The Representation Question
The warning sounded by Oxfam this week should not surprise anyone who has watched politics steadily bend towards wealth over the past two decades. What should, however, give us pause is the scale of the imbalance it describes: billionaires, the report says, are 4,000 times more likely to hold political office than ordinary citizens. That is not merely an inequality of income; it is an inequality of voice, access and power. When money becomes the dominant qualification for public office, democracy slowly hollows out from within. Elections continue, parliaments sit, laws are passed—but the social contract frays as citizens begin to feel that governance no longer responds to them, only to those who can afford proximity to power.
Seen against this bleak global picture, India’s reservation system stands out in the report as a “compelling” counter-example—an unusual acknowledgement in an international discourse that often treats affirmative action as a moral question divorced from political outcomes. India’s experience suggests something more pragmatic: that structured inclusion can alter who sits at the table and, over time, what the table discusses. Reservations for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in legislatures were not acts of charity; they were constitutional design choices rooted in the recognition that historical exclusion cannot be corrected by formal equality alone. The recent decision to extend reservations to women in legislatures builds on the same logic—that representation shapes priorities, and priorities shape policy. It is no coincidence that states and local bodies with stronger representation from marginalised communities have often been more assertive on issues such as welfare delivery, land rights, social security and basic services.
Critics of reservations frequently argue that representation does not automatically translate into empowerment. That is true—but it is also incomplete. Representation is not the end of the road; it is the opening of a gate. A first-generation legislator from a marginalised background may face entrenched hierarchies within parties, bureaucratic resistance, or the blunt force of money politics. Yet without that initial presence, the possibility of influence would not exist at all. Over time, reserved seats have produced not just symbolic participation but political careers, local leadership pipelines and a slow recalibration of what leadership looks like. The shift is uneven and often frustratingly slow, but it has altered the grammar of Indian democracy in ways that are easy to overlook precisely because they are now part of the system’s everyday functioning.
Oxfam’s report also points beyond India, citing Brazil’s experiment with participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre as another model of how ordinary citizens can exercise real power over public resources. The lesson here is not that one model fits all, but that institutional imagination matters. Democracies decay not only because elites capture them, but because systems fail to evolve mechanisms that keep citizens meaningfully engaged between elections. Participatory budgeting, strong local governments, empowered municipal councils, social audits and transparent grievance redressal systems all operate on the same principle: they lower the cost of participation for ordinary people. When decision-making moves closer to daily life—schools, health centres, roads, water supply—citizens are more likely to engage, organise and hold authorities accountable.
This is where the report’s emphasis on civic space becomes crucial. Political empowerment does not survive in an environment where dissent is viewed with suspicion, protest is criminalised by default, or civil society organisations are treated as adversaries rather than democratic partners. Trade unions, grassroots movements, journalists and advocacy groups are often dismissed as irritants to governance. In reality, they are among the few counterweights available to concentrated economic power. When these actors are weakened, the vacuum is rarely filled by “neutral” institutions; it is filled by those with money, networks and influence. Transparency laws, access to information, independent oversight bodies and a free press are not procedural niceties—they are the plumbing of democracy, invisible until they break, and catastrophic when they do.
The deeper challenge, hinted at but not fully explored in the report, is that billionaire power today operates less through crude corruption and more through structural influence. Campaign finance, revolving doors between business and government, control over digital platforms, ownership of media, and agenda-setting through philanthropy all shape public life in ways that are legal, subtle and hard to regulate. Countering this does not require demonising wealth, but it does demand clarity about boundaries. Democracies must decide how much economic power is too much political power—and then build institutions capable of enforcing that line. India’s reservation system shows that deliberate design can tilt the balance back, at least partially, towards the many. The task now is to extend that spirit beyond representation alone, into campaign finance reform, stronger local governance, and a renewed commitment to protecting civic freedoms. Democracy, after all, does not fail overnight. It erodes slowly—unless societies choose, consciously and repeatedly, to reinforce it.
