There has been some snarky commentary on the splendiferous pre-wedding festivities of Mukesh Ambani’s youngest son. So let me begin by saying that it made me happy to see that one of India’s richest men was able to celebrate on a scale unseen since princely times. Guests who returned from the festivities in Jamnagar have come back with tales of wonder and extravagance. The reason why I feel happy that a rich Indian can celebrate without being ashamed of his wealth is that I spent my formative years in those socialist decades when nearly all Indians lived in extreme poverty. Those who were rich were too scared to show that they were rich.
It is my considered view that no country becomes prosperous if it does not celebrate prosperity. In the India in which I grew up and began my career as a journalist, we celebrated poverty. Never wealth. The shabby condition of our cities and the squalor of our villages were justified by our political leaders as inevitable since we were a poor country. They loved showing that they revered the poor and hated the rich.
They did not dare admit that it was because of their economic policies that millions of Indians had remained mired in extreme poverty for so long. They did not dare admit that it was because of the debilitating License Raj that Indian industrialists did not dare grow beyond their quotas. They could be fined for producing that extra two-wheeler or motor car. That was how absurd our economic policies were. More absurd still was that our policymakers believed bureaucrats were better businessmen than businessmen themselves.
It was into this centrally planned, quota-controlled Delhi that Dhirubhai Ambani arrived in the eighties. I first heard of him in a context that painted him as a villain and not a great entrepreneur. I remember newsrooms buzzing with rumours of how he bought up officials and politicians to enable him to evade their insane rules and regulations. Today, he is seen as a great Indian and a hero by a huge, aspirational middle class. This would have been impossible in socialist times, because the Indian middle class was miniscule and irrelevant. It is a good thing that we have begun to shake off the shackles and memories of that India, in which poverty was worn as a badge of honour by our leaders.
So, when I hear Rahul Gandhi’s economic views, a chill runs down my spine. His campaign in the last general election was based on trying to convince voters that Narendra Modi was a thief who was stealing ‘their money’ to put in the pockets of his ‘four rich friends’. It worries me that he has not moved too far from this bizarre idea. He has rarely made a speech on his Nyaya Yatra in which he does not spit out the names Adani and Ambani, as if they were words of abuse. His hatred of India’s two richest men is so apparent that it often worries me that he may have become a crypto-Marxist.
His economic ideas do not seem to resonate with the Indian voter and this could be because, like me, there are millions of Indians who remember those ‘socialist’ decades with horror. If Narendra Modi had seen Khan Market then, he would never have reviled it as an enclave of privilege. It certainly was not. It was the only market near where I lived, so I was obliged to visit it often. I remember it as a dump that reeked of rotting garbage and as a place where we queued endlessly for groceries, gas cylinders and almost everything else. The shops sold shoddy goods that gave Made in India a bad name. And those who could afford foreign-made equivalents, sought them out from shopkeepers who sold them on the sly.
In socialist times, air-conditioners were considered a luxury that only rich people could afford. Middle-class people relied on the ‘jugaad’ talents of Indian mechanics and engineers, who worked in makeshift shops on the edge of Khan Market. As I remember it, these air-conditioners were noisy and leaky, and usually packed up on the hottest summer days of the year. But they did cost less than half the price of branded, brand-new air-conditioners.
India has come a long, long way since. But we have a long, long way to go before we become a fully developed country. The Prime Minister’s idea of a ‘Viksit Bharat’ is not yet on the horizon, but at least he urges us to join him in trying to get there. If he wins a third term, as every poll suggests, it will be because he appeals to an aspirational new India that might sometimes seem too obsessed with temples and identity politics, but it is one that wants to move forward. If Congress loses its third general election in a row, it will be not so much because of ‘parivarvaad’ but because it continues to cling to economic ideas that are stale and defunct.
It was when ‘socialism’ was the only economic idea around that politics became a lucrative business. Most Indians were too poor to notice that their leaders became very rich from espousing socialism. So rich that they discovered the best legacy they could leave their children was to gift them a political party. It was the beginning of hereditary democracy or ‘parivarvaad’.
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10.03.2024
There has been some snarky commentary on the splendiferous pre-wedding festivities of Mukesh Ambani’s youngest son. So let me begin by saying that it made me happy to see that one of India’s richest men was able to celebrate on a scale unseen since princely times. Guests who returned from the festivities in Jamnagar have come back with tales of wonder and extravagance. The reason why I feel happy that a rich Indian can celebrate without being ashamed of his wealth is that I spent my formative years in those socialist decades when nearly all Indians lived in extreme poverty. Those who were rich were too scared to show that they were rich.
It is my considered view that no country becomes prosperous if it does not celebrate prosperity. In the India in which I grew up and began my career as a journalist, we celebrated poverty. Never wealth. The shabby condition of our cities and the squalor of our villages were justified by our political leaders as inevitable since we were a poor country. They loved showing that they revered the poor and hated the rich.
They did not dare admit that it was because of their economic policies that millions of Indians had remained mired in extreme poverty for so long. They did not dare admit that it was because of the debilitating License Raj that Indian industrialists did not dare grow beyond their quotas. They could be fined for producing that extra two-wheeler or motor car. That was how........
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