Point of view : V.V.S. Manian
Sometimes the truth hurts badly. But truth is truth. As an Indian, I don’t think we have got rid of poverty, though we may have stratified that major chunk of the population live happily. We are all idiots falling for the faintly coined slogans and casting our vote. We have still not gotten over the “Garibi Hatao“slogan, which Indira Gandhi basically thundered from UP. UP is yet to see that the poor are totally inhabited. Crime has been eliminated by Yogi. Poverty and begging have not.
The recent Inequality Report 2022 says that in the Billionaire Raj, India is a poor and very unequal country with affluent elite. We don’t need a report to highlight this; we are eyewitnesses to reality.
Modi thundered on every platform in the world that India is one of the fastest-growing economies, but the reality is that there is an increasing level of wealth inequality and shrinking opportunities for the youth. The wealth share of the top 1% of the country’s population was as high as 40 percent, according to the report. The Income and Wealth Inequality in India, 1922-2023 states,”The income and wealth inequality in India now is worse than what it was during British colonial rule. The research paper has found that the wealth share of India’s top 1% is among the highest in the world, higher than even South Africa, Brazil, and the United States.
‘Though the government claims that it has lifted more than 250 million Indians out of poverty in a relatively short time, paradoxically, socio-economic disparities have increased. The study has revealed that ‘top-end inequality’ has been particularly pronounced between 2014–15 and 2022–23 in terms of wealth concentration.’ In other words, India’s rich are getting richer, and that too at an increasingly fast rate, while the poor are getting poorer. So we can forget Indira’s pet topic of “Garibi Hatao” (remove poverty) and shift to Sabke Saath, Sabka Vikas (Everybody’s company will help in everybody’s growth”). To me, this slogan is rather sketchy. It reinforces the basic premise of the report: the company of the rich will become richer, while the poor will continue to live in poverty in the company of the poorer.
The report says, “As per our benchmark estimates, the billionaire Raj headed by India’s modern bourgeoisie is now more unequal than the British Raj headed by the colonialist forces. One reason to be concerned with such high levels of inequality is that the extreme concentration of incomes and wealth is likely to facilitate disproportionate influence on society and government. This is even more so in context with weak democratic institutions. After largely being a role model among post-colonial nations in this regard, the integrity of various key institutions in India appears to have been compromised in recent years. This makes the possibility of India’s slide towards plutocracy even more real. If only for this reason, income and wealth inequality in India must be closely tracked and challenged.”
I would like to add that Modi is God-fearing and a temple hopper. Hopefully, he would have seen the real India. I have seen the poor and sadhus lined up in front of every temple across India, begging for alms. Let us not forget that India still continues to live in their company.
