In the book I wrote on the changing character of India’s power elite (India’s Power Elite: Class, Caste and a Cultural Revolution, Penguin Random House, 2021), I devoted the last chapter to a brief consideration of an important and emerging aspect of the Indian power elite — their emigration. I called it ‘the secession of the successful’, borrowing that term from the radical American professor and politician, Robert Reich.
My fellow columnist in this magazine, the distinguished Kiran Karnik, observed at that time that in all the discussions and reviews of the book then there was little focus on the last chapter. Mr Karnik went on to observe that while the elite may be beginning to secede from the country through emigration they had already seceded by living within gated communities with private security and dependent on privately provided water, power, healthcare, education and other needs. The only way in which the outside world intervened was through pollution!
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