India’s New Gilded Age
By Dr Syed Amir
Bethesda, MD
The American humorist and essayist, Mark Twain (1835-1910), popularized the phrase, The Gilded Age, by using it as the title of one of his earlier books. It refers to the period of the late nineteenth century in America when many people quickly became rich, having accumulated incredible amount of wealth. However, the wealth was not equitably distributed as the super-rich coexisted side by side with the poor and deprived. Society glittered like gold from outside, but inside it was hollow, beset by the vast economic disparity among its people.
In a new book, The Billionaire Raj, A Journey through India’s New Gilded Age, James Crabtree, finds the current profusion of billionaires in India redolent of America’s gilded age of yore. He is a professor at the National University of Singapore and spent nearly five years as the bureau chief and reporter for the Financial Times, London, based in Mumbai, the commercial capital of India.
He asserts that India of the forties and fifties, when its founding fathers, Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, were preaching socialism and advocating adoption of an austere lifestyle, has vanished and replaced by avarice and a scramble for the acquisition of wealth. Nehru’s vision rooted in the rejection of free market economy prevailed during the first fifty years after freedom and kept the gap between rich and poor relatively stable. Now, in the new India, the country’s top one percent own almost sixty percent of its wealth. The rich live in great splendor, in luxurious palaces, within sight of shanty towns where the poor exist in wretched conditions.
The author, a journalist, travelled extensively in India and interviewed some of the billionaires. Among them, Mukesh Ambani, the richest man in the country, with a net worth of $38 billion, perhaps best personifies the new class of Indian tycoons. Indians have an average income of less than $2,000 a year, according to the author. Ambani owns a conglomerate business empire, with diverse interests, including oil and gas exploration, telecommunication and television. His residential tower, Antilia, in Mumbai is about the size of Versailles, the 17th century palace built by French emperor Louis XIV in the suburbs of Paris. The 27-storied glittering tower comprises a ballroom on the ground floor, bedecked with twenty-five tons of crystal chandeliers, a reception room on the top floor, with spectacular view of the city, leading to a huge outdoor terrace. It requires a staff of 600 round the clock. The monthly electricity bill for the Antilia is rumored to be seven million rupees.
How capitalism has radically transformed India’s societal and political landscape can be illustrated by the following statistics cited by Crabtree. In the mid-nineties, merely two-decades ago, only two Indians were featured in the celebrated Forbes list of the world’s wealthiest individuals. More recently, their number has gone up spectacularly to over 100, more than in any other country, except the US, China and Russia. The abundance of money in the hands of a few has tainted the electoral process, with black money indirectly playing a malignant role. According to best estimates, the elections in 2014 cost in excesses of $5 billion dollars, much of it unaccounted black money.
Crabtree quotes Dr Amartya Sen, Nobel Laureate, distinguished intellectual and economist, who claims “the economic reopening in India had indeed created a more vibrant economy, but one that was less equal and fair.” He did not think that “having a lot of rich people was necessarily a problem, as long as they get no special favors and pay fair taxes.” However, in common with many developing countries, only one percent Indians pay any taxes, while fewer pay any income tax on their income above Rs 10 million ($155,000).
The book comprises discrete chapters, addressing often disconnected topics that could have been written for academic or financial magazines at different times. In one of the final chapters, entitled, “The Tragedies of Modi” the author focuses on the Indian prime minister a hugely popular figure and his administration since his landslide victory in the 2014 election. In a massive public gathering of American Indians in September 2014 at Madison Square Garden, New York, he received a rock star-like treatment by a crowd that filled the hall to capacity.
In his rousing speech, Modi characterized India as having attained independence after enslavement for over a millennium, implying that the thousand-year Muslim rule, like that of the British Raj, was also an alien domination. Lately, the weight of his responsibilities as Prime Minister has made Mr Modi more cautious in what he says in his public speeches. His personal integrity, however, is unquestioned. The book quotes several sources testifying to his hard-working habits. With no family to worry about, he works fourteen-hour days and has not taken a vacation.
Modi and his Hindu nationalist party have been active in moving India’s orientation from a pluralistic, secular society, so assiduously nurtured by its leaders after independence, to one dominated by Hindutva. As part of the effort, all mention of India’s iconic figure, Jawaharlal Nehru, is being erased from the school text books, so that the new generation will remain ignorant of the contributions of the legendary Prime Minister who put India on a modern, progressive trajectory. Some insidious elements have been introduced to sully India’s venerated democratic process. The book fails to fully highlight the key role that arousal of communal passions and inflammatory anti-Muslim rhetoric, whipped up by Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), played in 2014 elections. And, they are likely to employ the same tools in the next elections in 2019.
The Billionaire Raj is a well-researched book, with an abundance of references to scholarly work and personalities. The title of the book notwithstanding, mostly of it is not about billionaires. It deals extensively with socio-economic conditions and the political state of India under the current Modi Government. Apparently, unlike Russia, the billionaires do not have much direct influence on shaping the political fortunes of the country. Finally, despite the ponderous writing style, the book will be of great appeal to those with serious interest in India’s fast emerging status as an economic powerhouse.
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