A new report by Oxfam has brought to focus unaccounted wealth stashed away by the world’s super-rich in tax havens and called on governments to strengthen taxation systems, increase financial transparency and move towards creating a global asset register to identify, track and tax at higher rates the wealth of the richest individuals. The British-founded non-profit known for its inequality studies reported that untaxed wealth hidden offshore by the richest 0.1%of people across the globe exceeds the entire wealth of the poorest half of humanity comprising 4.1 billion people. Ten years after the so-called Panama Papers leaked a trail of wealth avoidance by some of the world’s wealthiest individuals, “the super-rich continue to exploit offshore systems to evade taxes and conceal assets, highlighting the urgent need for coordinated international action to tax extreme wealth and end the use of tax havens”, the Oxfam report of April 2 said. The loot was calculated by Oxfam to be of the order of USD 3.5 trillion in 2024,an amount higher than the GDP of France and more than twice the combined GDP of the world’s 44 least developed countries. It is also about 85% of the GDP of India.
The numbers paint a grim picture of the power and control exercised by a super-minority of the super-rich, leading to an unprecedented concentration of wealth that inflicts structural violence and in-your-face manifest violence that is tearing society apart – a toxic mix of economic violence, the concentration of wealth, which then fuels and funds armed conflict, atrocities and even genocide across borders seen in the military wars of the kind the Israel-US are now engaged in against Iran. In a reinforcing feedback loop, the war machine feeds into the digital-military-industrial complex that profits as enemies are conjured up and destroyed in what are mostly one-sided, tech-run, remote operated, push-button wars that have killed an untold number of innocent citizens.
The thinking that delivers violence across the borders brings violence within borders, too, seen in the rising inequity and inequality that erodes opportunity, reduces life expectancy and brings its worst effects on the poor, women and girls, and radicalised groups. Consider Oxfam data from an earlier report that said 3.4 Black Americans would be alive if their life expectancy was same as the White people, or that 20 of the richest billionaires are estimated on average to emit 8,000 times more carbon than a billion of the poorest. Further, economic sanctions have brought misery that may be worse than overt killing by the war machine: a much-cited report by the journal ‘Lancet’ last year noted that unilateral economic sanctions lead to about 564,000 excess deaths around the world each year. The study analysed the health impact of economic sanctions using a dataset of age-specific mortality rates and sanctions events for 152 countries from 1971 to 2021.
While Oxfam is a global report that should shock the conscience and begin a journey of corrective actions globally, it also carries special implications for India which has seen growing inequality on the back of policies that have led to the rise of a new class of the super-rich who today wield undue influence in policy making. The 2024 working paper (“Income and Wealth Inequality in India, 1922-2023: The Rise of the Billionaire Raj”) by Thomas Piketty and others from the World Inequality Lab reported that “India’s modern bourgeoisie is now more unequal than the British Raj”, wondering “how long such inequality levels can sustain without major social and political upheaval”. The paper detailed data that showed the rise of top-end inequality has been particularly pronounced in terms of wealth concentration between 2014-15 and 2022-23. But it is a sign of the times that the report did not stir policy debates let alone action and remains a forgotten red flag as the nation pushes ahead with its goal of expanding from the fourth to the third largest economy of the globe.
Following in the footsteps of the dominant American narratives and mimicking its politics of domination or its business lessons of unbridled shareholder capitalism while mouthing pious but hollow approaches to issues of equity, sustainability or fairness will eat into the Indian ethos, tear apart the oft-cited values of vasudaiva kudumbakam and lead to a plunder of resources and all the attendant ills that the undue wealth concentration has brought to United States and its policy making. What the Oxfam global report of April 2 shows is a failing global order, a tear in the social fabric and the inevitability of violence that will eventually consume not just the poor but also the rich and the super-rich. There is a practical downside when moral obligations at the heart of issues like fairness or distributive justice are ignored and greed is rewarded.
This offers a different lens and adds more worries on India’s newfound closeness to the United States and Israel, which is presented as a strategic geopolitical partnership but also carries the burden of buying into the American ideological Kool-Aid and subserving India’s wealth of wisdom to a policy machine that eventually has no friends, only interests. India’s model therefore cannot be the failed model of the United States with its rising inequality and growing structural violence within its borders and military violence outside.
Yet, the signs of rising inequality are everywhere in the India of today. From private equity that increasingly rules hospitals to galloping fees of schools run in air-conditioned rooms; from unemployed youth in poorly paid food delivery jobs via apps that raise millions to the deteriorating condition of public hospitals, passenger trains and buses – India runs the real risk of deteriorating at the fastest possible pace ever recorded from a socialist set up to a would-be market economy after the 1991 economic reforms to now a de facto market society. A market society, as Prof. Michael Sandel explains, is one in which everything can be bought for a price whereas a market economy is a tool for organising productive activity. This cannot be the destiny of India, where dharma comes before artha.
Billion Press
(The writer is a journalist
and faculty member at SPJIMR)
