THE BILLIONAIRE RAJ
A JOURNEY THROUGH INDIA’S NEW GILDED AGE
JAMES CRABTREE
Oneworld, 384pp, £18.99
India before the collapse of the Soviet Union was a highly protectionist, socialist state, but Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s economic reforms in 1991 ushered in a transformational change. As Crabtree’s book ‘colourfully details’, wrote Kapil Komireddi in the
Spectator, ‘it was under Singh that inequality, crony capitalism and corruption attained Himalayan proportions. Indian billionaires, proliferating from a mere two in the 1990s to more than 100 today, finance their extravagant lifestyles with money raided from state banks. Crabtree evocatively profiles these parasites in their habitats: gaudy palaces, private jets, elaborate weddings, Neronian bacchanals.’
Crabtree, the former Mumbai correspondent of the Financial
Times, ‘provides an unsettling portrait of India’s go-go 2000s’, wrote Bilal Qureshi in his New York
Times review. ‘Instead of a raucous celebration of liberalisation, Crabtree offers an exploration of the overnight ascent and dubious finances of India’s new billionaire class. Raising cantilevered skyscrapers over slums and building fortunes on graft and kickbacks, the executives profiled in the book operate with the unobstructed swagger of robber barons. Crabtree’s Indian story is a cautionary tale of globalisation’s excesses and the consequences for one of the world’s most unequal societies.’ Jonathan A Knee, writing in the
Washington Post, regretted that ‘he devotes only the shortest of the book’s three sections to descriptions of individual billionaires’. However, the failure ‘to deliver on the promise of a comprehensive portrait of a newly minted cluster of billionaires who rule the world’s second most populous country does not mean the book is without interest. On the contrary, the book is chock-full of profoundly revealing vignettes from various corners of India’s endlessly diverse society and economy.’