The Enchantment of Riches

Even if it is not yet glorious, it is cool to be rich in an India that is shedding its socialist habits. You do not have to be a socialist to create an equal society. Even a responsible capitalist can achieve that

The biblical sin of greed is a familiar slogan against the venal rich, the source of all our evils. It is the regulation diet of we the poor, we the exploited and we the majority who are brought up in the noble tradition of austerity of the soul. In every scandal that breaks out, the anti-hero is invariably a crony capitalist with the means to buy the system with a discount. In every moral harrumpher’s fairy tale about the unequal nation, pachyderms in pinstripes who control the boardrooms are the engineers of social division. And if it is a land without justice, we do know why it is so: a minority has amassed the national resources leaving the rest of the wretched to rot in the margins. No one in the business of nation building ever told us, echoing Deng Xiaoping, that it is glorious to be rich. The wealth creator here, in the popular imagination, is worse than Martin Amis’ immortal hero John Self, an epitome of the excesses of the Eighties, in the novel Money.

Still, in spite of this acquired national narrative of the nobility of the austere and the vulgarity of the rich, the wealthier Indian today is a global citizen. He is there not because he is enabled by the system; he is there in spite of it. His ancestry says it all. In the initial years of post- Independence India, the national model was borrowed from the Soviet Union, though we called it a mixed economy. But the capitalist part was conditional and regulated and the socialist virtues were celebrated. It was more Marx than Adam Smith; the state hovered over the aspiration and ambition of the individual. The ruler was wiser than the citizen.

There were, though, a few who loved the art of making money. Some of them were, literally, born to make it and multiply; they continued the tradition of the inherited trade of the community. Then there were the pioneers, and the best of them saw little difference between building a business empire and building a nation. The national movement, to a great extent, was patronised by the upper business class, though, it must be added, free India was hardly a friendlier place for business. As the Government— steeped in the twin loftiness of socialism and Third Worldism—built dams and steel factories, in Bombay and elsewhere, industrialists with a greater sense of ingenuity were building an alternative India. Alternative because its value system was not compatible with an India of the controlled market and the all-knowing Government. In their India, ambition was not morally reprehensible, and to dream was to muster courage to break the system. The nowhere-to-stratosphere legends of certain Indian business houses are as motivational as the stories of Japanese zaibatsu or Korean chaebol. The state was not an ally for them; it was a challenge.

The political rhetoric has only added to the portrait of the wealth creator as wealth stealer. The politician always wants the poor as election fodder, and being one of the world’s poorest countries, India is the perfect backdrop for your average ghetto- friendly socialist, and they are all socialists when it comes to “change”. The most idiotic of them, by the sheer frequency of its usage, have come to believe that the wealthy are the cause of Indian poverty. This misplaced social analysis brings out a paradox: In spite of having one anti-wealth regime after another, and all of them socialist irrespective of nomenclature, why is it that India remains poor with abominable social indices? But the much suppressed business class, in their growth story, did far better than the state that suppressed it. One is a story of national lethargy and ideological deep freeze; the other is about perseverance, adventure and imagination.

The end of the Licence Raj did certainly bring in a whiff of freedom. But freedom was still conditional. Soon, license would be replaced by regulations, and ironically, the supervisor of a regulated market would be the erstwhile liberalisation guru. Wealth creation, again, became an activity the limits of which were set by the state, and it was good business versus bad business all over again. Crony capitalism, after all, is inevitable in a country that makes it difficult for the honourable businessman. Regulation is an invitation to corruption, and that is how the state becomes the father of the crony capitalist. In the series of corruption scandals that rocked the previous Government, two recurring characters were the shady capitalist and his counterpart in the Government. Much of the shame India acquired as one of the world’s most corrupt countries could have been avoided had the system allowed good businesses to flourish. The socialist state, while condemning the poor further into the ghettos, continued to feed a certain kind of wealth maker, the one who grows in the grey zones of India.

The national mood has changed, and being rich is not something to be ashamed of, we are told. Wealth creation, the state has come to realise, is not tax collection. Even if it is not yet glorious, it is cool to be rich in an India that is shedding its socialist habits. And you do not have to be a socialist to create an equal society. Even a responsible capitalist can achieve that. India is not there yet. In his book on social virtues and the creation of prosperity, Trust, Francis Fukuyama writes: ‘Societies that are good at producing wealth-creating economic organisations most likely are also good at creating wealth-redistributing interest groups that harm efficiency. The positive economic effects of spontaneous sociability have to be calculated net of the costs incurred as a result of interest group activity. There can be societies that are good at producing only interest groups without being able to create effective businesses, in which case sociability would have to be considered an overall liability. Medieval Europe resembled such a society in many ways, as do certain contemporary Third World societies that have an excess of parasitic employers groups, labour unions, and community organisers and a dearth of productive corporations.’

Third Worldism as a mental disorder has not been fully eradicated from the Indian Establishment, and the regime change hopefully will be accompanied by a national cure. An atmosphere for effective, productive business is what the state should provide now, perhaps, instead of over- reading Thomas Piketty. Then wealth creation will not be an embarrassment of the rich.

About The Author

S Prasannarajan

•