Of Bread and Circus: Roman Rajya in India

In a recent conversation on the state of affairs in India, I was educated about the ancient Roman politics of “bread and circus”. The Romans relied on skilfully curated distractions that kept the populace happy and distracted from the realities around them. The gladiators in the Colosseum and circus performances would keep the masses entertained while problems like hunger were taken care of by the state by ensuring a steady flow of grains and bread.

Bread placated the public and kept their basic needs fulfilled, while the circus ensured that they were distracted from the dismal state of affairs around them.I utilise American journalist Alice Schroeder’s succinct and useful explanations of what the Roman system of bread and circus meant as a framework to make my case. While we are in the times of focusing on Ram Rajya, let us compare our current state with Roman Rajya.

While we chest thump our way to being the 3rd largest economy globally, we are facing an ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor. On one hand, Indian businessmen and industrialists are climbing up on the global billionaire index while on the other, self-employed wages and regular wages have seen a negligible increase since 2017.

The government has obfuscated this truth by clutching on to NITI Aayog’s Multi-Dimensional Poverty Index which claims that 25 million individuals have been lifted out of poverty in the past 9 years. Without any information on household consumption and savings, the government has hidden income-based indicators of poverty and is relying on this flawed, inaccurate and cherry-picked statistic.

Manufacturing has reached historical lows under the Bharatiya Janata Party government (BJP). In 2022-23 it grew a dismal 1.3%. This is the second-lowest growth in the last 25 years. The only year worse than this was 2019-20, when the output declined by 3%. The focus is on the optics of being a manufacturing giant of smartphones, yet the devil is in the details. Wherein, government schemes have incentivised the exporting of phones from India, while ignoring incentivising value addition.