Is the Adani imbroglio an episodic, one-off incident—or does it reflect a major systemic lacuna in our conception of development and democracy?
Mahatma Gandhi had said the national objective must be “to wipe every tear from every eye” and earlier answered a question about his “dream for India” by saying he would “work for an India in which the poorest shall feel it is their country” in the making of which it is their voice that shall prevail. It was this vision that provided the crucial ethical dimension to the national goal of securing development through democracy—for, clearly, the voice of the most disadvantaged would count only in a democratic polity.
After much cogitation and debate, this approach of prioritising the uplift of the poor, as distinct from incentivising the rich to become richer, led to the enunciation of a “socialistic pattern of society” as the objective of equitable democratic development. This cumbersome expression was often reduced to the single word “socialism”.
This form of “socialism” was later incorporated in the Preamble to our Constitution. Chief Justice Sanjiv Khanna has underlined that “the way we understand socialism in India is very different from the way other academics might understand [it]. In our context, socialism means welfare state…in which the State must ensure… that there is equality of opportunity”.
Illustration: Deni Lal
This ethical dimension has been underplayed ever since the country, in the name of economic reforms, has been bewitched with “GDP” and “per capita income” as the chief criteria for measuring development, pushing aside other Constitutional criteria such as “equality” and “equal opportunity”. In the pursuit of this model of private sector driven development, growing inequalities of income have transformed into humongous inequalities of wealth and the domination (even capture) of key levers of governance by giant business entities that are “too large to fail”. Where in the Nehruvian era, the public sector was given the primary role to promote governance objectives, in Modi’s “New India” it is the private sector, specifically a handful of private sector giants, that are being entrusted with promoting national goals such as a massive switchover from fossil fuels to renewable energy.
Thus, we are saddled with a public sector Solar Energy Corporation of India that produces no solar power itself but is the channel through which state electricity distribution companies are compelled to purchase renewable solar energy from a monopolistic private entity, claimed to be the “largest” in the world, however burdensome the tariffs might be on state budgetary resources. Adani’s indictment in a US court alleges that he bribed state government “officials” (a term used in the US for even elected representatives) who were baulking at purchasing excessively expensive renewable energy from Adani Green through SECI. The indictment also carries the implication that despite evidence of violations under the (Indian) Prevention of Corruption Act, the Indian regulator, the Securities Exchange Board of India, had failed to carry out its regulatory duties vis-à-vis Narendra Modi’s flagship private entity, the Adani group.
Economies which relied on private enterprise, such as the US “robber barons” of the 19th and early 20th century whose shenanigans brought on the Depression and led to Franklin Roosevelt’s anti-trust legislation, have found reflection in the Japanese ‘zaibatsu’ leading to Japanese armed invasions of its neighbours in the 1930s and 1940s in quest of an Asian “co-prosperity sphere”, and the rise of Hitler on the corporate shoulders of ThyssenKrupp. So too, Boris Yeltsin’s transmogrification of the Soviet socialist economy into the notorious ‘oligarchs’ of Russia.
Equally, Korea’s ‘chaebols’. In China, too, Dengonomics has been characterised by massive corruption.
The Adani imbroglio is thus not the outcome of one business giant’s dodgy ways but symptomatic of our dismantling ethics from economic policy.
Aiyar is a former Union minister and social commentator.