Cheese Burst and Free Market.
I am pretty much an outsider to the Indian economy now. Don’t get me wrong, I still keep track of Jio’s latest investors and I still have loans to pay and I am going nowhere like Vijay Mallya. But, I never had to bear the brunt of demonetization, I never had to stand in the long queues to exchange my invalid currency or neither do I regularly calculate the GST for the pizza I buy. My closest shave was when I had to pay 200Rs for a plate of Poha in Ahmedabad airport (and my jaw literally dropped to the floor) and that’s it.
So all that I will write might be just some load of bullshit but I think there might be an ounce of truth to it. You all know the shit that’s beaten over and over again — We were a closed economy. Manmohan Singh opened it up in the 90s. McD, KFC and Dominos came home and everything has been happy ever after. That’s the popular story we hear. That was my stance ever since I got a grasp of the popular dialogue — A foreign company will come in and create job opportunities. “Look Arcelor Mittal is coming next door to Hospet. Jobs, fuck yeah!”. So much was I a fan of free market that I was all for 100% FDI in defence 4 years ago.
What changed? A better understanding of capitalism and living in the most capitalist country in the face of the world has made me understand not all is good in a free market. Yes cheese burst from Dominos is the best thing to make it to India after independence but lets take the pizza. If we order one cheese burst, the billionaires and millionaires get the pizza, the middle class get to share the left over crumbs and the poor get the cardboard. To quote how fucked up it is..
India’s richest 1% hold more than four-times the wealth held by 953 mn people who make up for the bottom 70%. [1]
Then demonetization and a series of other fucked up policies, some old and some new, tanked our GDP. Then came COVID which just made everything worse.
- The small businesses are fucked, medium ones might stay afloat and big corporate ones will survive. So in this situation opening the markets further is majorly going to benefit the bigger ones(the 1%) and the sharks from outside the border.
- The point above would make it a no-brainer for governments to get a tighter control of the market for shorter term right? That’s what Spain, Ireland and other western world countries are doing[2]. But our government is playing this game on another level. Knowing that outside investments might be going down post COVID they have taken a bet on government-owned enterprises. Privatization is selling like cup cakes from Iyengar’s Bakery. So who’s going to partake in this privatization? The 1%.
- To make things worse, more people have been pushed below poverty line due to the jobs lost in COVID. The salaries haven’t kept up with the rising cost of living already. So why privatize more? Govt would say, the population will not take frugality. We need to keep investing more. They demand more trains and more airports. But who are the ones demanding this? The 1%.
- People are looking for jobs, food security and better healthcare but our government is privatizing sectors and with it giving away the safest jobs out there(A government job still happens to be the most coveted, innit?) for the sake of vistas nobody(statistically speaking) gives a fuck about right now. But hey, the 1% want no slums in front of their Antillas!
End of the rant. TLDR: in a time when governments around the world are looking for tighter control our government is throwing a party where the only ones that are invited are neo-liberals and religious fundamentalists.
[1] Wealth of India’s richest 1% more than 4-times of total for 70% poorest: Oxfam: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/economy/indicators/wealth-of-indias-richest-1-more-than-4-times-of-total-for-70-poorest-oxfam/articleshow/73416122.cms
[2] Protectionism Spreads Globally With the New Coronavirus: https://www.wsj.com/articles/protectionism-spreads-globally-with-the-new-coronavirus-11590779442#
