Contradictions can be illuminating. Covid-19, the World Bank stated in 2020, had led to the largest ever contraction in the global economy in eight decades. The Indian economy suffered heavy losses, manifest in unprecedented shrinkages in GDP growth, massive unemployment as well as periodic retrenchment. Yet, in the same year, the world added 607 new billionaires — effectively more than three billionaires every two days, says the 10th edition of the Hurun Global Rich List. India, a poor nation, had a sizeable kitty of the super rich, adding 55 new billionaires which amounts to the emergence of one billionaire every 10 days. An exponential rise in the value of financial assets, such as shareholdings in profitable companies, led to a further deepening of select pockets.

Wealth creators or wealth creation need not be vilified. The former can serve as symbols of the engines of growth. Indeed, the Indian prime minister is known for his generous views on wealth creators. The problem per se lies not in wealth creation but in the distribution of wealth. This process is marked by horrific inequalities that, studies say, have been further aggravated by the pandemic. Research by international agencies found that in 2020, the wealth of global billionaires rose by 3.9 trillion dollars while the combined earnings of global workers fell by 3.7 trillion dollars. One of the consequences of this anomaly has been a rising backlash against private wealth. India has not been immune from this development and neither can this collective animosity be blamed on mischievous political agenda or residual romanticism for a socialist ethos. The deepening poverty among large segments of the population — industrial workers, the various segments of cultivators as well as agricultural labourers, employees of the informal sector — compounded by the absence of social security has led to the consolidation of suspicions of an unholy, expanding nexus between the State and the Corporation. Economic policies directed at redistributing wealth, creating social safety nets and kick-starting moribund economies to generate employment may act as a balm. But economic interventions, given the cyclical troughs experienced by capitalist economies, can only offer temporary reprieve. A renewed, robust commitment to equality and justice by the State and the myriad political systems around the world is the need of the hour.