The political economy behind the Ambani wedding

The Z Factor

If you’ve been following the seemingly endless $600-million Ambani wedding, you probably had one of two reactions: frustration that the money is being used for a wedding instead of a school or a hospital, or frustration that you aren’t rich enough to throw a wedding like that for yourself or your loved ones.

Let’s talk about the latter, because in a country like India where big, fat weddings are a source of pride, I would wager that many of us privately fall into that category. Weddings in India often expand exponentially based on how rich one is -- or, at least, how rich one wants to seem. So, chances are, most of us would have had an Ambani-esque wedding, save for the misfortune of not being an Ambani.

Is that why watching the Ambani wedding makes us go green with envy?

In India’s post-liberalisation capitalist era, envy toward the rich is unfashionable. India went through decades of suspicion toward the rich, resulting in a barrage of policies that were inadvertently designed to keep most people poor. To turn the page, India and its leaders embarked on a journey that celebrated wealth. To quote Deng Xiaoping, who is as famous for pithy sayings as for economic reform: “To get rich is glorious.”

But envy is often less about hating someone for what they have, and more about hating your own slim chances at getting what they have. The problem is that most Indians don’t really fancy their chances at getting so rich, so they simply end up resenting the rich. Just look at the odds. India has about 200 billionaires from among 1.4 billion people. That gives Indians a 0.000014% chance of becoming a billionaire. The US has over 800 of them, which gives Americans a 0.000242% chance at the lottery. That’s not great, but it does mean that an American is 17 times as likely as an Indian to see wealth in the billions.

And it really is a matter of luck and chance -- or more specifically, who your parents are and who you know in politics. In his 2016 book, The Rise and Fall of Nations, Ruchir Sharma explained the concept of “bad billionaires.” Bad billionaires, Sharma argued, are a product of a warped and unequal economy, where most wealth is either inherited or generated through political power as opposed to getting rich through free market competition and innovation.

On both counts, India has a terrible record. In 2023, over 40% of India’s billionaires were said to have inherited their wealth instead of making it on their own, according to the UBS Billionaire Ambitions Report. By contrast, nearly 73% of America’s billionaires and over 81% of Asia’s billionaires were “self-made” – often, products of technological innovation.

In India, given the structure of the economy and the government, the accumulation of much of that wealth necessitates proximity to political power. That is why an Ambani wedding must invite politicians from across the spectrum, lest anybody feel left out or offended. It’s also why a Jeff Bezos can afford to bankroll a newspaper that exposes a President Trump or an Elon Musk can thumb a nose at President Biden, but no Indian billionaire can ever publicly criticise anybody in power.

If India truly wants to get rich, it has to find a way to create more self-made, politically liberated billionaires. In many cases, those conditions are interlinked. Technological innovation has often gone hand-in-hand with a culture of irreverence toward political authority, because innovation is often the product of a culture that questions and rebels against the mainstream. Until then, widening wealth inequality will only spawn resentment, not inspiration. You can’t take hope from someone you can’t become.