CHAPTER 1
AMBANILAND
Upward Mobility
Talk that Mukesh Ambani would build a magnificent new house began drifting through Mumbai in the early years of the new millennium, not long after his father died.1 The tycoon bought a plot of land on Altamount Road and quietly launched an architecture competition. Early designs showed a soaring “eco-tower” with lush green plants spilling down the sides.2 Residence Antilia, as the structure was first called, quickly became known as the world’s most expensive private home. It was to be a vertical palace with a rumored price tag of $1 billion, towering over a city where half the population still live in slums.3 As gossip it was irresistible. A petrol pump attendant turned industrial titan, Dhirubhai Ambani’s was corporate India’s most celebrated rags-to-riches story. Now the scale of his son’s plans hinted at the grandeur of his own ambitions, not simply to run his father’s business but to seize his mantle as the nation’s preeminent tycoon as well.
For those who knew the Ambani clan, the building carried still deeper symbolism. Dhirubhai Ambani passed on without leaving a will, assuming that his sons—Mukesh, then forty-five, and Anil, two years his junior—would go on to control Reliance together. The pair had contrasting reputations: the elder unflashy, introverted, and well organized; the younger a flamboyant financial wizard. They worked together amicably enough under the old man’s gaze. But relations soured quickly without him, and a ferocious battle for control began. Over three acrimonious years their feud gripped India, playing out first in the press, then in the courts. Associates of the two men still refer to this period as “the war,” a corporate Cain-and-Abel battle so fierce it appeared as if the country itself was being forced to take sides.
Back then both brothers lived in a fourteen-story residential tower called Sea Wind, a thin, white structure with a helipad on the roof, about a fifteen-minute walk from my own apartment in southern Mumbai. The Ambanis had the whole building, with each brother living on a separate floor. During their feud, the two men coordinated their entry and exit to avoid running into one another in the lifts.4 The intimacy of these arrangements gave their squabbles an added frisson, replicating the plots of Indian soap operas in which members of big business families plotted against one another under the same roof. Their mother, Kokilaben, lived in the building too, although her early attempts at détente went nowhere. India’s most powerful business family was tearing itself apart. And if Mukesh Ambani planned to leave Sea Wind and build a new home of his own, there was no clearer signal that it would not come back together.
Dhirubhai Ambani grew up in a poor village in the western state of Gujarat, before moving in his late teens to seek work in Aden, a British imperial port in what is now Yemen. He tended a Shell petrol forecourt at first, then worked as an office clerk. On the side he learned to trade in the souks.5 Eight years later, having married and had his first son, he moved back home to start a business in Bombay, as Mumbai was known before a local political party changed its name in 1995. Dhirubhai founded what would become Reliance Industries in the late 1950s, trading yarn, importing polyester, and exporting spices. It was profitable work, but money remained tight. Mukesh Ambani spent much of his early childhood living with his three siblings in a two-roomed chawl or tenement house, in a poor midtown area packed with belching mills.
Reliance began to grow even when entrepreneurs remained shackled by the restrictions of the License Raj, all set up in the name of Jawaharlal Nehru’s “scientific socialism.” Dhirubhai Ambani proved masterful at navigating these rules, learning both to work the system and to work around it. He realized the value of favors in New Delhi, where he befriended politicians and coaxed information from bureaucrats. “His philosophy was to cultivate everybody from the doorkeeper up,” as his unofficial biographer Hamish McDonald put it.6 Regulations or licenses helpful to Reliance appeared mysteriously, aiding Ambani’s move into textiles manufacturing, then enabling him to open a giant polyester plant. At the time, Mukesh was living in America, studying for an MBA at Stanford University; his father told him to end his studies early and return home to Mumbai to run the facility.
Styling himself as a populist, Dhirubhai Ambani floated Reliance Industries on the stock market in 1977, becoming an icon to India’s first generation of retail investors and addressing giant crowds at shareholder meetings held at football grounds and cricket pitches.7 As his businesses grew, so the tycoon moved his family as well, first taking an apartment in a prestigious residential high-rise, then buying the entire Sea Wind. Yet for all his ability to work India’s system, he still chafed against its limitations. Arun Shourie, a former newspaper editor and otherwise staunch critic of the tycoon’s business style, gave a speech not long after his death, praising him for exposing India’s failing bureaucracy. “The Dhirubhais [of this world] are to be thanked, not once but twice over,” Shourie argued. “They set up world-class companies [and] by exceeding the limits in which those restrictions sought to impound them, they helped create the case for scrapping those regulations.”8
The 1991 reforms began that clear-out, giving Indians a taste of a new world of mobile phones, multichannel television and foreign consumer goods. For business leaders like Ambani it meant the ability to import freely and expand into deregulated sectors. By the time Mukesh Ambani took over, Reliance had spread out into many of these new areas, using its connections and commercial heft to build an industrial behemoth with divisions stretching from petrochemicals and oil refining to energy and telecoms. The company’s growing powers were once captured in a joke, emphasizing the shift from state-dominated socialism to a rapacious market economy: the history of independent India, the joke went, could be charted in the shift “from self-reliance to Reliance.”
Yet even this rich legacy was not enough to hold the company together. After years of feuding, confirmation that Reliance would be partitioned arrived in June 2005. Kokilaben, the matriarch, finally hammered out a peace accord, concluded with a ceremony at the family’s temple. “With the blessings of Srinathji, I have today amicably resolved the issues between my two sons, Mukesh and Anil, keeping in mind the proud legacy of my husband,” she wrote in a statement.9 The younger sibling would get half of the company, including its telecoms and power divisions. The elder would keep the energy and petrochemicals operations. Both would use the name Reliance. The armistice did not end the brothers’ bad feelings exactly. Instead a kind of cold war began, in which the duo scrapped over the terms of their separation. Nor did it reassure those who viewed Reliance as the epitome of a more worrying trend: the growing concentration of corporate wealth in India, and its corrosive effects on political power.
At first both brothers fared well during India’s mid-2000s boom. But as the decade wound on it was the elder man who prospered, building projects that were bold in scale and ruthlessly well managed. He finished the company’s giant oil refinery and set up a new energy exploration arm. His operations, which were mostly set up early in his father’s career, easily outperformed the newer concerns inherited by his sibling. Mukesh grew wealthier, too. In 2005 he ranked third on the Forbes India Rich List, one place ahead of his brother.10 But over the next few years he powered upwards, taking the title of richest Indian that he has never since relinquished.11 At the time of his death Dhirubhai Ambani was placed 138th in the Forbes global billionaire rankings. By 2008 his son had elbowed his way into the top five.12 Mukesh Ambani rarely spoke in public and cloaked his ambitions in bland corporate language when he did. But those who knew him told a different story. “Isn’t it obvious?” a friend from his university days once told me. “He wants to be the richest man in the world.”
The Mythical Island
Antilia’s terraces faced west towards the sea, but visitors arrived at the entrance at the back, the only one on Altamount Road, where heavily armed guards stood outside on the street. An imposing three-meter-high rust-and-gold-colored gate slid s
lowly from right to left to let guests inside, revealing a short driveway up towards the lobby. Inside, the building doubled as an opulent private hotel, foyer festooned with cut flowers and garlanded images of Dhirubhai Ambani. The ground floor’s ballroom hosted Reliance corporate functions, as well as the many gatherings the family threw for local charities and dignitaries. Its ceiling was covered almost entirely in crystal chandeliers. A giant golden Buddha statue stood in the garden, surrounded by elegant water features. “It’s all very bling,” an occasional guest once told me. “Lots of chandeliers. The chandeliers have chandeliers.”
Part of the building’s grandeur came from its adaptability, allowing Mukesh Ambani to host private events on almost any scale within his own court walls. Those invited back noticed how the fixtures would change from one gathering to the next. His wife, Nita, often took charge of remodeling the space, adding or removing walls and staircases as the occasion demanded. Catwalks and foreign DJs were brought in for fashion shows. Stylish interior canopies appeared at wedding receptions thrown for favored relatives. The cast of Broadway musicals flew in for special one-night performances. The grander the gathering, the greater the throng of Bollywood stars, celebrity cricketers, bigwig politicians, and fellow tycoons, at a venue whose very exclusivity marked out membership of India’s new aristocracy. Smaller and more intimate soirées were hosted higher up, where the truly elect were whisked upwards by express lift to the sky terrace on the roof. On Diwali, the annual festival of lights, there was no grander spot than Antilia’s top terrace from which to watch fireworks explode out over the skyline.
When not used for entertaining, the building provided a more basic function: a sanctuary and place to retreat. It doubled as an office, with facilities for video conferences with executives in distant Reliance divisions. There were places to relax, from the temple on the upper floors to the basement sports courts in which Ambani’s eldest son, Akash, invited friends to play football, handing out free pairs of Nike trainers to anyone who did. Rather than go out, the family often hosted small events for friends, hiring in musicians or stand-up comics. There was a home cinema too, in which the tycoon could indulge his taste for late-night Bollywood movies. A gated community in the sky, the building provided a sense of privacy for a man whose fame made it complicated to appear in public, and whose shyness meant he rarely wanted to do so. It was a tension the building itself could never quite resolve: an oasis designed to keep India at bay, but one that succeeded only in attracting more attention to its reclusive owner.
Controversies dogged the place too. There was a court case about the land upon which it was built, acquired from an Islamic trust that had originally planned to use the plot to establish an orphanage.13 Not long after construction wrapped up in 2010, a local journalist managed to get hold of Antilia’s monthly energy bill. It came to roughly seven million rupees ($109,000), causing a minor outcry in a country where hundreds of millions lived without power of any sort.14 There was more intrigue the next year: although Antilia was already being used for entertaining, it emerged that the Ambanis themselves had not actually moved in. Rumors swirled about problems concerning vastu shastra, a Hindu theory of harmonious architecture, similar in some ways to feng shui.15 In a rare 2012 interview with Vanity Fair, Nita Ambani confirmed that the family had by then finally taken up residence, although she declined to give reasons for their delay. Such was the family’s desire for privacy that the article’s author talked of months of “nuclear-treaty-level negotiations” before their meeting, most of which were designed to stop any questions relating to Antilia at all.16
The building’s lavish interiors—and the life of untouchable privilege that went with them—caused fascination and resentment in equal measure. Visitors whispered details of specially shipped-in artworks along the driveway, or lavish parties in which acrobats from Cirque du Soleil spun from triple-height ceilings. One friend attended an event in which guests were taken up in lifts with live butterflies fluttering around inside, caged in cylindrical glass walls. Antilia hinted at an existence that was part burlesque fantasy, part oligarch mansion, part Bond villain lair: a city within a city, and a barrier against the chaos below. Even the mysterious name seemed to hint at a deeper, epochal change. The Ambanis never did explain their choice, but before they adopted it the word “Antilia” was used to describe a mythical island on the far side of the Atlantic. Similar to Atlantis, it embodied the idea of territory yet to be discovered, serving as a target for seafaring explorers in the fifteenth century. In the words of historian Abbas Hamdani, Antilia was a “motivation for exploration”—a new beginning; a fresh chapter in history.17
Mukesh Ambani’s home embodied India’s brash new style, but also an underlying clash of cultures. The old commercial elite were English-speaking and cosmopolitan, with accents polished at foreign schools and family fortunes dating back to Imperial times. For them, liberalization had been at once thrilling and unnerving: a font of opportunities but also a source of raw new competitors muscling their way in from unfamiliar parts of India, of whom the Ambanis were merely the most forceful. Thousands thronged the streets when Dhirubhai Ambani died in 2002, a sign of the affection with which he was held by shareholders and ordinary citizens. While many criticized his buccaneering methods, they also admired the way he bulldozed his way into a closed business elite. His son, however, was viewed with less warmth and just as much suspicion. One exemplary member of the old establishment, Ratan Tata, patriarch of the Tata conglomerate and perhaps the only man to rival Mukesh Ambani’s stature in business, hinted as much in a 2011 interview. “It makes me wonder why someone would do that,” he said when asked about Antilia. “That’s what revolutions are made of.”18
“You walk around the streets of this city, and the amount of rage at Antilia has to be heard to be believed,” Meera Sanyal, a former international banker turned local anti-corruption campaigner, told me a few years later.19 Sanyal had spent three decades working in finance, rising to become head of Royal Bank of Scotland’s India operations. During the 2009 general election she ran as an independent candidate, angered by the incompetent government response to Mumbai’s terror attacks the year before, when gunmen attacked prominent targets, including the Taj Mahal Palace hotel. But as time wore on she found a new target: not so much the incompetence of the state but the venality of its business class, amid a welter of multibillion-dollar scandals, ranging from corruption during the 2010 Commonwealth Games to the handing out of valuable coal and telecoms licenses on the cheap. Almost all involved allegations of collusion among politicians, bureaucrats, and business titans—the basic definition of crony capitalism.20
When we met in 2014, Sanyal was again trying to become a member of parliament in south Mumbai, standing, again unsuccessfully, for the new anti-corruption Aam Aadmi (“Common Man”) party, in the same national election that would sweep Narendra Modi to power. One warm spring evening not long before the poll, I found her on a busy roadside next to a well-known Hindu temple, not far from Antilia. Cars honked as they streamed past, while the smell of marigold blossom hung in the air. A ragged holy man dressed in black sat cross-legged on the pavement, selling lotus flowers to worshippers. Sanyal wore an orange and yellow sari, along with the white peaked side cap often adopted by Aam Aadmi party workers, in a conscious echo of the “Gandhi cap” worn by nationalist activists during the fight for Independence.
A few dozen supporters tagged along as we walked through the neighborhood, banging drums and brandishing the brooms that symbolized their plans to sweep away dirty politics. Not long after we set out, a cheer went up. Over the next junction stood a Reliance jeweler’s shop, part of Ambani’s ever-expanding retail operations. Sanyal’s band waved their brooms cheerfully at the staff, who stared back bemused behind displays thick with gold watches and rings. Around the next corner we walked past the Gamdevi police station and the group stopped to pose for pictures next to a busted-up Aston Martin,
hidden beneath a dirty gray sheet.
Later that week I watched Sanyal try to win over a late-night gathering of dozens of young professionals, crammed into a cavernous living room in the south of the city. There was an energy among the crowd, with people sitting five deep on the floor. The audience were well to do and liberal, although mostly disengaged from mainstream politics. In India, unlike in the West, wealthy neighborhoods tend to have lower voter turnouts while poor areas stream to the polls, in the hope that loyalty to some local politician or other might improve their lot. The upper middle classes view their politicians as they view their tycoons: as operators of dubious machines fueled by graft and patronage. Even so, India’s anti-corruption movements—which began around 2011, and a few years later resulted in the launch of Sanyal’s party—have raised hopes of change. In 2014 the troubled state of Indian capitalism was a central electoral theme, and Mukesh Ambani found himself decried frequently by politicians on the stump as an exemplar of how private financial might was corroding democracy.
Sanyal perched at the front of the room on a tall thin stool, white cap affixed, her voice cracking as she tried to be heard. “I stood for election but I lost,” she explained, referring to her earlier 2009 run.21 “The paradigm in India was ‘good people can stand but you can never win.’ You can’t win without a war chest of money, without being the son or a daughter of a politician, or a criminal.” Sanyal went through the problems India faced, returning often to the entrenched power of business. These were people she knew, she said. As a banker she warmed to entrepreneurs and had no problem with profits. Still the power of families like the Ambanis, and what she described as their ability to bend the rules in their own interest, now embodied the frustrations middle-class Indians felt over their corruption-riddled economy. Some tycoons now behaved like the “robber barons of America or the oligarchs of Russia,” she said. Antilia was a particular bugbear. “At first I just thought of it as a terribly ugly structure, a blight on the face of Mumbai, but you see what people say about it,” she explained. “It’s not good for the country when you have crony capitalism of that nature.”
The Billionaire Raj Page 3