Sometime in the 1990s, when New Delhi came out of its socialist mindset and embraced free enterprise and the rich and powerful were no longer shy of celebrating their elitism, the Delhi media began publishing a list of the rich, famous and powerful.There was an earlier era when the powerful played down their power and the wealthy shied away from showing off. That is passe. Today the arrogance of power is on full display and billionaire bling is on reality TV.Over the past quarter century, the national media periodically put out lists of billionaires, of the politically powerful and of the ‘movers and shakers’ in the Delhi Darbar. Any such list is always contested. Everyone tends to have an opinion on whether X deserved to be at No 3, while Y is at No 33. That is partly the purpose of publishing such lists. To seek a talking point around a publication.Listing the rich is easy since there are numbers that define them. Listing the ‘powerful’ is not that simple. Any such list can and will be disputed.I know of individuals who were eager to get on to such lists and even know some who were unhappy to attract attention to themselves. A senior civil servant who kept a low profile through most of his career finally stepped out to even pose in front of a camera, with bright lights penetrating the dark corners of his South Block office when a magazine listed him in the country’s ten most powerful. Such has been the appeal of these lists.While some may pooh-pooh these exercises in pandering to the vanity of the powerful, such lists do tell us something both about changes in the composition of the country’s power elite and the media’s perception of who constitute the elite.The Indian Express’s ‘List of the Most Powerful Indians’ (March 2025), once again offers an interesting database for a student of power. Coming as this list does a full decade after a major regime change in New Delhi, this year’s list also offers us a basis to judge the kind of transformation that has occurred in the country’s pyramid of power.Of course, like all such lists, this one too is the product of the subjective thinking of the newspaper’s editors and publishers. That’s par for the course. Questions will not only be asked about the list itself, but also about the ranking within the list.By what definition of power does Mohan Bhagwat, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh chief, figure in rank below foreign minister S. Jaishankar? Or, indeed, can Amitabh Bachchan really be pushed all the way down to 99 out of 100?There is no point wasting time on such questions. The more interesting ones to ask are what is the social composition of any list of the ‘powerful’ and what does it tell us about the changing power structure.First, some facts. Of the country’s 100 most powerful, the IE list has only seven women (four politicians, two billionaires and one movie actor).In the top 50 of the most powerful, 16 are Brahmins, nine Banias, two OBCs, one Dalit (Kharge), one tribal (Soren) and one Muslim (Omar Abdullah).Among the top 50, only nine are from south India (five chief ministers, two politicians, one sportsperson and one industrialist).There isn’t a single scientist, scholar or educationist in this list of the powerful and only one engineer (the administrative head of ISRO).There are many ways in which this list, like any other, can be dissected. Profession, religion, caste and region are of particular relevance to understanding the composition of the country’s power elite.Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the opinion makers who sought to define him have long argued that his assumption of power constituted a regime change. In many ways it has, and I have tried to capture some dimensions of that change in my book, India’s Power Elite: Class, Caste and a Cultural Revolution (Viking Penguin, 2021).Yet, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose – the more things change, the more they remain the same. The individuals who have entered ‘Lutyens ki duniya’, as Modi once dubbed the Delhi Darbar, may have changed, but their caste and regional identity has not changed by much. The Khan Market Gang now wears saffron and votes for Rekha Gupta.A similar list of 100 most powerful done in 2013 would perhaps not have included Mohan Bhagwat and Gautam Adani in the top ten, but they would have figured in the top 100 or so.There are of course new entrants to any such list, but its caste and class composition would have been similar. So too the regional spread of the top hundred. As Sanjeev Sanyal, a member of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council observed recently, there has been little churn within the business elite in India, with seven out of the ten top business groups of 2005 remaining within the top ten in 2025.What should worry any society is the gender bias (only seven women out of 100) and the regional bias (only 19 south Indians out of 100) and that entertainers are viewed as more powerful than scholars and scientists.While some may criticise any such list and prefer one over another, the fact remains that the benefits of the growth process remain skewed in a variety of ways and so does our imagination of power.Sanjaya Baru is an author, a former newspaper editor and adviser to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire & Galileo Ideas – and has been updated and republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.
