Capitalism: A Ghost Story
Rockefeller
to Mandela, Vedanta to Anna Hazare.... How long can the cardinals of corporate
gospel buy up our protests?
Is it a house or a home? A temple to the new India, or a
warehouse for its ghosts? Ever since Antilla arrived on Altamont Road in
Mumbai, exuding mystery and quiet menace, things have not been the same. “Here
we are,” the friend who took me there said, “Pay your respects to our new
Ruler.”
Antilla belongs to India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani. I had
read about this most expensive dwelling ever built, the twenty-seven floors,
three helipads, nine lifts, hanging gardens, ballrooms, weather rooms,
gymnasiums, six floors of parking, and the six hundred servants. Nothing had
prepared me for the vertical lawn—a soaring, 27-storey-high wall of grass
attached to a vast metal grid. The grass was dry in patches; bits had fallen
off in neat rectangles. Clearly, Trickledown hadn’t worked.
But Gush-Up certainly has. That’s why in a nation of 1.2
billion, India’s 100 richest people own assets equivalent to one-fourth of the
GDP.
The word on the street (and in the New York Times) is, or at
least was, that after all that effort and gardening, the Ambanis don’t live in
Antilla. No one knows for sure. People still whisper about ghosts and bad luck,
Vaastu and Feng Shui. Maybe it’s all Karl Marx’s fault. (All that cussing.)
Capitalism, he said, “has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of
exchange, that it is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the
powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells”.
In India, the 300 million of us who belong to the new,
post-IMF “reforms” middle class—the market—live side by side with spirits of
the nether world, the poltergeists of dead rivers, dry wells, bald mountains
and denuded forests; the ghosts of 2,50,000 debt-ridden farmers who have killed
themselves, and of the 800 million who have been impoverished and dispossessed
to make way for us. And who survive on less than twenty rupees a day.
Mukesh Ambani is personally worth $20 billion. He holds a
majority controlling share in Reliance Industries Limited (RIL), a company with
a market capitalisation of $47 billion and global business interests that
include petrochemicals, oil, natural gas, polyester fibre, Special Economic
Zones, fresh food retail, high schools, life sciences research and stem cell
storage services. RIL recently bought 95 per cent shares in Infotel, a TV
consortium that controls 27 TV news and entertainment channels, including
CNN-IBN, IBN Live, CNBC, IBN Lokmat, and ETV in almost every regional language.
Infotel owns the only nationwide licence for 4G Broadband, a high-speed
“information pipeline” which, if the technology works, could be the future of
information exchange. Mr Ambani also owns a cricket team.
RIL is one of a handful of corporations that run India. Some
of the others are the Tatas, Jindals, Vedanta, Mittals, Infosys, Essar and the
other Reliance (ADAG), owned by Mukesh’s brother Anil. Their race for growth
has spilled across Europe, Central Asia, Africa and Latin America. Their nets
are cast wide; they are visible and invisible, over-ground as well as
underground. The Tatas, for example, run more than 100 companies in 80
countries. They are one of India’s oldest and largest private sector power
companies. They own mines, gas fields, steel plants, telephone, cable TV and
broadband networks, and run whole townships. They manufacture cars and trucks,
own the Taj Hotel chain, Jaguar, Land Rover, Daewoo, Tetley Tea, a publishing
company, a chain of bookstores, a major brand of iodised salt and the cosmetics
giant Lakme. Their advertising tagline could easily be: You Can’t Live Without
Us.
According to the rules of the Gush-Up Gospel, the more you
have, the more you can have.
The era of the Privatisation of Everything has made the
Indian economy one of the fastest growing in the world. However, like any good
old-fashioned colony, one of its main exports is its minerals. India’s new
mega-corporations—Tatas, Jindals, Essar, Reliance, Sterlite—are those who have
managed to muscle their way to the head of the spigot that is spewing money
extracted from deep inside the earth. It’s a dream come true for businessmen—to
be able to sell what they don’t have to buy.
……TO BE
CONTINUED….
