Yet for all their benefits, these decades of whirlwind growth have proved to be economically disruptive, socially bruising and environmentally destructive, leaving in their wake what novelist Rana Dasgupta has described as a sense of national ‘trauma’.18 Those benefits have also undeniably been shared unevenly, with the greatest portion of India’s new prosperity flowing to its top one per cent, or, more specifically, the top fraction of that one per cent.
