The Billionaire Raj

by James Crabtree

  When we spoke, Adani bristled at any suggestion that his expansion had been helped along by preferential treatment. “Modi is not directly helping any individual, that I can tell you. Modi is helping industries through policy,” he told me, pointing out that his original plans for Mundra had predated Modi’s arrival in office. He was critical too of those who complained about India’s government. “Our philosophy as a group is we never go and cry to the government that ‘you have promised this and you have not done this.’ We never do that. We always go along with the government…Irrespective of whatever we say about corruption and other things, at end of the day, they [the government] also want to see development.” Throughout our conversation, Adani’s admiration for his friend the politician was clear. “We like Modi not because he’s helping on x, y, and z, but because we like his kind of character,” he said. “Once he’s convinced himself that this is good for his state he will stand by you.”

  CHAPTER 4

  INDIA MODIFIED

  The Tsunamo

  Ringed by armed guards, Narendra Modi pushed through the throng and ducked into a silver-colored jeep. It was the afternoon of May 16, 2014—election results day—and already the scale of his triumph was becoming clear. Hundreds of supporters began gathering that morning at the BJP’s Gujarat headquarters, their numbers swelling with each passing hour. Men in orange shirts danced in the outer courtyard as victory reports filtered in. Confetti floated through the air. Modi’s image was everywhere, gazing down from posters and staring out of cardboard face masks. A bearded lookalike stood at the back, posing politely for selfies. The crowd surged as the real Modi emerged later that afternoon, lifting me off my feet as we pushed nearer to the car. Hands holding smartphones reached out as the jeep inched towards the exit, eager for a photograph of the leader within. Dressed in a waistcoat and smart blue and white shirt, Modi looked impassive in the passenger seat, as if contemplating the magnitude of his win. A perfunctory wave brought one final cheer from the crowd, the gates opened and the man who was soon to be India’s fourteenth prime minister sped away.

  I had taken the hour-long flight from Mumbai early that morning, on what was already a painfully hot day in one of the warmest months of the year. Traffic moved easily up the neat six-lane highway north from the airport towards Gandhinagar, the state capital and Modi’s longtime seat of power. Small scenes of his achievements as chief minister zipped by the window, from technology parks and glass office buildings to the Mahatma Mandir, a giant convention center named after Mahatma Gandhi, who was born in the state and for much of his life lived in a modest ashram nearby. The scene was prosperous and orderly; a model for the country Modi aspired to lead. Over the previous year he had crisscrossed India delivering rousing speeches attacking corruption and economic mismanagement. It was the most expensive election campaign the country had ever seen, and Modi’s message was simple: the ruling Congress, once the party of the poor, now stood firmly on the side of the super-rich. At its conclusion, more than half a billion people lined up at nearly one million polling stations, in a voting process that stretched out over a month.1 And as the largest democratic exercise in human history wrapped up that afternoon in May, even fervent BJP supporters struggled to come to terms with the scale of their win and what it would mean for the man the newspapers now referred to simply as “NaMo.”

  The BJP headquarters was a modern three-story building not far from the Sabarmati River. Party flags with lotus flower logos hung limply around the perimeter walls, as if wilting in the heat. Television vans idled outside when we arrived earlier that morning, their crews sheltering in the shade of a few nearby trees. A mural on the floor inside the compound featured a map of India made of multicolored sand, alongside an image of Modi’s face ringed with flowers. Supporters in the crowd outside lavished praise on their leader. “India needs Modi,” Vivek Jain, a teller in a local bank, told me when I walked back outside. A fervent admirer, he had taken the day off, and rode up on his motorbike to join the celebrations. He wore faded blue jeans and a rumpled white shirt, over which he had slipped a cardboard singlet with the slogan “NaMo: Education for everyone.” Others quickly chimed in. Modi understood ordinary people, having been born into a poor family. He was honest and would bring an end to corruption in New Delhi. He brought development to Gujarat and would do the same for India. He had neither children nor close family—barring his elderly mother, to whom he was devoted, and at whose house he had spent much of that morning—so there was no risk that his rule would degenerate into dynasty, as the Congress had done. “All the people of India want this same development he had brought here to us [in Gujarat],” Jain said, finally. “He will make India work again and stop all this crony stuff that has been going on.”

  Gujarat held a special place in India’s political imagination long before Modi became chief minister. His muscular brand of Hindu nationalism shared little with the secular pacifism of earlier nationalist leaders like Gandhi and Nehru. But the BJP leader still often mentioned Gandhi in his speeches, along with the special role their state played in the fight against imperialism, notably during the salt march of 1930, a celebrated act of civil disobedience in which the Mahatma led a procession in protest against a salt tax levied by the British. Under Modi’s leadership the state then acquired a new image, this time as a beacon of economic development. Elsewhere in India businesses struggled to find land, suffered power cuts, and saw their expansion plans frustrated by corruption. In Gujarat the lights stayed on, land was easier to come by, and the bureaucrats were mostly honest, for fear that their stern chief minister would find out if they were not.

  On Modi’s watch the state built irrigation canals, laid highways, and fixed a bankrupt electricity system. He had a knack for drawing in investment from abroad, presiding over Chinese-style double-digit growth rates. Economists hailed his “Gujarat model” for combining export-focused manufacturing with efficient agriculture and modern services.2 Foreign investors were equally enamored. “We’ve had the usual small issues with water and power,” one executive from Ford told me back in 2013, as the car group readied to open a $1 billion factory in the state. “But when that happens we all go and see the principal secretary of industry and mines, and he says: ‘Hey, you guys, go and get this fixed!’ ” With its dirty air and traffic-clogged streets, Ahmedabad was far from perfect. But the city still looked different from the typical chaos of urban India, with its orderly system of bus lanes and plans to turn the banks of the Sabarmati into a series of supposedly Parisian-style riverside paths.

  To supporters like Jain, Modi seemed a natural choice as prime minister, but even the day before the result his victory remained in doubt. The BJP christened his campaign “Mission 272,” the number of seats needed for a majority in the lower house of parliament, the Lok Sabha. Many analysts thought this target improbable; the BJP had only managed at most 182 seats in earlier elections. But on that afternoon it won a stunning 282, the first time any party other than the Congress had managed to win more than half of the seats on offer.3 The Congress itself was humiliated, reduced to a rump of just forty. In India, this was what a landslide looked like—or a “TsuNaMo,” as one headline put it.4

  “Narendra Modi has scripted one of the most gloriously spectacular political triumphs,” wrote Pratap Bhanu Mehta, a respected political commentator, the following day. “He was an outsider, demonised by the intelligentsia, with a central government arrayed against him. But he has broken through and will now produce the biggest churning that India’s power structure has seen since Independence.”5 Modi tapped into a powerful dissatisfaction brewing within India, as its people grew angry at the greed of the political class and the industrialists with whom they conspired. Back in Gujarat, having seen their leader leave, Modi’s supporters dispersed, joining thousands of others around the city, waving flags from the back seats of motorcycles and dancing happily on street corners. Around the rest of the countr
y many felt less jubilant, however, and reflected upon a simple question: How did the most controversial leader in modern Indian history, a man even many of his own supporters thought too divisive to win, get to the position of becoming prime minister in the first place?

  Bal Narendra

  A little more than a year later, a friend and I drove the three hours north from Ahmedabad to Vadnagar, the town of Modi’s birth, on a damp monsoon morning. The trappings of modernity thinned out as we left the city. Neat pots of rose-colored flowers disappeared from the roadside as the highway narrowed from four lanes to two, and eventually just one. Camels pulling blue trailers piled high with wood trudged down the verge, alongside occasional groups of women balancing pails of water on their heads. Little more than a village in Modi’s youth, Vadnagar was now a bustling small town, filled with half-finished buildings propped up by bamboo scaffolding. Hole-in-the-wall shops selling mobile phone cards dotted the town center, while its road junctions were festooned with adverts for cement. The tops of ruined temples poked out between the construction, hinting at an older settlement, now mostly forgotten: a minor center of Buddhism in the seventh century and then later a medieval trading hamlet around which the modern town had spilled out.6

  Modi’s father Damodardas was born around 1915 into an unremarkable lower caste, the Ghanchi. By tradition they earned a living extracting and pressing cooking oils. Today they are officially designated as “backward” under the government system that ranks India’s castes, placing Modi firmly in the lower half of India’s social scale. Modi has talked rarely about his earliest village days, although a few fables have emerged nonetheless, notably via Bal Narendra, a comic book of uncertain authorship recounting tall tales from his childhood. Its colorful cartoon panels showed the young Narendra saving a friend from drowning in the town’s crocodile-infested lake, and then later bringing a baby crocodile back to his home, to the consternation of his mother. At one point he is congratulated for staging a play to raise funds to repair a school wall; at another he helps a teacher to identify a bully by secretly marking his shirt with blue ink. At home he is dutiful and helpful with chores, but also resourceful. “I should keep this washed shirt under my pillow, so that all the creases are gone,” a thought bubble shows the young Modi thinking, lying at night beneath a kerosene lamp on a neat single bed.

  The bully story drew a blank look from one of his actual teachers, Hiraben Modi, a former primary school instructor, who was by then well into her eighties. The name Modi was common in the area, but she said she wasn’t a relation. Sitting in her modest three-room home, a few streets from the one in which Narendra Modi grew up, she recalled a confident, if not exceptional, young student. “He used to do homework properly, he was disciplined,” she told me. In a dingy homeware shop not far away, Jasood Pathan, a childhood friend, described a happy and harmonious upbringing in which young Muslim boys like him played happily with Hindus like Modi. Surrounded in his store by racks of Chinese-made torches and boxes of brass locks, he recalled youthful days of kite flying, swimming in the lake, and impish attempts to distract the musicians who played during wedding celebrations. “We were quite naughty, and did a lot of mischief together,” he said, smiling.

  The reality was almost certainly less idyllic. When Modi was born in September 1950, Vadnagar was small and poor, without power or running water. Schooling was basic and medical care limited. There was little contact with the rest of the country, beyond the occasional Bollywood movie and the town’s railway line, which brought trains up and down from Ahmedabad. Back then the average Indian would die not long after thirty. Fewer than one in five could read or write.7 “I had a lot of pain because I grew up in a village where there was no electricity and in my childhood we used to face a lot of hardships,” Modi once told his biographer in a rare candid comment.8 The tiny home he shared with his six siblings still stands in a narrow muddy street close to the heart of the old town, although his family no longer owns it. It was sold after their father passed away, Modi’s younger brother Prahlad told me later: “When we were there it was not a cement house and on the rooftop there were still iron sheets.” The new owners added brick walls, an extra floor, and a proper roof.

  Before Modi’s election in 2014, all but one of India’s prime ministers had been drawn from the upper ranks of the caste system. Rather than play down his modest heritage, however, Modi fashioned from it perhaps the defining image of his campaign: the place he took as a child helping his father to sell tea from their family’s wooden stall, next to Vadnagar railway station. This image was a relatively recent invention. People in Ahmedabad who followed Modi’s career told me the tea story began featuring in his speeches only around 2012, when he was first positioning himself as a national political figure. Before then he almost never discussed his family background. “No one really knows the real Narendra Modi,” the Times of India said of him in 2007, during his second term as chief minister. “He even dines alone.”9 By 2014, however, Modi referred proudly and often to his humble beginnings: the lower-caste birth; the boy who swam bravely in the crocodile-infested lake; the sacrifices he made leaving his family for a life in politics; and especially the story of the humble son of a chai-wallah who now yearned to lead a nation.

  The town’s lake was still there, although the crocodiles had long since disappeared. Damodardas’s tea stall was gone too, but half a dozen much like it stood on a muddy roundabout just outside the train station, with a large tree at its center. A handful of auto-rickshaws idled hopefully nearby. Modi’s basic high school was a few streets away. Inside the station, little had changed, with just one platform and a narrow single track. A few travelers sheltered from the drizzle beneath a corrugated iron awning, painted in yellow and with the town’s name spelled out in black script. “The school was just opposite the railway station, so during the recess, sometimes we brothers would go to the tea stall, but most of the time it was just Narendra,” Modi’s brother told me. Just a handful of trains would come each day. “He would go to the stall, take the kettle and the cups, and walk down the carriage asking if anyone wants to take tea.” In Bal Narendra, the scene is re-created with added pathos. Kettle in hand, Modi pours tea for two men in uniform sitting inside a carriage. The caption reads: “A patriotic Narendra ensured to the best of his ability that no jawan [soldier] was left unreplenished.”

  Rather than the station platform, it was the old village parade ground nearby that had the most profound influence on Modi’s youth. From the age of eight he returned home each day, threw down his satchel and headed out to attend the shakha (branch) meetings of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)—the Hindu religious organization that in time gave birth to the BJP. Anyone watching would have seen a group of stick-carrying uniformed men and boys, dressed in khaki shorts, engaging in communal calisthenics and singing patriotic songs. Founded in 1925, the RSS began its existence with a seemingly innocuous focus on charitable works and religious brotherhood. Its name translates simply as “National Volunteer Organization.” Today it describes itself as the world’s largest nongovernmental body, with perhaps five million members, and more than fifty thousand groups nationwide.10 Although it does not field candidates, the RSS wields enormous political influence, not least because its members act as field organizers for the BJP. Many prominent BJP politicians, like Modi, have deep backgrounds in the movement. Yet few institutions evoke more distrust among Indian liberals, many of whom view the RSS, with its forceful religious views and paramilitary aesthetic supposedly modeled on the imperial British army, as protofascist in nature.

  As it developed, the RSS pushed a militant vision of Hinduism, which stood in implicit opposition to the secular multiculturalism of moderates like Gandhi and Nehru. Its followers, known as swayamsevaks, were inspired instead by the theory of Hindutva, or Hindu-ness, which argued that Indian identity and the Hindu faith were inextricably intertwined. Rejecting the divisions of caste, it formally claimed
as Hindus all those whose religions viewed India as their spiritual homeland: a typology that included Sikhs and Jains, but pointedly excluded Muslims and Christians, who today make up about fourteen percent and two percent of the population respectively.11 It was an idea that had its most tragic consequence when Nathuram Godse, a Hindutva ideologue and former RSS activist, assassinated Gandhi in 1948, shooting him in the chest on his way to an evening prayer meeting. Nehru outlawed the organization, claiming “these people had the blood of Mahatma Gandhi on their hands,” one of three occasions on which the group has been banned since Independence.12 But a year later it was allowed to re-form. In the years that followed it went on to spawn a wider family of Hindu nationalist organizations, known as the Sangh Parivar, covering everything from trade unions and farmers’ organizations to youth and student groups, and eventually the BJP itself.

  Jasood Pathan, Modi’s childhood companion, played down the idea that his young friend had been a Hindu fanatic, telling me that many young boys in Vadnagar attended RSS meetings, mostly to stave off boredom. Still, Modi clearly warmed to the sense of brotherhood and purpose the organization provided. Pathan recalled his young friend taking inspiration from his parade ground meetings to give impromptu talks in school about the need to respect India’s military. “It would last ten to fifteen minutes, and he talked about the duties of the soldier,” he said. “It was well received.” Hindutva also instilled in Modi a sense of his place in a great civilization led astray, as the RSS taught him that India had been traduced first by Muslim invaders under the Mughal Empire, then by British colonialists, and finally by the modern, English-speaking elites of New Delhi, with their exotic notions of secularism and socialism. The RSS’s martial nationalism introduced him to broader influences too: first the nineteenth-century monk Swami Vivekananda, whose visits to America helped Hinduism gain recognition as a world religion; and then Vinayak Savarkar, whose 1923 book Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu? made him the movement’s theologian and one of Modi’s intellectual heroes.13 Many of the core tenets of the RSS—the importance of family, duty to the nation, social order, cleanliness, and personal honesty—were plain to see in Modi’s speeches, as was the unbending line he would later take on corruption.