‘Billionaire Raj’ Is Pushing India Toward Autocracy
The super-rich have opened their wallets to Modi, and income inequality has soared over the past decade. With an election coming, ordinary voters need to ask, ‘What’s in it for us?’
Narendra Modi and tycoons Kumar Mangalam Birla and Mukesh Ambani.
Photographer: Prakash Singh/BloombergIndia’s soaring income inequality is now among the highest in the world. The gap between the haves and have-nots is starker than in the US, Brazil and South Africa, and worse than in the country’s own history under foreign rule. So here’s a question for political scholars: With the dice so badly loaded against them, why would 1 billion voters prefer to make the rich even richer when they exercise their democratic choice in April and May? What’s in it for them?
“The ‘Billionaire Raj’ headed by India’s modern bourgeoisie is now more unequal than the British Raj headed by the colonialist forces,” says a new study by the World Inequality Lab. The report, which spans a century, shines a spotlight on 2014-2022, the first eight years of rule by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his right-wing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP.