India’s black money problem dated back at least as far as the heights of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s tryst with socialism during the 1970s. For a time, wealthy Indians faced punitive top rates of tax as high as 97.75 percent, teaching the prosperous to hide their assets and entrepreneurs to disguise profits.13 “In theory, this should have ushered in a socialist paradise,” as economist Swaminathan Aiyar once put it. “In practice, it converted India into a massive black economy.”
