OPINION

Elephants and Rihanna and Billionaires, Oh My!

March 17, 2024

Pre-wedding celebration for Radhika Merchant and Anant Ambani.

Credit...Reliance Industries handout via Reuters


By Sonia Faleiro
Ms. Faleiro is an author from India.


Rihanna, Mark Zuckerberg, bejeweled elephants and 5,500 drones. Those were some of the highlights of what is likely the most ostentatious “pre-wedding” ceremony the modern world has ever seen.

On a long weekend in early March, members of the global elite gathered to celebrate the impending nuptials of the billionaire business titan Mukesh Ambani’s youngest son, Anant, and Radhika Merchant. Monarchs, politicians and the ultrawealthy, including Bill Gates and Ivanka Trump, descended on an oil refinery city in the western Indian state of Gujarat for an event so extravagant you’d be forgiven for thinking it was, well, a wedding. But that will take place in July. For the long windup to the big day, some of Bollywood’s biggest stars, though invited as guests, took to the stage to sing and dance in what amounted to a bending of the knee to India’s most powerful family.

Watching the event, I couldn’t help thinking of the 1911 durbar, or royal reception, when King George V was proclaimed emperor of India. Once India won its independence from Britain in 1947, it committed itself to becoming a democratic welfare state — an audacious experiment that resulted in what is now the world’s largest democracy. But in advance of this year’s general election, expected to begin in April, the Ambani-Merchant matrimonial extravaganza shows us where true power in India now lies: with a handful of people whose untrammeled wealth and influence has elevated them to the position of India’s shadow leaders.

It’s difficult to imagine the Ambani-Merchant wedding event in an India that isn’t ruled by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. It’s true that the Ambanis have been wealthy for years now and that accusations of favorable treatment from government authorities are not unique to this family or the Modi government. But no other prime minister in India’s history has been so openly aligned with big business, and never before has the concentration of wealth been more apparent. India’s richest 1 percent now own more than 40 percent of the country’s wealth, according to Oxfam. The country has the world’s largest number of poor, at 228.9 million. And according to a newly published study looking at 92 low- and middle-income countries, India had the third-highest percentage of “zero food” children — babies between 6 months and 23 months old who had gone a day or more without food other than breast milk at the time they were surveyed. Oxfam has described this new India as the “survival of the richest.”

For the uberwealthy, this presents a no-holds-barred opportunity to exert their power and influence. In 2017, Mr. Modi introduced a fund-raising mechanism called “electoral bonds” to allow unlimited anonymous donations to political parties. In the five years that followed, the prime minister’s Bharatiya Janata Party received $635 million in contributions through such bonds, 5.5 times as much as its closest rival, the Congress Party. The 2019 Indian general elections cost $8.6 billion, surpassing the estimated $6.5 billion spent on the 2016 U.S. presidential and congressional elections.

Analysis by three independent media organizations in India published on March 14 revealed that a company called Qwik Supply Chains purchased bonds in the scheme worth $50 million. One of the company’s three directors, reporters later uncovered, is also a director at several subsidiaries of Reliance, Mukesh Ambani’s mega-firm. A spokesperson for Reliance said that Qwik is not a Reliance subsidiary and did not respond to further questioning from Reuters. The Indian Supreme Court has since struck down the electoral bond mechanism, calling it unconstitutional, but the delay in addressing the matter has most likely come too late to change the outcome of the forthcoming election, which is widely considered all but certain to go in Mr. Modi’s favor.

And judging by the omnipresence of Mr. Modi’s image — the state-funded publicity exercises focused on exalting him, the constant advertisements in newspapers and on TV, his image plastered on billboards and life-size cutouts everywhere from train stations to public parks — even those who wish to vote for other candidates might be forgiven for thinking there are none. With the help of a small group of business tycoons, led by Mr. Ambani, the prime minister has dominated the Indian media landscape. Since Mr. Modi came to power, Mr. Ambani has invested heavily in the media and now owns more than 70 outlets, including India’s biggest media conglomerate, which are followed by 800 million weekly viewers. Many of these outlets have been trumpeting Mr. Modi’s credentials and heaping praise on him.

Mr. Ambani has been relentless in expressing his gratitude to Mr. Modi for working in step with Reliance. In January, Mr. Ambani hailed Mr. Modi as the “most successful prime minister in India’s history.” Later that month, the tycoon’s family traveled to Ayodhya for the inauguration of the Ram Mandir temple complex, which is being built on the highly contentious grounds of a functioning mosque that was destroyed by a Hindu mob in 1992. The construction of the Ram Mandir is the epitome of Mr. Modi’s tenure, which has been defined by a violent and divisive Hindu majoritarianism. Mr. Ambani donated $300,000 toward the temple costs.

Mr. Modi was reportedly not present during the Ambani wedding event, leading to speculation on social media that he wanted to avoid further accusations of cronyism in an election year. But his hand was evident. Anant Ambani told the press that he in part chose his family’s hometown Jamnagar as his pre-wedding venue to honor the prime minister’s “Wed in India” call for young Indians to marry at home rather than abroad. Jamnagar is the location of Mr. Ambani’s oil refinery, which is the largest in the world. And in a brazen misuse of public resources, the government temporarily turned the city’s small domestic airport into a designated international airport, clearing the way for guests to land their private aircrafts. The government airport was expanded, staff numbers were increased, and the Indian Air Force deployed additional military personnel — all in the service of one event for one family.

Some Indians viewed the arrival of the world’s elite on their shores as a sign of their country’s growing prominence in the world. The occasion was treated as a national event, with “breaking news” and live feeds of the arrival and then departure of every celebrity; of the more than 1,000 guests who stayed in luxury tents and were provided with makeup artists and sari drapers and were reportedly served 2,500 dishes; of the lion-shaped diamond brooch on Anant Ambani’s suit and his Richard Mille wristwatch, worth an estimated $1 million, which even Mr. Zuckerberg appeared to covet.

But what viewers saw that long weekend in March wasn’t India at all, but the playground of an oligarch. The festivities took place weeks before a national election, at a time when India’s democracy is teetering on an edge. Violence against Muslims, Christians and Dalits has been normalized. The harassment of journalists, the incarceration of human rights activists and police violence against protesters has all but wrenched the country from the path chosen by its founding leaders, who wished the people of India to enjoy a “sovereign, socialist, secular, democratic republic.” In 2022, Freedom House, the nonprofit organization that tracks democratic governance, downgraded India from “free” to “partly free.” This status remains unchanged.

The Ambanis are entitled to spend their money on whatever they want (except, perhaps, on electoral bonds). And this latest celebration, while lavish, wasn’t entirely atypical in India, where weddings are viewed as an opportunity to demonstrate status. The giddy young couple at the center of the spectacle are charming: Ms. Merchant is a trained classical dancer; her fiancé is fond of animals. It would be churlish not to celebrate their happiness.

But if the 1911 Delhi durbar was a symbol of British imperial power, then the Ambani pre-wedding event in Jamnagar symbolized the rise of Mr. Modi’s oligarchs. And if this small group of people are thriving in their symbiotic relationship with the Indian prime minister, it comes at the cost of the nation’s experiment with building a democratic welfare state. That’s nothing to celebrate.

Sonia Faleiro is a writer and the founder of the literary mentorship program South Asia Speaks. Her most recent book is “The Good Girls: An Ordinary Killing.”