The Billionaire Raj by James Crabtree

Author:James Crabtree
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2018-07-02T16:00:00+00:00

How to Be a Crony Capitalist

Hyderabad, capital of the newly independent Telangana and home to most of the Andhrapreneurs, has long been associated with wealth. It was the largest city in India’s grandest princely state, led until 1948 by a monarch known as the Nizam, the head of an Islamic dynasty dating back to the early eighteenth century, and a successor state to the Mughal Empire. Osman Ali Khan, the title’s final holder, was not just the world’s richest man but also said to be one of the wealthiest who had ever lived, the recipient of a fortune drawn both from vast land holdings and from ownership of the state’s lucrative Golconda diamond mines.

Even as his rule crumbled, the Nizam’s eccentricities were legion: the fleet of Rolls-Royces he employed to collect rubbish from Hyderabad’s streets; the eunuchs that guarded his mighty jewelry collection; and above all the intricate complexities of his love life, with its dozens of concubines and countless illegitimate children. “The last Nizam had a total of 14,718 employees when he died,” according to one account. “In his main palace alone, there were about 3,000 Arab bodyguards, 28 people paid to fetch drinking water, 38 to dust chandeliers, [and] several specifically to grind walnuts.”31 His rule ended in 1948, when his state was forcibly folded into a newly independent India. But the excess of his rule left behind a city known as much for the splendor of its palaces and the sophistication of its culture as for the stunning rocky terrain of the surrounding Deccan Plateau.

More recently, Hyderabad has grown into one of southern India’s most important business hubs, and one known for wealth of a different sort. Visitors land at a shiny new airport, developed by GMR, one of the more prominent Andhrapreneur conglomerates, and then whizz into the city along an elevated expressway built by another local contractor, which offers impressive views over the glass and steel buildings downtown. During the 1990s, parts of Hyderabad were officially rebranded as “Cyberabad,” as its enterprising chief minister, Chandrababu Naidu, began to transform the city from a sleepy provincial capital into a major IT hub, attracting investment from Microsoft and Oracle. India’s tech sector is often thought to be largely free of corruption, but here Hyderabad was also an exception: Satyam Computer, the city’s most prominent outsourcing group, collapsed spectacularly in 2009 when its chairman admitted to inventing more than $1 billion of revenue, in one of Asia’s largest cases of corporate fraud. Yet the city’s modern wealth, as well as its reputation for financial chicanery, have come from traditional sectors like land and construction dominated by the Andhrapreneurs, the new class of “carpetbagging but hugely risk-taking Telugu infrastructure entrepreneurs” whom Shekhar Gupta dubbed the “Andhra oligarchs.”32

“You are now in a part of the country where the situation is arguably the worst,” anti-corruption campaigner Jayaprakash Narayan told me, sitting in his office in the city one afternoon in mid-2016. The room was sparsely decorated, with a single map of India on the wall and a small bust of Gandhi in the corner.

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