As Indian media covered the most expensive wedding in history last week, the Ambani family affair became a national Rorschach test. Some saw it as a stunning demonstration of India’s growing wealth and influence. Others saw it as an indictment of its lopsided development; the cost of the wedding, widely rumored to exceed $500 million, would dwarf the annual education budgets of several small Indian states.
Here, across the river, in the low alleys and noisy boulevards of Mumbai’s working class, the most common reaction to this extravagance was not resentment at Ambani but frustration – at a system that catered to the whims of an exalted few but rarely met the needs of the many.
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Naushad Ahmed, A burly middle-class mechanic who owns a car repair shop on a flood-prone stretch of LBS Road wondered how the city could deploy resources for Ambani’s wedding without tackling basic infrastructure. He wanted potholes filled. He implored a solution to the knee-deep floodwaters that ruined businesses every monsoon and turned lanes into canals of floating garbage.
“Look, Ambani has earned his money, and he has the right to spend it on his own children,” Ahmed said, echoing an oft-heard refrain. Mumbai, after all, was a city that embraced hard work and celebrated success. “But it’s no surprise that the government is making it easy for him,” Ahmed continued. “If the government did as much for us as it did for him, then things could really get better.”
The four-month nuptials, which ended Monday, began in March with a pre-wedding ceremony attended by Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Rihanna. Then, in May, a yacht cruise on the Mediterranean for 800 guests. The festivities culminated in a lavish party at Mumbai’s Jio World Convention Center, a gleaming 18-acre development developed by Anant Ambani’s father, Mukesh, who took partial control of his father Dhirubhai’s company, Reliance Industries, in 1981 and built it into a $250 billion empire.
On Saturday night, Prime Minister Narendra Modi came to give his blessings. Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson was seen dancing to bhangra music. Anant Ambani’s groomsmen, including Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan, took pictures with the $200,000 Audemars Piguet watches they had received as a gift from the host. And a viral video showed a scantily clad Kim Kardashian strolling near Mamata Banerjee, the matronly doyenne of West Bengal politics.
The influx of guests was so great that during the pre-wedding in March, the Indian Air Force ordered round-the-clock operations and built new roads, taxiways and immigration counters at a dual-use airfield. Last weekend, Mumbai police closed roads near the wedding venue, and travelers complained on social media that flights out of Mumbai International Airport were delayed by a flurry of private jet traffic.
In tribute to public service, the Ambanis have thrown large parties for 51,000 ordinary people in Gujarat in recent months. In a Mumbai suburb, they held a mass wedding for 50 poor couples, who were given gold jewelry. Reliance, the family-owned conglomerate with stakes in oil, telecommunications, media and retail, billed the sprawling event as a celebration of India’s success. “The presence of esteemed people showcases India’s economic, political, intellectual and scientific prowess,” the company said in a statement to Reuters.
But for many in Mumbai and elsewhere, the contrasting images – of international VIPs paying tribute to Ambani and of strained public infrastructure – have illuminated a deeper reality of India today. Mumbai’s LBS Road is not the only one that has been flooded in recent weeks. Monsoon rains have paralyzed New Delhi, destroyed 12 bridges in Bihar state and even torn the roof off an airport terminal in the country’s capital, prompting angry commentary on TV talk shows and opinion pages.
Jayati Ghosh, an economist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, said the meteoric rise of Ambani and the rest of India’s 200 billionaires, who collectively own nearly $1 trillion, according to Forbes, could unbalance India’s development at a time when other economic indicators are lagging.
Until recently, China invested nearly a quarter of its GDP in infrastructure at its peak, but India hovered around 2%, Ghosh said. Meanwhile, Brazil and South Africa, two other developing countries with extreme wealth disparities, invest 17% and 15% of their GDP, respectively, in social services, compared with 9% for India, according to the World Bank and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Although Modi has been widely praised for emphasizing infrastructure and social spending compared with previous administrations, he will have to make up for years of underinvestment.
The bigger problem here, according to Ghosh, lies in the misplaced priorities of the Indian ruling class.
“Being able to hire Rihanna or Justin Bieber is supposed to be a sign of India’s power, but it’s not,” she said. “Why worry about flooded roads when you can fly in a helicopter?”
But near the ceremony site, many residents did not envy the clan often called “India’s first family.” Sweaty welders said they had sold contractors 50 tons of steel just to build the event’s canopies and made a lot of money in the process. Outside the gleaming Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Center on Dhirubhai Ambani Square, the streets smelled of citrus blossoms. A group of young students huddled under a tree, reveling in the celebrity sightings and the $38 they earned working as caterers the night before.
Dev Kanojiya, a 20-year-old college student, said he aced the interview after proving he was over 5 feet 4 inches tall, could speak confidently and had a basic knowledge of Western alcoholic beverages. He caught glimpses of the Kardashian sisters and professional wrestler John Cena, but he was most delighted, he said, to see the cavernous reception hall decorated in a theme of his hometown of Varanasi and to see the foreign guests exposed to Hindustani classical music and traditional Hindu wedding rituals.
“Ambani was not spending all this money just for his son. He was presenting India in a different way to the world, showcasing Indian culture,” Kanojiya said enthusiastically. “We grew up hearing that India was a very poor country and we couldn’t afford these things. But today you see how it is being done and who will come.”
Across the river, Ahmed the mechanic and his neighbour Shareef Khan, a locksmith, were watching a stretch of LBS Road where shallow puddles were forming again in the rain. Just then, a bus hit a pothole with such force that all the heads on the street corner turned, thinking it was an accident.
“I know why the roads are bad here,” Khan said. “It’s because of politics.”