Recasting India (13 page)

It was also the time when Jafri, who has a BS in physics and an MBA, decided to start a business. But he did not move to Juhapura until 2006 and clarifies that it had nothing to do with the riots. He says he held back moving right after the riots but finally saw the business opportunity. There was “also the family pressure to move to a safer location.”

“I was already interested in retail and there was an opportunity. Juhapura did not have a large utilities and grocery store. People used to bring things from outside,” says Jafri, who is from the Syed Shia Muslim community, who have close ties with the Chiliya Muslim sect. The Chiliya Muslims are famed restaurateurs and run most of the restaurants on the Bombay-Ahmedabad highway. So Jafri and seven partners pooled about Rs 60 lakhs in 2004 and opened Hearty Mart in the heart of Juhapura with contracts from many highway restaurants to supply wholesale groceries to them.

Today, with 12 franchise stores across Gujarat and a turnover of Rs 12 crores in 2013, Jafri's work has become a case study at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIMA), where he has also lectured.

Jafri says he supports Modi's work—though he has reservations about the man—because it has brought development. “If we blame him for failing to stop the violence in 2002, we also have to give him credit for 10 years of peace,” says Jafri, who once met Modi at a public event where they spoke briefly about growing Gujarat's economic potential.

He says all he wants is more development for Juhapura. “Already the locality is transforming. It has a series of new eateries where young people come for non-vegetarian [Gujarat is predominantly vegetarian] food,” says Jafri, who has bought an apartment in one of the poshest projects adjoining Juhapura called Al Burooj, a set of apartment blocks complete with an air-conditioned gym and landscaped gardens that would not be out of place in the swish financial and industrial center of Gurgaon on the outskirts of the Indian capital, Delhi, which has mushrooming condominiums everywhere. He paid about Rs 54 lakhs ($91,000) for a two-bedroom home that is about to be delivered.

Standing inside Al Burooj, shaded by the palm trees that dot the neat walking track around the more than 300 apartments, Jafri said, “Does this look like a ghetto? No one actually wants to live in a ghetto.”

I
T IS SEEING PEOPLE LIKE
S
ARESHWALA AND
J
AFRI THAT MADE
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USSAIN
Momin, 32, decide to create Gujarat's first trade networking event of Muslim entrepreneurs. In 2014, 70 companies attended the event in Ahmedabad between February 7 and 9. The event was inaugurated by Modi in an unprecedented effort to reach out to the community.

Momin's Spider Communications, which does printing and public relations, and Muslim business networking platform Ummat hit a turnover of Rs 5 crores in 2013. His firm even got the hospitality business of Vibrant Gujarat, Modi's flagship annual business summit. “Many people told me that if you try and do a Muslim business event, you will face trouble,” says Momin. “But the chief minister himself agreed to open it. He told me that every community needs to build since India desperately needs development and he was always ready to assist anyone who was building something. I have never faced any discrimination.”

One of the people who had been a great source of support for Modi was the Syedna Mohammed Burhanuddin, the late absolute spiritual leader of the Bohra Muslim community—one of the most powerful business communities in India. The Syedna, who was born in Surat, had complete control over the Bohra community (though in later years there were some dissidents opposed to his absolute rule, which included payment to his office at almost every major occasion from birth to death). He gave many sermons around the world—several of these were in Gujarat—and inevitably he met Modi several times. They seemed to have developed genuine regard for each other. On the Syedna's death, Modi tweeted a condolence message—the first he had ever done for any Muslim leader.

The Syedna's control of his flock was complete until the end. When he died at the age of nearly 100 in January 2014, there was such a crush of his devotees that 18 people died in a stampede outside his home on Malabar Hill.

The Syedna ruled many, some say most, aspects of Bohra life—including, though never openly, who the wealthy business community would support politically with money and votes.

In Bombay, I spent a couple of days walking up and down the crowded Bhendi Bazaar and Nalli Bazaar lanes, the business center of the Bohra Muslims, asking traders about the late Syedna and Modi. It was two days before the 40-day anniversary of the Syedna Burhanuddin's death. Everyone I spoke to admitted that the Syedna's writ ran large in the close-knit community—and therefore he could impact the community's support of a politician, and in fact had, in the case of Narendra Modi. “The Syedna always told us that the Bohras had one principle—strengthen the hand of those who are coming to power,” is all that Fakhruddin (who goes by one name), a partner at the glass traders' Fishfa Group, would say.

Farooq Umar at the hardware store Bellacasa is more forthcoming. “Can you tell me the name of the chief minister during the 1969 riots in Gujarat or 1992 riots in Mumbai [Bombay]? No one remembers. We need strong leadership.”

Originally from Jamnagar in Gujarat, he visits the state every year. “Why should we not support Modi? Have you seen the electricity in Gujarat? It never goes. Have you seen the roads?”

From Bombay, I went to meet Fakhruddin Vanak, one of the most prominent Bohra Muslim entrepreneurs in Chennai. Vanak, 75, is chairman of Vanjax Sales, an industrial trolley and lift manufacturer. His Vanjax Sales had a turnover of Rs 22 crore in 2013 and grew by 10 percent. The entrance to his office has a large photograph of the Syedna.

Mention Modi to him, and the smiling man with twinkling eyes says, “Let me tell you a joke first. My granddaughter once told me that India was a banana republic. I was aghast. I asked her, who told you that? She said someone told her that Rajiv Gandhi used to say ‘
iss desh ko banana hai
‘ (we need to build this country) and so, she didn't know Hindi so well, she thought it must be the same as a banana republic. I wonder if some people are thinking the same when Modi goes on about building the nation.” He gives a little guffaw at his own joke.

Then he adds seriously, “We desperately need a sense of hope and growth in this country. We support Modi, of course we do. Naturally there was an impact in the community about Syedna's interactions with Modi. I hope that Modi will become prime minister and then fulfil all his promises.”

Many Muslims—like their Hindu and other countrymen—await the fulfillment of those promises now that Modi is prime minister.

 

There was that time when Gauri Singh hired an employee. She seemed elderly but was probably younger, much younger, early middle age. A 40-year-old who could pass for 60. But in her line of work, Singh is often confused about the age of her employees.

Most of her employees are married at 13, mothers at 15.

“By the time they are 30, they are old women. By 40, they are broken. They are finished, they just cannot do hard physical labor anymore,” Singh told me about the women of The Maids' Company.

After having worked for two or three days, Singh's new employee disappeared. About a week later, Singh learned that her body had been discovered. She had been found dead—robbed of the gold chain around her neck and her earrings, her sari hiked up above her legs, blouse torn and with blue marks around her neck. There was a strong suspicion of sexual violence. “She used to live in a particularly criminal slum and by the time I got to the police, they had already cremated her and closed the file,” says Singh. “I stood in that police station horrified, and I screamed at the officer in charge. I told him that the criminals he was not stopping today—because the crimes were happening to the poor—one day they would attack someone richer. And then all hell would break loose for him.” A few months later another employee, a 19-year-old trainee desperate for money, prostituted herself for Rs 7,500 ($126) to a local man in her area. That man led her to a gang rape by 17 men. She was thrown out of the van in the early morning hours in front of her home in the slum. The community shunned her, and she was left to bleed at the back of her aunt's house. A day after the incident Singh located her in her aunt's home, but before she could help the girl, in the family's panic to hide from the social shame, they sent the girl off to the village without medical attention. Soon, Singh heard that the girl was dead.

This time, the officer listened to her patiently and then gave her some advice. “ ‘Madam,' he told me,” Singh remembers, “ ‘what kind of business are you doing? This is very dangerous for you. Next we will be coming to meet you in jail.' I didn't know what to say.”

The Maids' Company employs some of the poorest women in India, an invisible workforce from all over, in the town of Gurgaon. A satellite city of the Indian capital, its groundwater tables are hitting crisis levels even as new Jacuzzi-sporting penthouses relentlessly rise to the sky These women are trained by Singh—who studied social policy and development at the London School of Economics—and her partner, Indu Bagri, and their managers in domestic work. Cooking, cleaning, washing, taking care of children—the all-women company provides all these services for a price. They are a new and unprecedented link between the two faces of India, perpetually in contact but increasingly distant. It is a complex, delicate, even dangerous balance that Singh negotiates. To glimpse inside her business is to comprehend India's many layers, static and kinetic, those ever-darting flickers of aspiration and of social ascendancy.

I have a job where I meet entrepreneurs every day, but Singh is different from anyone I have ever met—as is her business, which some people mistake for an agency that places maids. To understand what she does and why it is important, you have to understand the origins of both Gurgaon and Gauri Singh herself. Gurgaon is the schizophrenic, dystopian soul of India—a place where everything has gone wrong and right all at the same time.

The town is also called Millennium City because it sort of combined together many villages and emerged as a city at the turn of the millennium in the state of Haryana, which borders the Indian capital, Delhi. The melting was uneven—many villages remained—and Gurgaon, it seems sometimes, lives in both the twenty-first and twentieth century at the same time.

So Gurgaon has evolved only over the last decade or so into what it is today. Before that it was Gurr-ga-wahn, as the villagers call it, in their gruff Haryanvi. “
Gaon
” in Hindi means “village,” and it was many villages then.

When I first used to go to Gurgaon in 1998 and 1999, the wide road that led to Delhi wound through a desolate, dry scrubland of emptiness, interspersed with a few pubs named after their respective milestones. A famous one was 32nd Milestone. The names accurately implied the sense of desolation beyond.

The ancient Aravalli mountain range spreads over Gurgaon. The mountains are Delhi's natural barrier from the yawning mouth of the Thar Desert just a few hundred miles away in the state of Rajasthan. From Gurgaon to the desert in Rajasthan is less than 500 miles, a drive of barely 12 hours, with a little help from the weather and traffic gods.

The Aravallis stop the sands from spreading. But not the city. Gurgaon is an altogether different beast from Delhi. It is as tall as the capital is low, as if to compensate for history, representing the tall tales it has had to tell itself about itself.

I watched this town rise—not slowly, not in hiccups of clumsy brick and tar, but all at once, a prefabricated hothouse, its dreams neatly brought in parts and assembled in a whoosh.

So it is a town of many tall towers in the middle of many small villages. We wanted so much for it to be our showcase to the world, the capitalist paradise after our years of socialism.