A new book shows why the super-rich in India must strive to alleviate poverty and reduce inequality

The “post-corporate capitalist world” is dominated by the super-rich who are literally devouring the earth, and are, in the words of Thomas Piketty, virtually on the brink of owning their own countries. In the post-socialist era, the most relevant question that can meaningfully be posed is: what do the super-rich owe to the world’s extremely poor? As crucial as this question may sound, it is posed and contested within the liberal discourse of global justice, which nevertheless maintains its orientalising legacy by focusing on the duties of the developed world’s super-rich towards those in the developing world. More generally, the domain of global justice is entering a period of disenchantment, largely due to its West-centricity, and often parochial and exclusionary theoretical formulations.

As India has been witnessing a “super-rich boom” at a staggering rate alongside China and Brazil, the need to ask the question of what do India’s super-rich owe to the poor warrants a deparochial framework; one that addresses West-centrism and reassess the theoretical foundations of agency, culpability and duties in the global poverty debate. Such a deparochial framework cannot be fruitfully achieved through “withdrawalist scholarship” that endorses intellectual disengagement from Western and global theorisations.

A much better alternative would be to “critically...

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