A 100 years ago, a judge of the United States Supreme Court Louis Brandeis had with remarkable prescience declared, “We must make our choice. Either we can have extreme wealth in the hands of the few, or we can have democracy. We cannot have both.”In a stirring, deeply worrying report titled Resisting the Rule of the Rich: Protecting Freedom From Billionaire Power, Oxfam describes how governments worldwide are “making the wrong choice; choosing to defend wealth not freedom”. They are choosing “the rule of the rich”. This also entails the choice “to repress their people’s anger at how life is becoming unaffordable and unbearable, rather than redistributing wealth from the richest to the rest”. The report also documents the convergence of the super-rich with political power the world over. This enables them “to shape and influence politics, societies and economies”. In sharp contrast, “those economically with the least wealth are becoming politically poor, their voices silenced in the face of growing authoritarianism and the suppression of hard-won rights and freedoms”. There could be few lessons more worthy of attention for our times than these. In this world of super-wealth and endemic poverty, just 12 billionaires own as much wealth as half the world’s people, some four billion women, men and children. Decades of neo-liberal policies and the slashing of social welfare policies have been central to the making of this staggeringly unequal world. Inequality has burgeoned through these decades, but more specifically the five years leading up to 2025 have been a watershed. Just in 2025, the wealth of billionaires grew three times faster than the average annual rate in the previous five years. The number of billionaires around the world crossed 3,000 for the first time, and the amount of billionaire wealth is higher than at any time in history. At the same time, since 2020, the reduction in poverty globally has mostly halted. In other words, in a world in which nearly half the world’s people are forced to live in poverty, the poor have tended to remain impoverished.Also read: Inequality Is a Political Choice. A New Wealth Tracker Shows How India Could Do Better.Food costs have risen dizzyingly around the world, raising the cost of living intolerably. Those who are socially stigmatised and women are most likely to be trapped in low-end low-paid insecure employment. One in four people live with hunger and food insecurity. Their numbers have actually increased over the past five years by over 40%. The global G20 alliance, at the time when the presidency vested with South Africa, appointed an Extraordinary Committee of Independent Experts on Global Inequality headed by Joseph Stiglitz. This Committee on Global Inequality found that wealth gaps have widened sharply over the past 25 years, with 90% of the world’s population living in societies shaped by high economic inequality. It also noted that a quarter of humanity – about 2.3 billion people – now face moderate or severe food insecurity. The number of persons living with or at the edge of hunger has risen sharply from 335 million in 2019 to 2.3 billion in 2025. Inequality is inimical to democracy, progress and fairnessA highly instructive finding of the Oxfam 2026 report is the great incompatibility of high inequality with democracy. It observes that highly unequal countries are up to seven times more likely to experience democratic erosion than more equal countries. The forms of democratic erosion in unequal countries that the report identifies include weakening the independence of the judiciary or the power of the legislature; the restriction of civil liberties and freedoms; the manipulation of elections; and growing concentration of power in the hands of authoritarian leaders. Closely linked to this democratic downslide is the ever-growing proximity and overlap of economic wealth and political power. Oxfam finds that the super-rich amplify their political power in three main ways. One of these is by directly accessing political office and institutions. It reports that over 11% of the world’s billionaires have held or sought political office. It is not just that billionaires are over 4,000 times more likely to hold political office than ordinary people. 2025 saw a billionaire become the president of the world’s most powerful nation, with a cabinet that includes multiple billionaires. In just his first year since his re-election, the wealth of US billionaires have skyrocketed higher than ever before, and even billionaires in other parts of the world have seen double-digit increases in their wealth. The policies of the Trump presidency that helped raise billionaire wealth so dramatically include the championing of deregulation and undermining agreements to increase corporate taxation. A second way that the ultra-rich expand their political influence is by “buying politics”. The super-rich, the report says, have long used their vast wealth to buy politicians and political parties, and by this to subvert the power of the majority. In 2024, one in every six dollars spent by all US candidates, parties and committees came from donations from just 100 billionaire families.All over the world we are seeing “an erosion and rolling back of the civil and political rights of the many; the suppression of protests; and the silencing of dissent”. Photo: Unsplash.When in India those who purchased election bonds, mostly for the ruling BJP, to make the BJP according to some estimates the world’s richest political party were exposed, this again laid bare the role of private corporations, many of which are owned by India’s spawning billionaire class, in upholding the ruling far-right ruling formation.A third way is by “legitimising elite power”. A major part of this is the growing dominance of billionaires and the super-rich of media and social media. Over half of the world’s largest media companies have billionaire owners, and nine of the top ten social media companies in the world are run by just six billionaires. Indian media has also seen a massive acquisition by India’s biggest oligarchs of television news media. Billionaire-owned media “systematically neglect the interests of people living in poverty, women and racialised groups”. In India, they both are drum-beaters of support for the ruling regime, never critically evaluating its actions or public statements; and shrill amplifiers for the Hindutva agenda of hate against religious minorities. In these ways, in country after country, Oxfam observes that “the super-rich have not only accumulated more wealth than could ever be spent, but have also used this wealth to secure the political power to shape the rules that define our economies and govern nations. Billionaires use their wealth “to buy a politician, to influence a government, to own a newspaper or a social media platform, or to out-lawyer any opposition to ensure them impunity from justice”. These actions are, as Oxfam notes, “inimical to progress and fairness”. This kind of power “gives billionaires a grasp over all our futures, undermining political freedom and eroding the rights of the many”. It is for this reason that inequality and crony capitalism are so inimical to democracy and the well-being of working people. The economic poverty of the majority tends to translate into “political poverty”. In other words, the mass of ordinary citizens are unable to participate on equal terms in politics, decision-making and public life. This limits people’s abilities to influence policies, instead we see an elite capture of policy-making. Faced with huge debt, governments in poorer countries resort to austerity measures and cut-backs on welfare, and when people protest, many measures of repression. All over the world we are seeing “an erosion and rolling back of the civil and political rights of the many; the suppression of protests; and the silencing of dissent”.India’s inequality storyHow closely Modi’s India mirrors the findings of the Oxfam report is graphically revealed by the March 2026 Wealth Tracker Report of the Centre for Financial Accountability authored by Anirban Bhattacharya. India is today more unequal than any time since India became free, at levels comparable to or higher than in colonial times. The richest 1% in India own 40% of the wealth of the nation. The top 10% earn 60% of the national income whereas the bottom 50% survive on just 15% of this income.It is important also to be mindful of the caste nature of inequality. The World Inequality Lab observes that nearly 90% of all billionaire wealth in India is held by upper castes. Moneycontrol in a report of September 2025 observes that if one looks at the surnames of those at the top in the Hurun rich list it tells a story. We find that Agarwal and Gupta were the two most shared surnames by India’s richest business families, both tied at 12, followed by the Patel at 10, Jain at 9 and Mehta, Goenka and Shah at five each. Singh, Rao and Doshi completed the top ten surnames with four families each among India’s wealthiest. Missing almost completely in the Hurun or Forbes lists of the ultra-rich are surnames of the oppressed castes. What’s more, this concentration has been deepening. The World Inequality Lab reports that during the Modi years – between 2014 and 2022 – the OBC share of billionaire wealth was cut in half, falling from 20% to below 10%, while the upper caste share climbed from 80% to 90%. There were three significant inflection points in the inequality journey of the Indian republic. The first was the three decades immediately following freedom. We find that the share of the top 10% in India’s national wealth fell significantly from nearly 60% to just above 40% during this period. This period also shows a modest rise in the share of the bottom 50% from less than 10% of the national wealth to slightly higher than 10%. This phase in which post-colonial India moved to a path of greater equality shows the egalitarian impacts of even limited land reforms and the five-year plans. This limited march to greater equity reversed from the 1980s and more from the 1990s, which marked the period of neo-liberal “reforms” that advanced the interests of global capital rather than of the worker and farmer. This phase saw massive tax cuts for the rich, the crushing of trade unions, deregulation, privatisation and cuts in social security. In this phase, we see the steady rise of the share of the top 10% in the national wealth to levels even higher than in colonial times, and the share of the bottom 10% plummeting to levels even lower than in colonial India.One of India’s most respected left economists Prabhat Patnaik explains, “In India in the neo-liberal period there has been a substantial reduction in the tax burden on the rich, so that the increase in investment by capitalists has been accompanied by an increase in their wealth as well. It is this fact which largely underlies the increase in wealth inequality in the country.”The spectacular pandemic paradoxThe third inflection point is the period since the pandemic in 2020. This started with the lockdown. The wealth of Indian billionaires increased by 35% during the lockdown. Mukesh Ambani made Rs 900 million per hour during the pandemic, when the bottom 24% of the people in the country were earning under Rs 3,000 per month. Gautam Adani’s total fortune increased by 728% in a year. In 2019, the combined wealth of India’s billionaires was approximately Rs 31 lakh crore. By 2025, it soared to around Rs 88 lakh crore.How did this happen? In 2020, markets crashed and the dollar billionaire club shrank briefly as 125 people fell off the list, leaving 828. But even then the combined wealth did not shrink. By 2021, the recovery was already complete. The count bounced back to over a thousand. And total wealth shot up to Rs 90 lakh crore, almost 50% higher than the pre-pandemic figure. In 2022, the dollar billionaires rose from 1,007 to 1,013 and their combined wealth rose to Rs 100 lakh crore. In 2023, as the Centre for Financial Accountability (CFA) Report puts it, “the dam broke”. Three hundred new entrants joined the club in a single year and their combined wealth jumped to Rs 109 lakh crore.According to the World Inequality Lab, in 2019, the share of wealth of the top 1% in India was 36.5% and that of the bottom 50% was 6.8%. From 2022, it holds steady at around 40% for the top 1% and 6.4% for the bottom 50%. Between 2019 till 2025, the number of individuals with wealth of Rs 1000 crore and more grew by 77%. And their wealth grew by a staggering 227%.According to the Hurun Rich List, the most spectacular rise in this period was in the wealth of Adani, by an incredible 625%. The combined wealth of Mukesh Ambani, Gautam Adani and his family, Savitri Jindal and her family, Sunil Mittal and his family, and Shiv Nadar increased by 400% from 2019 to 2025. Ambani’s wealth increased by 153% from 2019 to 2025. This period has seen a further cutback on social welfare spending by the Union government, most recently reflected in its decision to terminate the legal guarantee of rural employment and its budgetary contribution to the states climbed down down from 90% to 60%. During this same period, the CFA Report notes that Indian banks have written off a mammoth Rs 19,66,554 crore of loans since 2014. This has benefitted mainly the top 1%. This same class is beneficiaries of massive tax breaks. This time was marked by the crushing of millions of small and medium enterprises and an alarming swelling of household debt, which rose from Rs 69.9 lakh crore (2019-20) to Rs 136.6 lakh crore in 2024-25 – nearly doubling in just five years. The bulk of these loans were not for productive purposes or for buying assets, but simply to make ends meet.Inequality is not inevitable: Tax the ultra-richThis ever-burgeoning inequality that concentrates quantities of wealth in the hands of the ultra-rich that are difficult even to imagine, and leaves the lives of millions in congealed poverty and growing hunger is not inevitable. As the Extraordinary Committee of Independent Experts on Global Inequality headed by Joseph Stiglitz underscored, these outcomes are ultimately a “policy choice,” reversible through progressive taxation and other redistributive tools. Oxfam observes that “governments can choose to defend ordinary people rather than oligarchs. People themselves, when organised, can present a powerful counterweight to extreme wealth. Together we can demand a fairer, more equal world.”Inequality is not just a policy choice. As Amitabh Behar, executive director of Oxfam International, explained to me, burgeoning billionaires are a sign of policy failure, not success.It is evident that working people the world over understand this, that inequality is not a chance of fate but a policy choice. The fact is that people are not accepting swelling inequality without resistance. The corporate-owned media might not show this but last year, there were more than 144 large-scale citizen protests in 60 plus countries. Most of these centred around economic questions. In Indonesia, protests by gig workers led to ministers being dropped. In Kenya, protests forced the regime to roll back regressive tax measures. The story was repeated in Madagascar, Peru and Morocco. The most dramatic developments were in India’s neighbourhood. Spontaneous violent mobs stormed the properties of the state and senior politicians, forcing regime changes in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal.File photo: A student crosses a barricade during a protest over alleged corruption by the previous government in Nepal. Photo: PTI.In Nepal, young agitators burned down even the buildings of parliament and the Supreme Court. At the base, a significant impetus for these mass and sometimes violent protests around the world was the rejection by young working people of a future of joblessness and the sustained denial of decent public education and healthcare, at a time when unimaginable levels of wealth was concentrated in only a few hands enabled by a crony state apparatus. What then are alternative policy choices? First is the imperative to tax the super rich and to deploy the resources raised from this to invest far more in public services. Moreover, in a context where shareholders make huge profits while the wages don’t even keep pace with inflation, it is the duty of the state to ensure a living wage for workers in all factory and supply chains across the world. In a country like India, nine out of ten workers are informal workers who are forced to work in insecure, unsafe jobs at dirt wages with no labour protection. This must radically change. The policy universe must also address the debt trap which has become a form of modern day colonialism, a situation in which most countries in Africa end up paying more in debt servicing than on education, health and social security combined.CFA observes that whenever universal social rights like health, jobs, education, or lower fuel prices, are proposed, these demands are dubbed to be “outlandish”, “utopian” and “impractical” because budgetary resources are said to be unavailable for these. The fact is that it is because the wealthy elites are not made to pay their fair share of taxes that governments have lesser resources to invest in ways that improve the lives of the millions. The majority of our revenues are from indirect taxation, which is intrinsically regressive because it burdens the poor disproportionately. Also read: In Charts: Inequality in India Among Highest in the World, Top 1% Holds 40% National WealthDrawing from the prescriptions from leading left economists like Prabhat Patnaik and Jayati Ghosh, CFA proposes a 2-6% tax on the wealth of the super-rich. Even a small wealth tax, it rightly observes, could generate substantial public resources for programmes in health, education, nutrition, and social security. The rapid expansion of billionaire wealth underlines the potential role that progressive taxation could play in financing essential public service, or in the language of Prabhat Patnaik, universal social rights. This wealth tax, combined with a 33% inheritance tax, would yield Rs 10.63 lakh crore annually for social rights public spending.It illustrates how just this modest wealth tax and inheritance tax can be used. It could be used to raise both public health and education spending by 1% of the GDP. These could be used to strengthen the quality of primary health care and public schools and universities.In addition, it could finance a decent pension fixed at 50% of the living wage for all persons who are not covered by formal-sector pension schemes. An alternative scenario that it draws up is that far from scrapping it, we can actually raise MGNREGA wages to Rs 800/day. In addition, it could fund 1.3% of GDP on climate adaptation, ensure a minimum support price for farmers, run community kitchens amid the raging LPG crisis and provide free air purifiers to 30 million urban families.Prabhat Patnaik and Jayati Ghosh argue that far from discouraging investment, increased public spending can in fact boost the economy from below, a kind of “bubble-up” growth. Thomas Pickety has shown that the US and Europe saw the highest growth when the taxes were at their peak (i.e. between 1940 and 1980). The scenarios that CFA proposes are of course just illustrations. The point is that lives of deprivation, dispossession and oppression of millions of impoverished working people are not inevitable. They are presently trapped in living with little hope of better futures by the stranglehold of elite capture of policy and politics by the super-rich. But this can and must change. It is entirely possible to build a country and world that is more equal and just. For this, resources can and must be raised from the rich and wealthy to assure decent life chances to every human being. Harsh Mander is a social worker and writer.