The “post-corporate capitalist world” is dominated by the super-rich who are literally devouring the earth, and are, in the words of Thomas Piketty, virtually on the brink of owning their own countries. In the post-socialist era, the most relevant question that can meaningfully be posed is: what do the super-rich owe to the world’s extremely poor? As crucial as this question may sound, it is posed and contested within the liberal discourse of global justice, which nevertheless maintains its orientalising legacy by focusing on the duties of the developed world’s super-rich towards those in the developing world. More generally, the domain of global justice is entering a period of disenchantment, largely due to its West-centricity, and often parochial and exclusionary theoretical formulations.
As India has been witnessing a “super-rich boom” at a staggering rate alongside China and Brazil, the need to ask the question of what do India’s super-rich owe to the poor warrants a deparochial framework; one that addresses West-centrism and reassess the theoretical foundations of agency, culpability and duties in the global poverty debate. Such a deparochial framework cannot be fruitfully achieved through “withdrawalist scholarship” that endorses intellectual disengagement from Western and global theorisations.
A much better alternative would be to “critically depart” from the so-called Western theorisations of global justice and duties of the super-rich. The latter approach offers more plausible and constructive modes of tackling parochialism in purportedly global theories.
A decade ago, Neera Chandhoke posed a very provocative question in response to cosmopolitan theorist Thomas Pogge’s seminal work on the theme: Do those of us who live in India have any kind of duty towards the poor? In essence, Chandhoke unravels two kinds of agency questions in the developing world: the agency of the poor and the agency of the affluent. The mainstream theorists of global justice focus exclusively on the first construal of agency and wholly ignore the second. The analytical difference between the two kinds of agencies is arguably very crucial for fleshing out the culpability of the super-rich for systemic poverty in the developing world. Plutocrats, as national and transnational actors, are a part of the economic structure that shapes the destiny of the vast majority of people, especially the poor. In a deparochial framework of global justice, the location of agents in the global distribution of wealth, power and resources is integral to the determination of duties of global justice.
The super-rich wields exemplary wealth, resources and power; how this great fortune comes about and what it does to equally plausible rights and claims of the multitude could be a basis for great moral and practical discussions on their responsibilities. The impact of this buoyant power and influence can be mapped through the language of human rights, which constitutes the widely accepted grammar of justice. As capacious agents alongside states, their agency and role cannot be overlooked simply because they are the newly born agents of the once-poor or not-so-developed world.
These questions need not be just focussed on understanding poverty itself, its manifestations, measures and prevalence in India or elsewhere. It must reconfigure the focus on responsibilities that the affluent among us must shoulder towards those who are reeling in poverty; not just because they ought to, but because their conduct has long-lasting effects on the realisation of their rights. Much has been said and written about the superrich, eulogising and fetishising their entrepreneurial prowess, net worth, lifestyles and assets. New scholarship needs to attend to the flipside of the coin and critically examine the repercussions of emerging plutonomy on the poor in India. It warrants the reassessment of market-oriented nations from the standpoints of their own stated claims, frameworks, assumptions and expectations.
Interestingly, today’s plutocrats are vastly emerging in democracies. In the absence of strong safety nets, capitalist democracies lack built-in limitarian strategies to counter the increasing concentration of wealth and ensure the benefits of economic growth trickle down to the bottom half. There is certainly something more that is required of democracies than is currently expected. The concentration of wealth in the fewer hands has a long-term effect on the distribution and the effectiveness of political power. The political leverage that is gained in the economic sphere easily translates into visible and invisible forms of domination. The pursuit of commercial interests at the expense of public good leaves an indelible mark on the future distribution of wealth and political power. That is how this loop completes and reproduces itself. The bending of rules in favour of the superrich is in itself a systemic violation of rights, after all the world’s poor continue to be the most vulnerable wherever they find themselves.
India is a whirlwind of paradoxical transformations. On the one hand, it has made a major stride as one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. The rise of India’s billionaires stands out as a representative image of a growing and self-conscious country, breaking “free” from colonial shackles and socialist constraints. On the other hand, apprehensions about rising inequality in the country are more palpable than ever. Poverty rates have halved for sure, but still the largest chunk of the world’s poor live in the country. The emergent and responsible India has also begun refusing to solicit any humanitarian assistance from the developed world. Three decades after India’s neoliberal turn, one could locate a paradoxical picture of poverty amid plenty in the country.
This paradox is attributable to the state’s skewed policies that tend to favour the super-rich. Keeping in line with global neoliberal policy imperatives, India has eschewed socialist policies and reconfigured its tax and credit regimes in ways that best fulfil business interests. Several taxes that are widely considered key to the redistribution of income have been abolished. The implementation of economic reforms pushed through the global economic architecture, and the state’s pro-business policies (rather than pro-market) have enabled superrich Indians to draw a disproportionate share of the economic surplus leaving as little as 5.7 per cent and 13.3 per cent of total national wealth and income respectively for the bottom half (World Inequality Report 2022). The combined net worth of India’s billionaires is reaching a quarter of its GDP, and half of this superrich wealth comes from rent-thick sectors despite the increasing trend of entrepreneurial wealth.
These policy decisions that produce humungous private affluence severely affect the government’s ability to fulfil the basic human rights of the poor, including food, healthcare and education. India’s superrich, being the primary beneficiaries of skewed economic policies, wield significant economic clout to influence public policies often to the detriment of the disadvantaged lots. The resultant wealth disparities and the prevalence of poverty are closely connected with the organisation of national and global economic institutions. Interestingly, these disparities are supposed to be tackled through the free play of capital, economic growth and institutionalised philanthropy, overlooking the resultant, and vastly growing, plutonomic configurations in the country.
India, much like China and Brazil, can no longer be categorised as a developing world in the conventional sense of the term. This exceptionalism stands neglected in the global poverty debate. Can India’s superrich be exempted from the global poverty debate – that predominantly restricts duties of alleviating global poverty to the agents in the developed world? A preliminary hypothesis implicates India’s superrich as both contributors and beneficiaries of the institutional arrangements that produce staggering wealth on the one hand and extreme inequality and poverty on the other. Can the actions of the superrich then be linked with the unfulfillment of the human rights of the poor, locally and nationally? If yes, what is the nature of these harmful actions? These questions are arterial because the existing scholarship looks at the relationship between the super-rich and the poor exclusively in terms of economic growth and philanthropy. There is a veritable need to ask if institutionalised philanthropy is the only possible mode of relationship between the super-rich and the poor in national and global contexts.
This kind of debate not be allowed to slide into a radical argument for the abolition of the superrich, less so for returning to the dirigisme. The superrich can, and in fact, do a lot of positive and transformative work, to say the least. That said, there is just one overarching concern: the absence of limitarian strategies enables a Mathew Effect, making it very difficult for everyone else to rise from the ashes. The accumulated capital has an inevitable fall into the political sphere, and when that happens, it reproduces wealth for the few and corresponding deprivations for the many.
This new scholarship must then focus on the institutional violations caused by the very process by which many billionaires are produced and allowed to reproduce wealth unbound. Fragile and porous institutions make it difficult for the poor to resist policies that are harmful to them. Justice is all about the right arrangement of institutions, and the assurance of their continuous and impartial functioning is key to peaceful and just societies. There is thus an intricate relationship between poverty alleviation, reduction of inequalities, and the achievement of peace, justice and inclusive institutions within and across societies.
Excerpted with permission from Deparochialising Global Justice: Global Poverty, Human Rights Cosmopolitanism and India’s Superrich, Aejaz Ahmad Wani, Palgrave Macmillan.
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