Across river from lavish Indian wedding, frustration and flooded streets

As Indians consumed the wall-to-wall media coverage this past week of the most expensive wedding in history, the Ambani family affair has become a national Rorschach test. Some saw an awe-inspiring showcase for India’s growing affluence and its rising clout. Others called it an indictment of its lopsided development; the cost of the wedding, which was widely reported to exceed $500 million, would eclipse the yearly education budget of several small Indian states.

Here on the far side of the river, in the low-lying alleys and honking boulevards of working-class Mumbai, the most common reaction to the extravaganza was not resentment toward Ambani but frustration — about a system that catered to the whims of the exalted few yet rarely delivered for the many.

Naushad Ahmed, a burly, middle-class mechanic who owns an auto repair shop on a flood-prone stretch of LBS Road, wondered how the city could deploy resources for the Ambani wedding but fail to tackle basic infrastructure. He wanted potholes to be filled. He begged for a solution to the knee-deep floodwater that ruined businesses during every monsoon and turned alleys into canals of floating trash.

“Look, Ambani earned his money, and it’s his right to spend it on his own children,” Ahmed said, echoing a commonly heard refrain. Mumbai, after all, was a city that understood hard work and celebrated success. “But it’s no surprise that the government makes everything easy for him,” Ahmed continued. “If the government did as much for us as they did for him, then things could really be great.”

The four-month nuptials, which ended Monday, kick-started in March with a pre-wedding ceremony attended by Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Rihanna. Then came a Mediterranean yacht trip for 800 guests in May. The festivities culminated with the blowout bash at the Jio World Convention Center in Mumbai, a gleaming 18½-acre project developed by Anant Ambani’s father Mukesh, who took partial control of his father Dhirubhai’s business, Reliance Industries, in 1981 and turned it into an empire worth $250 billion today.

On Saturday night, Prime Minister Narendra Modi stopped by to offer his blessings. Former British prime minister Boris Johnson was seen shuffling to bhangra music. Anant Ambani’s groomsmen, including the Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan, took pictures with the $200,000 Audemars Piguet watches that they had received as gifts from the host. And a viral video captured a scantily clad Kim Kardashian milling near Mamata Banerjee, the matronly doyenne of West Bengal politics.

The influx of guests has been so great that during the pre-wedding in March, the Indian Air Force ordered around-the-clock operations and built new roads, taxiways and immigration counters at a dual-use airfield. This past 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 a nod to public service, the Ambanis in recent months have thrown large feasts for 51,000 ordinary residents in Gujarat. In a Mumbai suburb, they arranged a mass wedding for 50 poor couples, who received gold jewelry. Reliance, the family conglomerate that has holdings spanning oil, telecommunications, media and retail, has framed the sprawling affair as a celebration of India’s success. “The presence of esteemed individuals highlights India’s economic, political, intellectual, and scientific prowess,” the company said in a statement to Reuters.

But to many in Mumbai and beyond, the contrasting images — of international VIPs paying respects to Ambani and of straining public infrastructure — pointed to a deeper truth about India today. It wasn’t just LBS Road in Mumbai that was flooded in recent weeks. Monsoon rains have paralyzed New Delhi, snapped 12 bridges in Bihar state and even ruptured the roof of an airport terminal in the nation’s capital, sparking angry commentary on debate shows and op-ed pages.

Jayati Ghosh, an economist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, said the meteoric rise of Ambani and the rest of India’s 200 billionaires, who collectively hold nearly $1 trillion, according to Forbes, could unbalance India’s development at a time when other economic metrics are lagging.

Until recently, China invested nearly a quarter of its GDP on infrastructure at its peak, but India has hovered around 2 percent, Ghosh said. Meanwhile, Brazil and South Africa, two other developing countries with extreme wealth disparities, invest 17 and 15 percent of their GDP, respectively, on social services compared with India’s 9 percent, according to the World Bank and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

While Modi has been widely praised for emphasizing infrastructure and social spending compared to previous administrations, he will have to make up for years of underinvestment.

The bigger issue here, Ghosh argued, was the misplaced priorities of India’s ruling class.

“The fact that you can hire Rihanna or Justin Bieber is supposed to be a sign of India’s strength, but it’s not,” she said. “Why worry about waterlogged roads when you can fly in a helicopter?”

But near the wedding venue, many residents didn’t begrudge the clan often called India’s “first family.” Sweaty welders said they sold contractors 50 tons of steel just to build the event’s awnings and made good money in the process. Outside the gleaming Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Center at Dhirubhai Ambani Square, streets smelled like citrus blossoms. A group of young students huddled under a tree, reveling in the celebrities they saw and the $38 they made working as caterers the night before.

Dev Kanojiya, a stylish 20-year-old college student, said he passed an interview to get the job after proving he was over 5-foot-4, could speak with poise and possessed a basic knowledge of Western liquor. He caught a glimpse of the Kardashian sisters and the professional wrestler John Cena, but he was delighted above all, he said, to see the cavernous event hall decorated in the theme of Varanasi, his hometown, and for the foreign guests to be exposed to classical Hindustani music and traditional Hindu marriage rituals.

Ambani “was not just doing all this spending for his son. He was presenting India in a different way to the world, showcasing India’s culture,” Kanojiya said excitedly. “We grew up hearing India is a very poor country and we can’t afford these things. But today, you see how this is done and who will come.”

Back across the river, Ahmed the mechanic and his neighbor Shareef Khan, a locksmith, stood surveying a stretch of LBS Road where shallow pools were forming again as rain began to fall. At that moment, a bus hit a pothole with such force that every head on the street corner swiveled, thinking there was an accident.

“I know why the roads here are bad,” Khan said. “Politics.”