, patting away the sweat dripping from his neck, and seated himself in his chair. Just then, an elderly woman entered his office unannounced, and placing her hands on the table, begged him in a high-pitched voice to help her stop her tenant from taking over her two-room apartment. She explained that her family members were all dead, and the tiny apartment was her only asset and source of income. It was her twentieth visit to the councillor and she needed his help to turn the goons out of her house.