Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd 
Mukesh and Nita Ambani’s son Anant Ambani’s marriage has revealed that the Indian monopoly houses that originated in Gujarat are proving to be anti-humanitarian and anti-social.
Everyone knows that Mukesh Ambani is the richest man in India. He and the second richest family of Gautam Adani are ardent supporters of the RSS/BJP, more particularly Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah. As part of the marriage celebrations, Modi visited them after the wedding while last month, RSS Sarsanchalak Mohan Bhagwat too paid the family a visit.
Even though there was an invitation to Sonia Gandhi, she appears not to have gone there. Many other political leaders also attended the marriage celebration, which has been going on for almost a year now.
By one estimate, more than Rs 5,000 crore have been spent on this wedding. Expensive watches and other things were handed over as return gifts to equally wealthy politicians, film stars and cricketers. Many of them are already so rich that they do not know what to do with the money they have in their bank accounts.
The Ambani family has gifted such people watches and other ornaments worth more than two crore rupees each. We do not know what gifts of what value they have given to Mohan Bhagwat and Narendra Modi. The nation would like to know from them only, because they teach morals from their RSS/BJP platforms. Are there any morals involved in this rich family giving gifts to the rich but not helping the poor in any significant way?
Ambani’s family and attendees in that wasteful marriage know that India has a large number of poor that includes tribals, children of all castes, old men and women with nobody to look after them, millions of orphans, destitutes who need food and shelter, youth who want to study in schools and colleges but their parents cannot afford to put them in educational institutions and so on.
The Ambanis are really not known for sharing their wealth with the needy through broad philanthropic structures of the kind such wealthy tycoons normally create worldwide.
Even assuming that Anant Ambani, the groom, needs the blessings of Indian Gods/Goddesses to survive and prosper in his married life – he got married to Radhika Merchant, who is also from a rich family – where should they spend their money? Should their family be spending their wealth on people who are already rich?
Would India’s Gods and Goddesses be satisfied with this kind of karuna and daya? Do they ask for transfer of wealth from wealthy to wealthy and also to spend it on vulgar display?
How do RSS/BJP leaders see this?
How do the top RSS/BJP leaders who took part in the gaudy celebrations justify their philosophy of Hindutva? How does a ‘nationalist moralism’ of this kind – where India’s wealthiest keep feeding only the wealthy but not the poorest of poor – sustain Bharat’s human spirit?
Does this morality of the rich helping the rich serve the matru bhoomi, which is full of poor people with no food to eat? Does nationalism prosper only when such Gujarati companies accumulate wealth in the process of privatising state owned industries by closing down the paths for a few jobs for reserved categories and giving gifts to the richest of the rich nationalists who hate the poor?
The East India company which ruled India and exploited us consisted of collective cartels of wealth owners which looked askance at individuals who spent the money looted from foreign countries on family luxuries. As Warren Hastings found out.
The colonial slave trade that was stopped by the intervention of William Wilberforce’s humanism came from the same religion the slave traders’ were using. That kind of counter-balancing act came from a moral basis which was part of the socio-spiritual life of the capitalists.
What the Ambanis did in the wedding celebrations was worse than feudal grandeur. How did a prime minister who repeatedly said “I am a chaiwaala” attend this kind of event? How does a so-called rashtra sevak, Mohan Bhagwat, go to that rich man’s house and bless a most wealthy couple but never a poor family’s marriage?
Where is the ‘integral humanism’ in overseeing the exploitation by monopoly companies of the national wealth of mass labour power and and then beaming in approval at the way the Ambanis are spending this wealth?
What is the moralist philosophy of Hindutva, which keeps attacking colonial rulers, who at least felt constrained by capitalist morality? The British and other Western capitalists kept their personal and family life couched in Shakesphere’s dictum, “Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy, But not express’d in fancy; rich, not gaudy”, and even the richest of the rich in Christian countries follow that dictum.
The Ambanis could have cared for Mumbai’s slum dwellers by spending part of this money on their children’s education by opening a few good schools. Their only school, the Dhirubhai Ambani International School, Mumbai, is meant for collecting massive amounts of fees from the rich. Where is their concern for the poor?
The display of opulence in the Ambani marriage ceremony – on the bodies of family members and their guests, in the halls, in the surroundings – looked so dehumanised, and a country of this level of poverty, unemployment and destitution felt tortured.
The Indian rich should stop feeding poor children with mud and feeding their own children with gold. If they don’t, the result will be that both will die.
Once a party runs its electoral campaigns with the money given by such immoral capitalists, every institution in the nation gets ruined with immoral influences. Political parties, social organisations, artists and sportspersons get bought with money and fed with immoral ethics rather getting fed with food for their well being.
There is a proverb in Telugu villages, “Perform a poor couple’s marriage even if it means hundred deceptive deeds, but never attend an immoral rich couple’s marriage even if they feed you with gold.” It is this morality which has enabled the people of India to survive and thrive through the millennia. The Ambanis will never understand this. But at least Mohan Bhagwat and Narendra Modi ought to have realised that mass morality and cash morality are moving in opposite directions in their rule.
Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd is a political theorist, social activist and author. His latest books are the Clash of Cultures—Productive Masses Vs Hindutva Mullah Conflicting Ethics and The Shudra—Vision For a New Path.