Sunanda K. Datta-Ray | Inequality and democracy: Can it ensure a better life?

A year in which more than 65 entities, including the world’s supposedly largest and oldest democracies, go to the polls might be regarded as the ultimate landmark for the government of the people, for the people and by the people. But through the celebration threads the censorious voice of Nurse Edith Cavell warning: “Democracy is not enough!” For democracy to be meaningful, people must have food and shelter, access to education, medical care and gainful employment. Above all, the process must inspire hopes of a better life in a future that is free of the tyranny of vote-seeking populism and majoritarianism.

Neither would have dented the deep humanitarianism of Cavell, the British nurse who gave her life during the First World War, explaining the sacrifice by famously stressing the need to inject meaning into a slogan. “I realise that patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone” were the last words of the woman whom the Germans occupying Belgium killed for treating wounded Allied soldiers and helping them to escape. When an English chaplain visiting her on her last night said she would “always be remembered as a heroine and a martyr”, Cavell answered in tones that Mahatma Gandhi might have envied: “Don’t think of me like that. Think of me only as a nurse who tried to do her duty.”

What would Cavell have seen as her duty if she had lived in India’s raucous poverty-stricken democracy with 186 billionaires, according to Forbes?

Or if she had to contend with the reality of the Oxfam report claiming that just five per cent of Indians own more than 60 per cent of the country’s wealth, while the bottom 50 per cent possess only three per cent? Or when, with less than a month to go before a crucial general election that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party is expected to win hands down, the Central government’s Enforcement Directorate responsible for investigating large-scale economic offences, arrested Arvind Kejriwal, Delhi’s feisty chief minister and a leading figure in the main Opposition alliance?

As for Oxfam’s economic figures, it would appear that far from correcting historic anomalies and aberrations, India’s much-vaunted political democracy encourages inequality. The report claimed, for instance, that between 2012 and 2021, 40 per cent of the wealth created in India went to just one per cent of the population while a mere three per cent went to the bottom 50 per cent. The report added that the total number of billionaires in India increased from 102 in 2020 to 166 in 2022, and that the combined wealth of India’s 100 richest individuals touched $660 billion (Rs 54.12 lakh crores), enough to fund the country’s entire Budget for more than 18 months.

Amitabh Behar, Oxfam’s CEO, was quoted as saying: “While the country suffers from multiple crises like hunger, unemployment, inflation and health calamities, India’s billionaires are doing extremely well for themselves. India’s poor, meanwhile, are unable to afford even basic necessities to survive. The number of hungry Indians increased to 350 million in 2022 from 190 million in 2018. Widespread hunger accounted for 65 per cent of the deaths among children under the age of five in 2022, according to the Union government’s submission to the Supreme Court.”

No one suggests a link between such strictures and the home ministry’s recommendation of a CBI probe against Oxfam. Nor does anyone suggest that the real estate firm DLF smoothed its way of out of a sticky jam by giving Rs 170 crores to the BJP’s election kitty. But Indians watched transfixed when the Narendra Modi government transformed Jamnagar airport into an international hub for the benefit of glitterati guests like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Rihanna and Ivanka Trump at the pre-wedding bash of billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s younger son. For hundreds of millions of Indians, the lavish festivities demonstrated that the novelist, F. Scott Fitzgerald, was right when he wrote, the rich “are different from you and me”. Ernest Hemingway’s supposed retort, “Yes, they have more money”, failed to explain why even the most aggressively democratic government responds so reverentially to them.

One reason for supporting democracies is that they are said never to go to war. True perhaps, but today’s India’s relations with some of the surrounding democracies are surprisingly prickly. Sri Lankans of various races regularly take turns to malign India. President Mohammed Muizzu of the Maldives seems to be on a permanent anti-India stump. Now, it’s the turn of Bangladesh’s Opposition BNP (Bangladesh Nationalist Party) to boycott all Indian products. As for China, many wonder what exactly President Xi Jinping means by claiming China is not just a democracy, but a much higher-functioning democracy than those in the West. His slogan “whole-process people’s democracy”, describing China’s purported democratic style with annual jamborees like the National People’s Congress held up as an example of participation in collective events, recalls China’s own rough handling of minority groups like the Muslim Uyghurs and Buddhist Tibetans.

Some might not see much of a qualitative difference between this and Israel’s relentless bombardment of a defenceless Gaza Strip or Myanmar’s brutal purges of the Rohingyas in its Rakhine province, all aimed at annihilating cultural minorities.

Others might fear that the bloodbath that accompanied Russia’s recent presidential election which was shadowed by Alexei Navalny’s mysterious death even before the Islamic State terrorists went on the rampage, is indeed the price of democracy. It is one of the great ironies of contemporary politics that while the Western powers proclaim the virtues of democracy to the rest of the world, Donald Trump’s popularity indicates they themselves are losing faith in the legitimacy of popular governments. Even some 10 per cent of Sri Lankans seem to prefer authoritarian to so-called democratic governance, according to a poll by Colombo’s Centre for Policy Alternatives.

As of now, the state of all public facilities in India constantly reminds people that Jesus Christ knew what he was talking about when he was quoted in the Book of Matthew as saying: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” Not that the wealthy are worried. Jamnagar airport demonstrated during the Ambani extravaganza that those who are excluded from God’s kingdom may easily saunter into the domains of Narendra Modi and home minister Amit Shah.