If anything, the undignified display of wealth by a billionaire during and in the run-up to a recently held family wedding shows how vanity clouds the capacity of most Indian billionaires to recognise the stark contemporaneity of their folies de grandeur, inequality, and abject poverty. Economists Nitin Kumar Bharti, Lucas Chancel, Thomas Piketty, and Anmol Somanchi, in their March 2024 study titled “Income and Wealth Inequality in India, 1922-2023: The Rise of the Billionaire Raj”, inform us that in 2022-23, the top 1% income and wealth shares were 22.6% and 40.1%, respectively.
A case of gross disproportion
In real terms, the top 1% possesses an average of ₹54 million in wealth (40 times the average Indian) while the bottom 50% and the middle 40% hold ₹0.17 million (0.1 times the national average) and ₹0.96 million (0.7 times the national average), respectively. If this was not stunning enough, the wealthiest 10,000 individuals (out of 920 million Indian adults) own an average of ₹22.6 billion in wealth which is a mind-boggling 16,763 times the average Indian.
Even more shocking is that nearly 90% of the billionaire wealth in 2022-23 was held by upper castes. Other Backward Classes owned less than 10% and Scheduled Castes a meagre 2.6% while Scheduled Tribes found no representation among the wealthiest Indians.
As for abject poverty, although the NITI Aayog reported that 135 million Indians successfully escaped multidimensional poverty between 2016 and 2021, of which nutrition is a component indicator, a report titled “The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World” (released on July 24 by a consortium of international organisations including the World Health Organization) stated that in 2022, a whopping 56.5% Indians were unable to afford “a healthy diet”, the average cost of which for Asia was “4.20 PPP [purchasing power parity] dollars” per person per day.
To be specific, almost 790 million people in India are not in a position to spend ₹350 daily on healthy food. In this context, the reportedly massive $600 million (about ₹5,000 crore) price tag of the wedding mentioned above may be contrasted with ₹1,271 crore (about $152 million) a leading business group (which the family referred to above owns) spent on corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities in the financial year 2022-23.
This distressing reality begs the question: what motivates billionaires to spend several times more on orgies of extravagance than for social welfare?
The American economist, Thorstein Veblen, grappled with such questions in one of his scathing indictments of the profligacy of affluent American societies entitled “The Theory of the Leisure Class”. Veblen wrote, “conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure”, who, to “put his opulence in evidence” seeks “the aid of friends and competitors” by giving them “valuable presents and expensive feasts and entertainments.”
The scale of this extravaganza is deliberately kept so large that it renders impossible what Veblen calls “pecuniary emulation” by others. It is this “invidious pecuniary comparison”, he suggests, that motivates wealthy narcissists to stay above the rest through wasteful expenditure.
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On entitlement and psychological capture
If Veblen’s analysis explains the pomposity of billionaires, the political philosophy of Harvard professor, Michael J. Sandel, examines the mindset that claims the right to wasteful expenditure.
In his book, The Tyranny of Merit, Sandel blames the entitlement mentality of the rich for their claim to absolute ownership of their wealth, and the freedom to splurge it. To reach this conclusion, Sandel relies on John Rawls’s “negative argument” (no individual can stake a sole claim to success because success depends on fortunate circumstances in early life for which one cannot claim credit), and Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek’s “affirmative argument” (the successful are obligated to contribute to the common good of the community which makes their success possible).
Sandel argues that the refusal to recognise the realities highlighted in these two arguments has led the rich to believe that their talents entitle them to the bounty that the market bestows upon them, and, by extension, the poor deserve their fate for their lack of merit.
Sandel is right because it is the entitlement mentality of the rich that justifies their right to spend their resources following the whims of elitism to not just enhance their social standing among their peers but also to look down upon the economically disadvantaged as “losers” and make them feel almost unwanted.
It is no wonder that most wedding extravaganzas are hotbeds of classism where the poor and the ordinary are deliberately excluded to let a large section of the international high society celebrate the occasion in perverse isolation. If at all, members of the “lower class” may get entertained on a different day as if to remind them of their position in society and the billionaire host’s magnanimity.
But what is astonishing is that the “lower classes” seem to have undervalued themselves and, as a result, become resigned to their “lower status” and start believing in the upper class’s absolute right to its wealth and wasteful expenditure.
An international newspaper covering the wedding mentioned above quoted a “middle-class mechanic” in Mumbai: “Look, [the billionaire] earned his money, and it’s his right to spend it on his own children.” The mechanic wanted the filling of potholes, and “a solution to the knee-deep floodwater that ruined businesses during every monsoon and turned alleys into canals of floating trash.” Nothing more.
Sociologist Michèle Lamont speaks of this middle-class peculiarity in her book, The Dignity of Working Men. She writes that a large section of the middle class American “white blue-collar workers” have little resentment toward those who do well. This attitude, she points out, is consistent with surveys showing that many Americans believe that the current distribution of rewards is fair, that opportunity is available to all, and that people can make it if they work at it.
This seemingly inexplicable appreciation of the rich by the poor and the middle-class amounts to a kind of psychological capture of the poor and the middle-class by the rich, made possible by the unabashed propagation of the myth of meritocracy, despite popular religions having tried for centuries to open the eyes of the deprived masses.
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Rights of the underprivileged
For instance, almost a millennium-and-a-half ago, the Koran issued a radical statement on the rights of the underprivileged which warned that wealth is god-given and the rich only hold it as trustees (mustakhlafeen) on behalf of the poor. Hence, the supplicant (saa’il) and the deprived (mahroom) have, “a recognised right” (haqqun ma’loomun) in it. (57: 7 and 70: 23-25) By introducing the doctrine of trusteeship, and using the word “right “in place of “charity”, the Koran not just redefined the idea of wealth-ownership but expanded the rights of the poor to bring them on a par with the rich in every aspect of life, thus restoring their dignity. The Koran even suggests that human miseries and happiness result from circumstantial randomness. (2:155)
This is perhaps what Sandel meant when he concluded his book with an aphorism to sober up the meritocratic rich: “There, but for the grace of God, or the accident of birth, or the mystery of fate, go I.”
One can only hope that Michael Sandel’s moral philosophy will sooner rather than later get the better of the atomistic individualism that shapes the billionaire-mindset.
A. Faizur Rahman is Secretary-General of the Islamic Forum for the Promotion of Moderate Thought. E-mail: themoderates2020@gmail.com
Santosh Mehrotra is a Visiting Professor at the Institute for Policy Research, University of Bath, U.K.
Published - August 05, 2024 12:59 am IST
