India
has not really had a vibrant tradition of philanthropy.
In feudal times, like everywhere else, the rulers scarcely
bothered to use this tool of social legitimacy, so secure
were they in their power secured by other means. The
wealthy in general, when they did spend for charitable
causes, concentrated their efforts and resources on
religious institutions rather than any secular activities
designed to benefit the needy or deserving at large.
In
terms of capitalist philanthropy, the early pioneering
industrialists of the late 19th and early 20th century
were probably the best that we have had in this regard.
The Jamshedji Tatas, Lala Shri Rams and a few others
set up educational and cultural trusts and created institutions
that the country still benefits from. But since then,
the record has been patchy and generally poor. Estimates
of the contributions made by the wealthy of India to
charitable causes regularly find that they are well
below international averages, and usually completely
minuscule in relation to the large surpluses generated
by the population, which accrue disproportionately to
such individuals.
In fact, evidence of the reverse flow of wealth was
evident in colonial times. Specifically, it was common
to find major and minor princes and other feudal title
holders using the wealth extracted by exploiting the
peasantry of India to purchase expensive real estate
in England, live in luxury there and hold large and
flamboyant parties for the upper classes of the colonial
power, in efforts to acquire the social acceptance that
was made so difficult by the colour of their skin. Since
the colour of money generally dominates other shades,
some of these princes did indeed gain entry into elite
social circles. But contemporary accounts still reveal
the rather amused, ironic and patronising nature of
such acceptance, even as the guests had no difficulty
in partaking of the lavish hospitality provided by the
Indian hosts.
But the new 21st century is supposed to be different
from those rather pathetic old days, when our ruling
classes were slavishly devoted to signs of acceptance
from the old white societies. We are now an emerging
power, aren’t we, with a rapidly growing economy, a
young population that provides lots of potential, and
some of the richest and most ambitious capitalists to
be found anywhere in the world. So we are now supposed
to be much more self-confident, more able to look inwards
and to our neighbours and use our resources to benefit
our own society and people, right?
Wrong, unfortunately. Our dynamic new bourgeoisie unfortunately
seems to have even less self-confidence than the brave
individuals who managed to build industrial empires
starting from a heavily colonial and difficult context.
Some recent moves on the ''charitable'' front in particular
suggest how far this bourgeoisie has to go before it
will behave in even the most obvious ways that capitalists
across the world have done in order to acquire legitimacy
in their own societies.
Our new corporate leaders are mostly those who have
inherited wealth, and also have benefited from a wide
range of explicit and implicit subsidies provided by
the government, ranging from free or cheap land to tax
holidays of rebates, access to public institutional
credit and little accountability on repayment. Even
the ''self-made'' among them have benefited from the highly
subsidised system of public higher education that gave
them the skills to conquer the world.
Yet the record of corporate or individual donations
is embarrassingly paltry, despite all the tax sops offered
for contributions to educational and charitable institutions
and all the expansive talk about corporate social responsibility.
Representatives of foundations that seek such donations
are full of stories about the churlish and penny-pinching
ways of our donors. It is not just education in general
that has failed to attract sufficient such funds. The
extremely constrained ability of several major educational
institutions to attract large funds even from the most
economically successful alumni tells its own story.
But the surprising thing is that, it is not as if such
high-wealth individuals do not want to give their charity
to education. They do indeed, but to the biggest and
richest and most famous institutions abroad rather than
any struggling institution in their own country. It
now seems that major donors are competing with each
other as to how much each can outdo the other in contributing
to these foreign institutions. If one gives $5 million
to Yale University, another seeks to provide the same
amount to Columbia University and yet another provides
$10 million to Harvard. The most recent aggrandising
gift has involved $50 million going to Harvard University.
Meanwhile the fuss that the London School of Economics
has made over the spouse of another magnate, inviting
her to deliver a lecture presided over by academic luminaries
despite her evident lack of any academic achievement,
suggests that we may soon see a flow of funds to that
institution.
None of these donors has given anything like an equivalent
amount to any Indian higher education institution, and
several of them have shaken off eminently deserving
requests for a fraction of these amounts to improve
the facilities and quality of existing Indian universities.
Of course there may be some direct quid pro quos involved
in such donations, such as admission of progeny, but
this seems like an excessively high price to pay for
what is after all, a relatively small matter.
It seems that the same lack of confidence that propelled
our feudal princelings to spend the rents extracted
from starving peasants to provide munificent hospitality
to the sniggering English elite in colonial times still
pervades our new bourgeoisie. The urge is use the resources
generated at home to seek foreign acceptance and legitimacy,
rather than build in the society which enabled the enrichment.
This particular trait seems to be particularly developed
among the Indian bourgeoisie. It has hard to imagine
the pioneers of American philanthropy, who created foundations
that are now international (like Ford, Rockefeller,
MacArthur and so on) spending their money in England
rather than in the US. So it is not about capitalism
in general but the peculiar Indian variant, which unfortunately
still bears the marks of colonised minds in a globalised
setting.
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