The Liberal India celebrates diversity—geographical, ethnic, cultural, linguistic and political. But we’ve always been deeply defensive about an unpleasant form of diversity in our society—the gulf between the rich and the poor. Drawing attention to it is treated as defamation of the nation, especially if the attention is international.
The phenomenon dates back at least to Satyajit Ray, who took Indian cinema to Western viewers, and whose early work (Pather Panchali, 1955, Mahanagar, 1963) portrayed poverty and unemployment, rural and urban, with deep compassion. Otherwise, sensible commentators of the Sixties raged that it was poverty porn designed to trash India. Ironically, Pather Panchali was not universally acclaimed in the West. At Cannes, François Truffaut walked out of the screening, complaining that he did not want to see a film about peasants eating with their hands.
India’s rich-poor gap has been vast since colonial times and vastly uncomfortable-making for the rich. Following the pandemic, it’s positively yawning. The headlines this week celebrate Gautam Adani, now the world’s third richest person and the first Asian to find a place on the global victory stand, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index and Forbes. But the big story is not that Adani has won the bronze, but that his elevation, while millions fall back into poverty, stretches the distance between the rich and the poor to astronomical scales.
It’s not Adani’s fault. That’s how money works. The Arthashastra says, “Just as elephants are needed to catch elephants, so does one need wealth to capture more wealth” (9.4.27 in LN Rangarajan’s translation, Penguin Classics, 1992). Elephantine people—businessmen with deep pockets and proximity to political power—did extraordinarily well during the pandemic, which shook global trade. But their success and its celebration were embarrassing because the majority, who operate with far less capital for small margins or work at suddenly vulnerable jobs, were hurt badly. Lack of state support during the pandemic pushed families into poverty, gutted small and medium-scale businesses which had survived the blow of demonetisation, and employment is now in free fall.
The government’s rhetoric on the economy says otherwise, though its earlier reluctance to release employment figures drew suspicion. But on Wednesday, the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister released a report titled ‘Competitiveness Roadmap for India@100’, which admits to low labour participation and rising inequality. The devil is in the details. The participation of women in the workforce, which has always been low in India, is now abysmal. Besides, unemployment figures show not only a lack of jobs but also fewer people seeking work. While Gen Z in prosperous countries have stopped saving until their economic future looks more certain, poor and lower middle-class Indians, especially women, are opting out of the job market, perceiving it to have no future. Ray’s Mahanagar was about a woman who steps out to work because of financial pressures on the family. Today, she would stay home.
The intensification of inequality in India has drawn international attention since last year. The ‘World Inequality Report 2022’, anchored by Thomas Piketty, among others, concluded that the top 1% of Indians own 22% of national income. The figure was 57% for the top 10%. The bottom 50% owns only 13%. The report complained that the release of inadequate inequality data for three years by the government was an impediment.
Oxfam’s India Supplement 2022, ‘Inequality Kills’, highlighted that the incomes of 84% of Indian households had shrunk during the pandemic, but the number of Indian billionaires grew from 102 to 142. It noted that a wealth tax of just 1% on the richest 98 households could fund the government’s Ayushman Bharat health insurance scheme for over seven years. The same tax on the richest 10% could fund all state welfare, including education, paid leave, and pensions for all.
This isn’t poverty porn. It’s insurance for the rich, who need political and social stability—more so than others—to stay afloat. Extreme inequality may be sustainable in welfare economies, where unemployment, disability or disease does not necessarily spell penury. But without a welfare net, people get desperate. Unless something else holds them in check.
The Arthashatra is a meticulous text, laying down the rules for everything that’s government, from urban planning to the standardisation of weights and measures (it even corrects monetarily for oil sticking to the interior of a measuring vessel), but it does not highlight inequality.
Perhaps it’s because absolute monarchies like the Mauryan Empire deter insurrection—though Louis XVI would have disagreed as he went under the guillotine. Class matters everywhere, and in India, the additional matrix of caste, community and faith keeps people in their place. But the tensile strength of this framework may not be equal to an existential threat, which is what dwindling incomes and no pensions means since home economics is now based almost completely on the money. Would a shakeup benefit the existentially threatened? Not necessarily, but it would certainly benefit those who have elephants, the better to catch other elephants with.
Pratik Kanjilal
Editor of The India Cable
(Tweets @pratik_k)