If you have it, you can flaunt it in India. Anant Ambani, a director of Reliance Industries ($260 billion) and the youngest son of Asia’s richest man, married his longtime girlfriend Radhika Merchant in Mumbai on Friday. It has been at least seven months of extravagant celebrations. What is most striking, however, is the acceptance of extreme displays of wealth in a deeply unequal society.
About 100 private jets ferried guests to the ceremony at Reliance-owned Jio World Centre, which opens in 2022; roads in the surrounding financial district were closed for the event. There was a pre-wedding party in March in Gujarat, near the family’s oil refinery, and another in May on a luxury cruise around Europe. Guests included, according to Bloomberg, Saudi Aramco CEO Amin Nasser; Samsung’s Jay Y. Lee; and HSBC Chairman Mark Tucker. Rihanna and Justin Bieber are among the stars who have already performed at the parties.
These are not to everyone’s taste, but they spark longings and provide entertainment in a country that loves big weddings. They also advertise India’s vibrant capitalist spirit.
China’s President Xi Jinping, meanwhile, is promoting “common prosperity” to close the wealth gap: ostentatious weddings have fallen out of fashion in the world’s second-largest economy since an anti-corruption drive began about a decade ago. Rather than asking India’s rich to tone down, Prime Minister Narendra Modi is urging them to marry in India rather than abroad to support the domestic economy and its $50 billion wedding industry.
It is true that the Ambanis are in a unique position to gloat and get away with it. Reliance’s foray into new businesses in recent years has burnished the family’s reputation among hundreds of millions of consumers; the conglomerate has launched price wars against Bharti Airtel, Amazon and Netflix, provided cheap mobile data and broadcast the cricket league for free. Last week, the family organised a mass wedding for 50 underprivileged couples.
India’s poor should not be ignored, of course. Their dissatisfaction cost Modi his electoral majority in June; politicians are well aware of the urgency of raising incomes and improving employment. A somewhat controversial survey concludes that the gap between rich and poor in India is worse than during British colonial rule. In 2022, the richest 1% of the population took almost 23% of national income, the highest level since 1922. This proportion contrasts with 16% in China, according to a report co-authored by Thomas Piketty. For now, India can still afford to celebrate its wealth.
Old friendships
Meanwhile, Modi concluded a visit to Moscow on Tuesday. On his first foreign trip of his third term, he met Vladimir Putin. The long-standing closeness between the two countries turns the vision of a bifurcated world on its head.
The consensus is that New Delhi is moving ever closer to Washington as tensions between the US and China rise, with all countries caught in the middle forced to choose sides. But India’s trade with Russia, though asymmetric due to the Asian nation’s oil purchases, grew 75% to $65 billion in 2023, while India’s trade with the US fell 9% to $119 billion.
Modi was not all smiles. He took the opportunity to burnish his statesmanship credentials by saying the deaths of innocent children were painful, in an apparent rebuke to Russia’s missile attack on Monday on a Ukrainian children’s hospital, even as the Indian leader courted Putin on issues ranging as far as space cooperation. It reinforces the idea of a multipolar world order.
The trip gave Russia the opportunity to discuss its trade relationship with the world’s fifth-largest economy, days after Putin met with Xi Jinping in Kazakhstan. Russia is increasingly dependent on the second-largest economy, though probably more than it would like.
That would help explain an ambitious goal. India and Russia aim to reach $100 billion in bilateral trade by 2030, though this would be less than half of Sino-Russian trade, which hit a record $240 billion last year. India and Russia are also studying a long-term oil deal and are discussing how to facilitate the settlement of trade in rupees. Modi’s stay in Moscow is the latest reiteration of India’s willingness to choose partners based on its own interests.
The authors are columnists for Reuters Breakingviews. The opinions are his own. The translation, by Carlos Gomez Downis the responsibility of Five days
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