India’s extraordinary economic boom has developed a split personality. Driven by energy, skill and ambition, India’s entrepreneurs are scaling new heights, but the underbelly of corruption in business and government has also surfaced with alarming clarity. As yet another great economic year came to a close, corruption scandals tumbled out of the closet with unending regularity.
Both in its rot and heady dynamism, India is beginning to resemble America’s Gilded Age (1865-1900). Ending with Theodore Roosevelt’s rise to the presidency in 1901, the Gilded Age transformed an agrarian US into an economic and industrial giant. Yet Roosevelt’s assessment was gloomy: “The dull, purblind folly of the very rich men; their greed and ignorance, and the way in which they have unduly prospered . . . these facts, and the corruption in business and politics, have tended to produce a very unhealthy condition.”
Four similarities between America’s Gilded Age and present-day India are worthy of note.