We agreed to meet one evening in August 2016, during New Delhi’s periodic monsoon. That night the rains held off, and I took an auto-rickshaw to his MP’s bungalow on the edge of Lodi Gardens, a lush public park dotted with fifteenth-century tombs. Gowda met me outside the front gate, dressed informally in a plain Nehru jacket and crisp white shirt. In his early fifties, he spoke rapidly and often ended his sentences with questions, like an academic fearful of losing his students’ attention. Sitting in a sparsely decorated living room, and sipping a glass of wine, he explained that his father and grandfather had both been politicians, and that he had moved back home to India hoping to follow them.
Armed with a famous family name and an impressive CV, at first Gowda was optimistic. He nosed around, sounding out party officials about becoming a candidate for various seats in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of parliament. The knock-backs began to mount up. “As soon as they discovered I didn’t have much money to bring to the table, they suddenly weren’t interested, if you understand what I mean?” he told me. He tried seat after seat, failing in each. “The people they consider to be viable candidates are people who they consider to have huge amounts of black money, OK?” He went on: “You don’t hear people saying, ‘This guy is a complete crook, we don’t want to be seen with him.’ They say, ‘This is the right guy, he has made a lot of money. He has the capacity.’ ”
Capacity meant the ability to provide cash for party workers, food for volunteers, and cars and buses to ferry them around. It meant stumping up for campaign rallies and public meetings and advertising and entertainment. Demands for funds began with basic “booth” expenses, meaning the thousand or more polling booths into which each local constituency is divided. “Party involvement itself is expensive,” Gowda said with a smile. “They will say, ‘OK, we will come and do a rally in your constituency, we will bring some star campaigner.’ But who has to pay for that rally? You have to make that happen.” As election day approached, and cash began to be distributed, capacity mattered more than ever. Money alone wasn’t always enough to ensure victory, but without it the odds of even being selected were slim.
In the end, Gowda gave up trying to win a seat, and managed to win a berth in the upper house, an appointed post that avoided the need to win an election entirely. But other candidates of limited means were forced to cultivate rich backers, to provide the capacity they lacked. Some approached local business figures. Others cultivated lower-level politicians, and asked them to fund-raise on their behalf. “In fact, why do you think I was foolish enough to think I could contest the Lok Sabha?” Gowda asked me. “Because I have enough networks that I would think I could have figured it out, even without having the money in my own pocket.”
I heard similar stories from another well-known national politician. Any candidate in a close national parliamentary race needed to spend at least “six or seven crore” (roughly $1 million), he told me. If you were lucky, some portion of this might be given to you by your party. But most of it had to be raised solo. “If you are very lucky, you can go to a single smooth operator in your local political scene,” the politician explained. “Ideally, this would be someone who will tell you they believed in you, and who won’t immediately ask for any quid pro quo.” If an amenable businessman could not be found, lower-level political operatives were often the best choice. “There are people raising money in your name who you might not even know about,” he explained. In this way, even personally honest politicians were drawn unavoidably into a system of corruption. “It’s a sad business, but that is how it works. There isn’t another way around it.”
These relationships between politicians and supporters were typically based on trust, given neither party wanted details of their arrangement in the open. Some who provided cash were public-spirited and asked for little in return. Another politician, this time one who ran a party machine in southern India, gave me an example involving one of his operatives, a newspaper seller who won a seat on the local municipal corporation. The man was well-liked but poor, traveling around the city by bicycle. The politician wanted him to run for the state assembly. “I said: ‘You are going to contest an election.’ He started crying,” the politician told me. “He said: ‘Sir, I don’t have a car, so how can I do this?’ But I knew he was popular, and would win the election. So what happened? Well, I went to this business guy, and I said: ‘You have an extra car, please give it to him.’ And I went to this other guy, and I said: ‘This man needs some new clothes, get it done please.’ And everyone did it.”
Most funders do demand something for their support, however. Having invested heavily in winning, the politicians also try to recoup their costs, extracting what they can from the office they hold. These local problems are then magnified many times over in New Delhi, as national party leaders, facing rocketing election costs, come to rely ever more on the generosity of the larger tycoons. At base, India’s money power system makes it all but impossible to win elections honestly. “Think of a politician today,” Rajeev Gowda told me. “You don’t think: ‘My God, I want to be like him.’ You say: ‘My God, why doesn’t the bastard give some of his wealth to me?’…This is actually out of control, and it will continue to be out of control. There is no limit, it is an arms race.”
The Sopranos of Moradabad
UP’s election results were released on a Saturday morning in early March, a few days after the final round of voting was wrapped up. They left Akhilesh Yadav’s hopes in tatters. The young chief minister had campaigned doggedly for a second term in office, but despite his efforts the BJP won a landslide victory, providing a thumping reminder of Narendra Modi’s heartland appeal. Modi’s promises to tackle corruption and create jobs, alongside his subtler appeals to Hindu pride, had broadened his party’s support far beyond its traditional base, enabling it to take around four-fifths of the state’s assembly seats. As well as being an endorsement of the prime minister, the vote was a rejection too: of the crime-ridden, black-money-infused style of government for which UP had become notorious.
UP’s politicians were more blatant than most, but all major political parties played India’s black money game. Some were notably inventive in the ways they raised cash. Mamata Banerjee, the diminutive chief minister of West Bengal, turned to art to fund her Trinamool Congress, which ruled the eastern state for much of the last decade. An amateur painter, she claimed to have persuaded various friendly business leaders to donate as much as Rs2 million (about $31,000) to buy each of her works, creating an artful means of legally raising large sums.20 For most leaders, money-raising options were more limited. Either you inducted rich people into your party and tapped them for funds, or you befriended rich people outside it and asked them to bankroll you anyway. Given the large sums involved, I was often struck by how wearying this fund-raising process must have been, given the ceaseless pressure to bring in money on the one hand, and all of the clandestine inferences and understandings and debts to be paid back on the other.
The dramatic rise of so-called crorepati politicians—meaning those worth more than a crore, or ten million, rupees—provided one of the clearest signs of India’s recent political dash for cash. More than three-quarters of those elected to UP’s assembly on that Saturday in March crossed this threshold, meaning they had assets of roughly $150,000 or more. At the national level, the average MP was worth at least $2 million.21 Then there were the truly wealthy: the businesspeople whom parties tempted into the fold with offers of safe seats or cozy berths in the upper chamber. In the mid-2000s, the Samajwadi Party recruited Anil Ambani to the Rajya Sabha, at a time when the billionaire tycoon happened to be investing in the state. Mayawati, the Dalit leader of UP’s Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), enjoyed a reputation for especially inventive fund-raising schemes during her own periods in power. One involved the alleged sale of “tickets,” meaning the right to represent her party in parliament. Although this is something Mayawati has denied, a
leaked US diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks suggested that the going rate for a BSP ticket during the 2009 national elections came to “roughly 250,000 dollars.”22 The same cable, poetically entitled “Mayawati: Portrait of a Lady,” made further allegations concerning the excesses of her various spells as UP’s chief minister. “When she needed new sandals, her private jet flew empty to Mumbai to retrieve her preferred brand,” the author claimed. Such stories had often attracted the attentions of India’s police, who unsuccessfully investigated various corruption allegations against her over the years, all of which she firmly denied.23
The need to raise money had another unfortunate side effect: the relentless rise of criminal politicians. Voters in most countries would shun candidates whose background came with hints of criminality. But in India, parties like the BJP and the Congress actively recruit such candidates. Roughly one-fifth of MPs elected in 2014 had “serious” criminal records, ranging from kidnapping and racketeering to murder, nearly double the rate ten years earlier.24 Rather than turn against them, voters often took violence and extortion as perverse signs of strength; a signal that a criminal politician could offer protection or extract resources from the state. “Many voters vote for politicians because, rather than in spite, of their criminal reputations,” Milan Vaishnav wrote in When Crime Pays. Such was the attraction of a criminal background that candidates facing criminal charges were three times more likely to win a seat than those with a clean record.
This complex intermingling of politics, wealth, and crime was explained to me one afternoon by Gilles Verniers, a genial young Belgian academic who had settled in New Delhi and become a respected analyst of UP politics. “It is very similar to The Sopranos. In fact, it is amazing how that series has opened my eyes,” he told me once over a cup of sugary tea, sitting in his home in a southern suburb of the city, dressed in a flowing white kurta. Just as Tony Soprano officially made his money as a waste management consultant, so UP’s colorful tycoons typically had a legitimate base in a single industry like liquor or construction. Expanding their operations, however, meant taking on other rivals with criminal tendencies. “If you reach a certain scale, it is a dangerous business, so you need protection,” Verniers told me. “One way is to become a politician, or to get protection from politicians. And of course the politicians are happy, because you come with money.” The rise of crime-tainted politicians diminished public respect for the political system overall. Yet when elected, these criminal figures often turned out to be Robin Hood figures with a populist common touch. “It doesn’t matter that these people are gangsters,” Verniers said. “It is that they are generous. Criminal politicians who were perceived to be too greedy get wiped out.”
Few people embodied UP’s occasional nexus of crime, business, and politics more than Gurdeep “Ponty” Chadha, an infamous alcohol magnate and money man. In November 2012, aged just fifty-two, he was killed in a gunfight at his home in a leafy enclave of southern New Delhi. “Chadha had gained a surpassing reputation for the kind of entrepreneurial success that is born of great intimacy with power,” as journalist Mehboob Jeelani wrote in Caravan magazine.25 Chadha’s demise—he was shot following a feud with his younger brother—only heightened his image as modern India’s greatest gangster tycoon.
Chadha was a tall man with a sizable paunch and a taste for rich men’s clothing. But he was born poor, in a small home in the industrial city of Moradabad, about a three-hour drive east of New Delhi. His father and uncles owned a wholesale booze business, where Chadha began working as a teenager, going on to fashion a liquor empire that came to dominate much of northern India in only a few decades. At first he expanded his business using hired goons and plentiful bribes. But he also learned the value of political patronage, delivering bags of cash on behalf of his father to help Mulayam Singh Yadav fight an election in 1989. He grew close to Yadav’s party, and prospered during the politician’s first spell as chief minister in the 1990s. As well as liquor, Chadha moved first into sand mining and real estate, then eventually everything from sugar refining and food processing to Bollywood financing. He cultivated connections, hosting what Jeelani described as “Gatsby-style farmhouse parties”—“farmhouse” being a euphemistic New Delhi term for “mansion.” Out-of-town guests were often flown in on chartered jets for these gatherings, while media reports talked of his habit of handing out “thousands” of Rolex and Omega watches as gifts during the annual Diwali festival. “Everyone would be wearing the same model,” an acquaintance recounted.26 “They’d see the watch and everyone would know.”
The kind of political patronage Chadha enjoyed could be fleeting. Businessmen who acted as “bag carriers” for politicians—meaning those who donated, stored, and laundered money—often suffered rapid reversals if their patrons lost power. But Chadha proved unusually deft, starting out as an intimate of the Yadavs before switching sides and growing even more successful under Mayawati, their great rival. For UP’s leaders a relationship with Chadha was both lucrative and uncomplicated; he gave freely and kept his requests reasonable. Yet over time he earned the kind of bounty that only political goodwill could provide: liquor licenses, cheap land, favorable tax status, police protection, and lenient treatment from the judiciary. Not long before his death, Chadha even made a dash for respectability, consolidating his businesses into Wave, a conglomerate focused on property and shopping malls, with a subsidiary that won lucrative government contracts to provide free lunches to schoolchildren.27
If Chadha was UP’s most notorious businessman, his fame was still eclipsed by a second local tycoon, who also forged a rags-to-riches story at the intersection of money and power. Subrata Roy, chairman of Sahara India, a conglomerate based in Lucknow, also began his career modestly, delivering snacks on a Lambretta scooter in Gorakhpur, an impoverished city in the east of the state. In the late 1970s he set up a small “parallel banking” business, offering generous rates of interest to poorer people without access to formal banking services, from farmers and taxi drivers to household servants. Roy’s offers attracted millions of customers. As more signed up, so their deposits provided the capital with which he built a business empire of more than a hundred companies, with interests stretching from finance and housing to infrastructure and consumer goods. At his peak, Roy launched an airline, owned a Formula 1 team, sponsored the shirts of India’s cricket team, and snapped up a clutch of foreign hotels, including New York’s Plaza and London’s Grosvenor House.
As his wealth grew, the cult of Roy’s personality expanded with it. Sahara’s more than one million employees addressed him as their “managing worker,” and were told to wear black and white uniforms once a week, including white socks, to mimic the black waistcoat and white shirts Roy typically wore himself. Tall and slim with boot-polish-black hair and a neatly trimmed mustache, Roy was famous for presiding over lengthy companywide meetings, beginning with a rousing rendition of the Sahara corporate anthem. Those attending would greet one another using the Sahara salute, placing their right hand over their hearts with an open palm, before listening as the managing worker held forth on the importance of patriotism, or his near-mystical personal philosophy, which he dubbed “collective materialism.”28 Yet Sahara’s business prospered despite its many oddities, amassing assets worth $10 billion or more, including an array of flashy airport hotels and high-end residential “townships” dotted around India.
Roy also used his money to build Sahara Shaher, a sprawling estate in eastern Lucknow filled with lush lawns and glistening white marble, and featuring its own auditorium, cinema, golf course, and cricket field. More akin to a Mughal fort than a mere mansion, Roy lived there as a recluse, emerging occasionally to host glittering parties filled with Bollywood celebrities and government power brokers. He courted politicians of all parties, although his links with the Yadavs were especially close. On the night Akhilesh Yadav became chief minister in 2012, Roy hosted a giant victory party, fer
rying guests around the grounds of his mansion in a fleet of white Mercedes saloons.29 As with “Ponty” Chadha, Roy’s alliance with the Yadavs did his businesses no harm. As he diversified into property during the 2000s, Sahara managed to acquire large tracts of land around the state, part of a drive that eventually left him holding 34,000 acres around India, an area about three quarters the size of Washington, DC.30 In his pomp, Roy had holdings larger than any publicly listed Indian company, a feat that would have been virtually impossible without help from friends in politics.
Some questioned whether Roy’s political bonds went deeper, asking if the millions of deposits he took from impoverished customers included money from politicians seeking to conceal its origins. “Does Sahara keep politicians’ money?” journalist Tamal Bandyopadhyay, who wrote a book on Sahara, asked Roy outright in 2014, around the time that his businesses began to come under serious official scrutiny.31 “Is Sahara a vehicle for turning black money white?” Roy firmly denied both accusations, just as Sahara consistently rejected the charge that its investment schemes were structured like a Ponzi scheme. Still, the question of where exactly Sahara raised its money remained mysterious. Back in 2012, regulators demanded that Roy refund more than $3 billion to his investors.32 Three years later, then aged sixty-five, he was sent to New Delhi’s Tihar jail on charges of contempt of court, having failed to appear at a hearing investigating another of his financial products. He remained in prison, off and on, for much of the next few years, trying to rescue his tottering business, finishing a trilogy of florid autobiographical management books, and vigorously denying any wrongdoing.
Men like Chadha and Roy, trusted allies willing to donate sizable sums, provided a pleasing solution for cash-starved politicians. The circle of cronyism was self-reinforcing: the stronger the friendship, the richer the tycoons became, and the more they could donate in turn. “The cost of elections skyrockets,” Gilles Verniers explained. “It is not just the money you spend in each campaign. It is the money you spend to build the patronage networks, to become a candidate in the first place.” Political leaders needed not just to win power, but also to hold it over the long term. They also needed spare resources to rebuild, if voters kicked them out, as Akhilesh Yadav found to his cost in 2017. “So the circle is complete,” as Raghuram Rajan argued during his time at the Reserve Bank of India. “The crooked politician needs the businessman to provide the funds that allow him to supply patronage to the poor and fight elections. The corrupt businessman needs the crooked politician to get public resources and contracts cheaply. And the politician needs the votes of the poor and the under-privileged. Every constituency is tied to the other in a cycle of dependence.”33
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