Responding to the famous provocation — If you’re an egalitarian, how come you’re so rich? — by the political philosopher, G.A. Cohen, about the gap between believing in economic equality and living a wealthy lifestyle, can neither be easy nor comfortable. The numbers should make this discomfort unavoidable.
The World Inequality Report 2026 estimates that India’s richest 10% receive 57.7% of the national income and own 65% of the country’s wealth. The top 1% alone accounts for 22.6% of income and 40.1% of wealth, while the bottom half receives 15% of income and owns just 6.4% of wealth. These are not merely numbers for economists as they tell us something about the India in which the word, ‘merit’, is deployed. We have a Constitution that promises equality, but we ultimately live in a society in which birth still influences education, occupation, income, social networks and
dignity. We speak endlessly about merit, but rarely about the conditions that produce it.
The familiar argument goes like this: I worked hard, I succeeded, therefore I deserve what I have. But before congratulating ourselves on the purity of individual effort, we should ask a few inconvenient questions as well. Who among us has had access to better schools? Who grew up in a house with books? Who could afford private tuitions? Who could speak English with confidence because it was spoken at home? Who could afford to fail an examination once or twice? Who inherited a house, land, business, professional contacts or social confidence? Who knew how to navigate an elite institution because someone in the family had already done it? None of these questions makes hard work irrelevant, but they make the mythology of the entirely self-made individual difficult to sustain. This is where India’s caste question becomes unavoidable. Caste has historically determined access to land, education, occupations, networks, status and power. The fact that discrimination is prohibited does not mean that the accumulated consequences of centuries of exclusion disappear overnight.
This is why the caste census matters. It can potentially tell us something we have too often preferred not to know about the graded access to opportunity and resources. There will, of course, be arguments over methodology, categories and the use of the data. Those arguments are necessary. But refusing to look at inequality does not make inequality disappear. A democracy cannot seriously debate social justice while insisting on debating it without adequate knowledge of the society it seeks to change.
The argument against affirmative action often invokes merit: why should someone receive an opportunity because of the group into which he or she was born rather than because of what he or she has achieved? The question sounds compelling until one asks whether opportunity itself is distributed equally. If inherited wealth, inherited education, and inherited networks are allowed to pass from one generation to another without being described as an assault on merit, why should corrective measures for inherited disadvantage be treated as a violation of merit?
This does not mean that every person born into privilege is personally responsible for historical injustice. It means privilege is a social fact and pretending otherwise does not make the social order more just. This is perhaps the most useful lesson one can draw from Cohen. Justice cannot be left entirely to Parliament, courts and government schemes. Institutions matter enormously, particularly in a country with India’s history of exclusion. But institutions operate through people, and social inequality is reproduced not only by laws but also by everyday choices.
Let us consider the perfectly legal life of privilege. A wealthy family buys the best education it can afford, lives in a secure neighbourhood, uses private healthcare and gives its children every possible advantage. It employs domestic workers and pays them what the market permits. None of this is necessarily illegal. Yet, when millions of such choices accumulate, they help reproduce a society in which some children begin life several steps ahead of others.
This is also why equality cannot be reduced to charity. A wealthy person can donate generously and remain entirely comfortable with the structures that produce inequality. Charity may help the poor, but it does not necessarily ask why there are so many poor people in the first place. And hence, solidarity is more demanding. It asks what we are willing to question, not merely what we are willing to give. What do we pay the person who works in our home? What wages do we consider acceptable for a sanitation worker? Why is the person delivering our food expected to work without security while we demand greater convenience at lower prices? Why is the agricultural labourer expected to survive on an income that the urban middle class would consider impossible to live on?
India’s economic growth has created wealth and opportunity on a scale that previous generations could scarcely have imagined. But growth alone does not settle the question of justice. If economic mobility is accompanied by the hardening of social hierarchies, we have to ask who is actually mobile and who is simply being told to run faster.
There is another uncomfortable dimension to this debate. The egalitarian often asks the State to do more — tax wealth, improve healthcare, expand public education, provide reservations, create jobs, strengthen welfare, and protect workers. These are legitimate demands. But what do we demand of ourselves? Can we speak of social justice while insisting that every private advantage is simply a matter of individual desert? Can we invoke fraternity while accepting profound differences in dignity between those who serve and those who are served?
The Indian Constitution never envisioned equality as merely equality before the law. Its moral architecture is built around liberty, equality, and fraternity. These words were not meant to describe the conduct of governments alone. They were intended to shape the republic, and that requires a change in how we understand privilege. Privilege need not produce guilt; success need not be apologised for either. But they must produce empathy and responsibility or at least not be converted into a theory of superior human worth.
Perhaps that is why Cohen’s provocation remains so uncomfortable. It turns the mirror towards the person making the argument. If I believe inequality is unjust, what does that belief require of me? The real test of an egalitarian society is whether equality eventually becomes a habit for us in our homes, workplaces, institutions, and our understanding of one another. India needs a social ethos in which privilege produces responsibility rather than entitlement. Success should especially not be an excuse to forget those who began the race much further behind.
Manoj Kumar Jha is member of Parliament (Rajya Sabha), Rashtriya Janata Dal