India’s hovering earnings inequality is now among the many highest on the earth. The hole between the haves and have-nots is starker than within the US, Brazil and South Africa, and worse than within the nation’s personal historical past below international rule. So right here’s a query for political students: With the cube so badly loaded in opposition to them, why would 1 billion voters want to make the wealthy even richer after they train their democratic alternative in April and May? What’s in it for them?

“The ‘Billionaire Raj’ headed by India’s modern bourgeoisie is now more unequal than the British Raj headed by the colonialist forces,” says a brand new research by the World Inequality Lab. The report, which spans a century, shines a highlight on 2014-2022, the primary eight years of rule by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his right-wing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP.