Author: Rochelle Almeida
In his review of her autobiography Daughter of the East, in The New York Review of Books, Ian Buruma describes Pakistan’s late Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto as leading “a bi-cultural life”—growing up in a doting, sheltered family and receiving her early education in English at the Convent of Jesus and Mary in Karachi. He writes:
This was the same Miss Bhutto who later went to Radcliffe, where she savored the delights of peppermint ice cream, apple cider, Joan Baez, and peace marches…. Let us, for the sake of simplicity, call this stylish young woman the Radcliffe Benazir.1
But then Buruma comments on the Oxford Benazir:
…who moved on to Oxford, her father’s alma mater, where she drove a sports car, sharpened her wit at the Oxford Union, and was squired around town by dashing young men in velvet jackets.2
The Oxford Benazir was close friends with Teresa, an Anglican minister’s daughter from Essex. It was Benazir who introduced Teresa to a certain Philip May who became her husband and supported his future wife’s political rise to stardom as the country’s Prime Minister while becoming an investment banker in London.3 But Buruma tells us that there is yet another Miss Bhutto:
This is the Benazir, sitting adoringly at her father’s feet at the family estate in Larkana, listening to his tales of heroic ancestors, “directly traceable to the Muslim invasion of India in 712 AD.” One of these heroes, her great-grandfather, defied the British by taking an English lover….We might call this romantic lady the Larkana Benazir.4
This dichotomized woman—traditionally Pakistani Islamic on the one hand and sophisticatedly Westernized on the idea as she romped from one international metropolis to the next—epitomizes the globalized lives led by the thousands of privileged South Asians across the Indian subcontinent who are often referred to as ‘transnationals’. Susan Koshy introduces the term ‘neo-diaspora’ to describe them and explains: “The ‘neo’ in neo-diaspora locates the South Asian diaspora’s origins in the modern period and highlights its embeddedness in the three major world-historical forces that have shaped global modernity: capitalism, colonialism and nationalism.”5 She differentiates the South Asian diaspora from that of traditional ones as defined by both William Safran6 and Robin Cohen7, by stating that unlike say Jewish immigration to America, South Asians were never forced to migrate.
I, however, prefer the term used by Gita Rajan and Shailja Sharma—‘New Cosmopolitans’. They define this segment of South Asians in the West as “people who blur the edges of home and abroad by continuously moving physically, culturally and socially, and by selectively using globalized forms of travel, communication, languages and technology to position themselves in motion between at least two homes, sometimes even through dual forms of citizenship, but always in multiple locations (through travel, or through cultural, racial, or linguistic modalities).8 They continue: “One way of understanding this class of people may be through the metaphor popularized by Manuel Castells of the ‘network’ that describes the newest form of globalization.”9 Indeed, these elite, highly-educated, wealthy, privileged urbanites from South Asia, have converged in recent times, on global metropolises such as London and New York to gain notoriety, not as immigrants of past generations had done, by dint of hard work and slow upward mobility as they battled and vanquished the forces of racial prejudice and color consciousness, but often through shady activities most often associated with enormous wealth and the dubious methods by which it was acquired.
By no means the only member in her family privileged by the kind of wealth that bought her access to the most worldly of pleasures, Buruma tells us that Benazir’s father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (also an Oxonian who read Law at Christ Church College and was called to the bar at Lincoln’s Inn), “spent his last years in filthy jails, his only comforts his favorite cologne and the odd Havana cigar”.10 Her brother Shahnavaz (known to the family as ‘Shah’), is described by Buruma as “a spoiled and handsome playboy—Swiss school, frequent attendance at Regine’s in Paris, flat in Monte Carlo” who died, while on a family holiday in Cannes, of poisoning. Buruma speaks of Shah’s widow as his “Afghan wife who sounds an even worse brat than her late husband… (and) was recently found by a French court to have been criminally negligent in letting Shah die.”11
During the years that Benazir’s sworn enemy General Zia-ul-Haq had imposed martial law in Pakistan, ruled as a virtual dictator and hanged her father Zulfikar following a sham trial, fearing for her own life, Benazir had fled Pakistan and remained in exile—not in Dubai, that mecca for South Asia’s ne’er-do-wells, but in London. Indeed between 1984 and 1986, Benazir was taken under the wing of affluent Pakistanis who had made London their handy bolt hole. It was during these years, while in exile in London, that she found herself under the protection of left-wing Pakistani expatriates such as historian and public intellectual Tariq Ali, whom she had first met when he helped her with her speeches for the Oxford Union.12 Fiercely loyal to the person they perceived as the new and only hope for a democratic Pakistan, expatriate Pakistanis shielded Benazir loyally against criticism directed at her late father that had inevitably began to rub off on her at precisely the same time that she had begun to toy with the idea of initiating a serious career in politics herself. This segment of wealthy, influential, business-minded (and somewhat shady) Pakistanis have been well-depicted by the Pakistani-British writer Hanif Kureishi in his novel My Beautiful Laundrette in the character of slimy Salim who deals in drugs and threatens his associates with physical violence if they ‘grass’ on him.13 In later years, after she had served two turbulent terms as Pakistan’s Prime Minister and when her husband Asif Ali Zardari (nicknamed Mr. Ten Percent for the 10% kickbacks he received on every government contract he doled out) had charges of corruption brought against him in Pakistani courts, it was in London that he too found refuge and escaped extradition.
Indeed London was not always the haven of choice for those escaping political scrutiny. In the late 1980s and into the 1990s, when organized crime was running rampant in the Indian metropolis of Bombay, India’s underworld dons such as Dawood Ibrahim and his deputy Chotta Rajan had ‘absconded’ allegedly first to Karachi, then to Dubai and Kuala Lumpur where, following decades of underworld activity, their stashes of undisclosed wealth lay waiting to be squandered.14 The arrival of cell phones and the ability to change SIM cards at the drop of a hat made it impossible to trace the whereabouts of India’s most wanted criminals. They flew easily from one international hideout to the next, their list of felonies including kidnapping, extortion and murder. When cooperation with Interpol eventually led to their exposure, they were often found in countries such as Malaysia and Nigeria, biding their time, incognito or under aliases.
That scenario has undergone a sea change. Today’s white-collar criminals from South Asia have reached the Western world and it is to glamourous global metropolitan cities that they escape often abusing the legal systems to facilitate anonymity and delay retribution. Take the case of India’s billionaire playboy, Vijay Mallya, founder-owner of Kingfisher Breweries and the erstwhile Kingfisher Airlines. According to India’s Business Today news magazine, in 2016, the tycoon defrauded a number of Indian banks to the tune of Rs. 9 crores (approximately $1,362,000.00—one million, three hundred and sixty-two thousand dollars). He misled them into granting him what the banks now term ‘bad loans’ and proceeded to embezzle the money to finance his five-star lifestyle—yachts, real estate, antiquities. Prior to his fugitive days, in 2004, he became notorious, for instance, for purchasing the sword of Mysore’s Muslim ruler Tipu Sultan at auction for a whopping Rs. 1.5 crores ($227,000—two hundred and twenty-seven thousand dollars) and then ‘returning’ it to India, where, he felt, it rightfully belonged. According to Business India, “Kingfisher Airlines had relied on…security pledges,… (and) Kingfisher’s own brand value, a promised infusion of equity funds and a projected return to profit by the airline…”15 However, by the time the fraud was exposed and before any charges were filed against him, Mallya had fled from India—not to some obscure Middle Eastern emirate but to London where he remains in exile.
Mallya is a Member of the Rajya Sabha (India’s Upper House of Parliament) and is also, simultaneously, to be found on the electoral role in the UK as a result of the 30-acre country estate he owns in the village of Tewin in Hertfordshire, within easy commuting distance of London. He allegedly purchased it for Rs. 100 crores (approximately $15 million) from British Formula One racing champion Lewis Hamilton. He also owns a posh London flat on Baker Street just behind Madame Tussaud’s waxworks. Ownership of valuable real estate in the UK and possible links with a helpful network of expatriate Indians with similarly deep pockets, has enabled Mallya to dodge punishment. By the time the consortium of Indian banks discovered the fraud and turned to Indian courts to demand his extradition, it was made known that, in the UK, Mallya holds residency—or ILR (Indefinite Leave to Remain) status. As a British resident, he has the legal right to fight extradition cases brought against him—which he has done with impunity. In a case that was brought into the Westminster Magistrates Court in London late last year, Mallya was named as a respondent in a trial that began with the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), arguing on behalf of the Indian government. CPA barrister Mark Summers appeared on behalf of the Indian government that was represented at the hearings by a four-member Central Bureau of Investigation and Enforcement Directorate (ED) team.16
Mallya has declared that the allegations made against him “are false, fabricated and baseless.”17 According to a December 2017 report in Business Today news magazine, “Mallya, who has been out on bail since Scotland Yard executed an extradition warrant in April this year, will be in the dock for the duration of the trial scheduled to end on December 14th. A judgment in the case, being presided over by Judge Emma Louise Arbuthnot, is unlikely until early next year.”18 However, according to a newspaper report in India’s Economic Times dated January 12, 2018, the extradition trial remains inconclusive as the defense has yet to complete its arguments.19
As is clearly evident, South Asia’s modern moghuls—whether they be Bhuttos, Zardaris or Mallyas—are able to buy legal counsel in Western countries that loathe to extradite defenders of lawsuits without following due process because petitioners make the argument that they will be harassed and abused while in Indian/Pakistani custody. By taking advantage of Western legal systems and the network of human rights organizations that bring up issues of alleged ill-treatment of convicted criminals in South Asian jails, such individuals are able to escape the arms of the law and buy time. Meanwhile, even while he is on trial for corruption in India, Mallya has the legal right to petition the British government for citizenship. If and when this is granted to him, the case for his extradition to India will become more complicated.
As if the Mallya scam were inadequate, in January of this year, India was rocked by the scandal of a gigantic fraud perpetrated on one of its nationalized banks, Punjab National Bank. The chief culprit was a diamond-merchant named Nirav Modi. The Belgian-born entrepreneur is no relative of the current Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, but there is little doubt that the two are well-connected socially. Filial and regional loyalties are fierce in India and they reside in the fact that both Modis are Gujaratis, i.e. owning cultural affiliation to the state of Gujarat, speaking the same mother-tongue (Gujarati) and connected by the entrepreneurial spirit that took a mere ‘chaiwala’ (tea-boy), as Narendra Modi was derogatorily termed by his political opponents in India, from the humblest echelons of society to his country’s most coveted office. Together with his second-in-command Mehul Choksi, the chief protagonist in the bank fraud scandal, Nirav Modi, disappeared overnight.
There is every reason to believe that Modi was tipped off by a senior government official, acting on behalf of the current Indian administration to send him swiftly into self-exile. Except that he did not flee to the usual hidey-holes—Karachi, Dubai or Hong Kong–where he would remain incognito. Nirav Modi came to the US—to New York, to be specific, where his presence was both flamboyant and fascinating to the local Indian press. Indeed it was in a luxury hotel—allegedly on the 36th floor of the J.W. Marriott’s Essex House in Manhattan overlooking Central Park–that he had booked a suite for a solid three months at the rate of Rs. 75,000 ($1,500.00—one and a half thousand dollars) a night for a total of Rs. 67.5 lakhs ($103,000.00—one hundred and three thousand).20 These figures are staggering; but they are a drop in the ocean when compared to the extent of fraud committed upon his bank—estimated at Rs. 11,300 crores ($1,710,695,700.00—one billion, seven hundred and ten million, six hundred and ninety-five thousand, seven hundred dollars)—a king’s ransom upon which he now sits—leaving the Indian economy reeling from this shock to its system.
Like Benazir who was the epitome of the Pakistani transnational from South Asia in the West, Vijay Mallya and Nirav Modi are the Indian equivalents of the same type of personage. In trying to place them within neatly categorized pigeon-holes, the contemporary ethnographer must abandon the usual images of starving, disease-ridden, war-ravaged immigrants that have romanticized the immigrant landscape in the West. In 1883, in her poem, “The New Colossus”, Emma Lazarus had described the detritus of the Western world that, like so much flotsam and jetsam, had begun to crowd American shores:
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”21
The New Cosmopolitan settlers from South Asia in London and New York are neither tired nor poor. But, in the fact that some have had their Indian passports revoked, they are indeed homeless—or at least stateless. And in the sense that some of them are wanted for international bank fraud, tax evasion, undisclosed wealth and money-laundering, remain swamped by lawsuits, must constantly watch their backs and find it impossible to roam, despite their colossal wealth, as free men do, they are indeed “tempest-tost”.
Footnotes
1 Buruma, Ian: “The Double Life of Benazir Bhutto. Review in The New York Review of Books, March 2, 1989, of Benazir Bhutto’s autobiography Daughter of the East (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989).
3 According to “Theresa May”, Biography in Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theresa_May from “Profile: Theresa May’s husband Philip”. BBC News. 13 July 2016. Accessed April 18, 2018.
5 Koshy, Susan: “Theorizing a Neo-Diaspora”. The Making of a Neo-Diaspora. Eds. Susan Koshy and R. Radhakrishnan. (New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2008).
6 Quoted by Koshy, Susan, op. cit., p. 4 from William Safran, “Diasporas in Modern Societies—Myths of Homeland and Return”. Diaspora 1(1), 1991, p. 84.
7 Quoted by Koshy, Susan, op. cit., p. 4 from Robin Cohen, Global Diasporas—An Introduction. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997).
8 Rajan, Gita and Shailja Sharma: New Cosmopolitans: South Asians in the US. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), pp. 2-3.
9 Quoted by Rajan and Sharma, op. cit., p. 3 from Castells, Manuel: The Rise of the Network Society. (London: Basil Blackwell, 1996).
10 Buruma, Ian, op. cit., loc. Cit.
13 Kureishi, Hanif: Screenplay. My Beautiful Laundrette, 1985.
14 Anonymous (HT Correspondent): “Chotta Rajan vs Dawood: Mumbai Underworld’s Bloodiest Fight.” Hindustan Times (New Delhi, October 27, 2015). https://www.hindustantimes.com/india/dawood-ibrahim-and-chhota-rajan-a-tale-of-bitter-rivalry/story-3xC8oC5T22su0R7AC6qzyI.html Accessed April 19, 2018.
15 Anonymous, “Vijay Mallya misled banks and misused money, has a case of fraud to answer: Prosecution to UK court.” Business India (New Delhi, December 5, 2017). Accessed April 18. 2018.
19 Anonymous: “Mallya Extradition Trial Hearing Inconclusive” The Economic Times. January 12, 2018. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/vijay-mallya-in-uk-court-for-hearing-in-extradition-case/articleshow/62461746.cms Accessed April 18, 2018.
20 Rajghatta, Sidhartha and Chidanand: “Nirav Modi Holed Up in Luxury NY hotel, Govt moves to block funds and flight.” The Times of India (Bombay, India, February 17, 2018). https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/nirav-holed-up-in-luxury-ny-hotel-govt-moves-to-block-funds-flight/articleshow/62954136.cms Accessed April 18, 2018.
21 Lazarus, Emma: “The New Colossus”. Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46550/the-new-colossus Accessed April 18, 2018.