“I have always been a capitalist in my mind, but misery and poverty were at our doors—you could hardly not see them—and my father was a politician during a socialist time. So we were socially connected. I was uncomfortable with the control or permit raj, being told what you can and can’t do. When I was starting out, all the prospects were with a handful of business families. People would say to me: ‘Take an agency for gas or cars. Do some work for Birla or Tata. Your father’s a politician, you’ll have a comfortable living.’ I didn’t want to do that, I wanted more, and I thought that if you look to the U.S. or to Europe, in each decade there is a business idea that breaks the mould.”
I began to import portable generators from Suzuki in Japan—the sort that in another country might be used for a picnic or a party or an ice cream stand. In India I thought we would need them in homes when the mains electricity failed, which happened all the time in those days. It was hard work and pain from 1976 to 1982, but it was the first time I tasted success. You could put that on my tombstone. I was able to buy a good car and an apartment. I had revenues of $100,000 a year, which at that time was really a lot of money. In 1983, generators were banned. It was decided by the government they should be manufactured in India, because of the import substitution policy. Birla and Shriram [two large, established and politically well-connected business houses] got letters of intent [from the bureaucracy in New Delhi] and the ban on imports was immediate, even though they hadn’t started to manufacture any generators.”
Sunil Mittal laughed, as if he still could not believe it, and hunched forward in his chair. His hair was closely cropped, black flecked with grey. “So I picked up my bag and went to Japan. God has guided my life. I looked at the street markets, seeing what was there. Some of the time I took an interpreter with me, other times I got by using English. I considered importing VCRs. I went to Korea, went to Taiwan. I looked at Teflon-coated products, at sports shoes, even at plastic tents. In Taipei at a trade fair, I saw push-button phones. I went to visit the factory of a man named Richard Wu and signed an MOU with him immediately to import the parts and assemble them in India. Only rotary phones existed at that time, and I knew these would be popular. We called the company ‘Mitbrau,’ which sounded German—foreign products sold better—but it stood for Mittal Brothers as I was working with my brothers by then. We sold about 10,000 phones a year, with a 300 or 400 percent margin. I realized I loved telecom. We started to make answering machines, did a tie-up with Siemens and imported cordless phones and fax machines from Korea. Then the mobile phone market opened up, and we bid as the outsiders. We had to go through courts, litigation, challenges—I’m compressing a lot of things here—but we ended up winning the Delhi licence and launched Bharti Airtel in 1995. The rest is history.”
Three years before the telecom sector opened up, Sunil Mittal had asked a consulting company to do a report on the market potential for mobile phones. Getting a landline connection in India was a long, tedious and corrupt process, and it was apparent the new technology might enable people to bypass the obstructions. “They said we could sell 50,000 phones over the next ten years. I thought the number was closer to half a million, so I threw away that report. I can’t truthfully say I saw the full market potential in 1995. By 2000 or 2001, we knew the future was going to be huge. I was convinced India would have more phones than it had vehicles. Today there are 20 million cell phones in Delhi. We have 135 million subscribers in India.”
The invention and spread of mobile telephony had a significant impact on Indian society. The mobile phone spread faster than in countries with a more efficient landline system. It had become an Indian object—a status symbol and a commonplace tool. The phrase or word “missedcall” had passed into Hindi and other languages. When foreign publications illustrated stories about contemporary India with inevitable photographs of a sadhu or a sari-clad woman clutching a mobile phone—as if this were the most outlandish juxtaposition, an Easterner holding a Western product—they were missing just how mainstream and indigenous the technology had become. Bharti Airtel’s own revolution had been ignited further east, when its founder visited Taiwan in the early 1980s and was captivated by the idea of a push-button phone.
When his commercial idea exploded, Mittal made a decision which went against accepted business thinking. He was under threat from other Indian companies that were moving into the telecom market, like Reliance, which had more capital to spare. So rather than finding new employees, Mittal did something unexpected—he “reverse outsourced,” giving his work to foreign companies like IBM, Ericsson and Nokia, who opened up larger operations of their own in India. So instead of an Indian company “taking” jobs from richer nations, he was creating business for them. The strategy worked: even while Bharti Airtel was hiring fewer people, it became India’s largest telecom provider a little over a decade after its foundation.
“I looked at the size and infrastructure of telecom companies around the world,” he said. “I looked at Verizon, British Telecom, France Telecom, AT&T—and I thought there’s no way I could build that infrastructure in twenty-four months. It’s not going to happen. So I let other companies do the IT and call centres while we focused on markets, customers and innovations.” Bharti Airtel no longer obtained and maintained their own equipment. Their network operations were run by Ericsson, the management of their transmission towers was outsourced and most of their IT staff moved to IBM, with protected salaries and the right to return within two years. “None of them came back!” Even the computer on Mittal’s own desk at his head office was maintained by IBM. “When I decided on this strategy, one of the big European companies called me to say I was making a fatal mistake, and that I was taking away the heart of our business. I told them telecom companies are not technology companies. We’re not the ones who understand how wireless technology works. If something goes wrong with a switch and the network goes down—nobody in our office can fix it. I’ve sat all night watching engineers trying to get the Airtel system running. The heart of our business is not technology, it’s the customers. I prefer speed to perfection.”
Although Mittal was still a small player at the time, he had three meetings with Sam Palmisano, the chairman and CEO of IBM, who realized his own company needed to evolve fast if it were not to have its business eaten up by the nimble new IT companies in India. With the exponential growth of Bharti Airtel’s subscriber base, IBM had every reason not to exploit the contract by ratcheting up costs.3 “Sam told me he would personally keep a watch on this project. I told him, if this fails, IBM will fail, and the world’s telecom companies will open to you if it succeeds. He kept his promise. Soon I was talking at IBM conferences, celebrating our partnership on stage. Once that happened, I knew we were in a good place and it would hold together.”
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 secon
d 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.”4
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.”5
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?6
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.”7 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.”8 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.”9
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.10 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.”11 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.12
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.”13
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