So who's the most powerful Indian of them all? Answer: The usual suspects

Is Narendra Modi more powerful than Mukesh Ambani or Gautam Adani? That’s a loaded question and the India Today Power List neatly sidesteps it by creating a separate Political Top 10 with Modi at the top. An adroit move except that in doing so, it betrays the dulling inertia of the media’s definition of power. In a year where as India Today says “winds of change have swept through India” they have only ruffled the Power List ever so slightly. The same industrialists, the same film stars, the same writers (sorry, writer) dominate. Some 18 people have fallen off the list but none in the top 20 from 2013. Narendra Modi portrays himself as the outsider shaking up Delhi’s power establishment but the Power List shows little sign of any shake-up except for the arrival of Subramanian Swamy as The Gadfly at 47. And he’s hardly a fresh new face on the firmament. Power in popular Indian parlance remains largely about money, preferably old money. The top 5 in the Power List 2014 are industrialists just like the top 5 in Power List 2013. Actually 14 of the top 15 in the Power List 2014 are industrialists with MS Dhoni at Number 14 being the lonely exception.  The names change over the years but the surnames remain constant – Ambani, Tata, Mahindra, Birla.  As for the newcomers, India Today recognises the financial power of a Deepika Padukone who makes her entry into the Power List at 48 but largely because she is worth $44.4 million or Rs 272 crore – much of which was made playing a pretty prop in a B-wood blockbuster. No mention here of the power of a Kangna Ranaut who carried an entire Queen on her pretty back, and brilliantly leveraged her small town girl made good image both off and on screen. This is not to discount the importance of money but to wonder if that’s all there is in determining power in India. Modi came to 7 Race Course Road without being born to money or coming from political pedigree. Of course he had powerful backers, powerful moneyed backers, but if nothing else the rise of Modi should have alerted us to the possibility of different kinds of power. Modi, for example, wielded the power of social media more effectively than any other Indian politician. He understands that Twitter drives the agenda as much as the op-ed pages and the evening talk shows. In fact, Twitter can drive the agenda for the evening talk shows whose resident top gun Arnab Goswami shows up at Number 26 on the Power List. It’s the viral storm of Twitter that can keep pushing something like the rape accusations against a Tarun Tejpal into the front page headlines. A large and engaged Twitter following can count almost as much as money in the bank. Subramanian Swamy clearly understands that. Without a cabinet post he leverages not just his lawyerly expertise but also his social media clout into real power. In that sense in the new power structures of India should Twitter or for that matter Google count for something since their algorithms actually determine how many of us view the world? But because their products are largely virtual, their heads do not make into Power Lists like these. But it’s no accident that the gossipy handles LutyensSpice and LutyensMasala made their debut on Twitter promising what more staid regular media cannot deliver – insider gossip. And while their follower counts are in the thousands, it will keep growing. Or take for that matter, Bollywood. This is not to suggest for a moment that an Amitabh Bachchan or a Shah Rukh Khan do not deserve a place on the list just as they deserved it last year. But it’s astounding to that that in a country whose popular culture is defined by Bollywood, not a single filmmaker or even producer makes the top 50 list. Anurag Kashyap and Ekta Kapoor made the list last year but exited it this time. One looks at the list and wonders what are the thinktanks that drive our policies. And did they change with the change in sarkar? While their heads might not be household names who are the people whose ideas are shaping the policies of a new government? Who are the Chanakyas in the new dispensation? That’s what one hopes to learn from scouring a power list – not just the usual suspects and whether they went from Number 16 to Number 19 – but the men and women whose ideas have an outsize influence on our daily lives. And that cannot be gauged from looking at bank balances necessarily. It requires us to fundamentally open up the very notion of power. Power has to be about more than goods sold and brand names. If a Supreme Court judge can halt a government in its tracks, that’s power. If young people across the country, in malls and gyms and coffee shops, hum Honey Singh songs that’s power even if millions revile him. If a Mary Kom forces Indians to remember that north-easterners are also Indians that’s power. And if a dogged Dinanath Batra notches up more victories that determine what we read in textbooks that too is power of sorts especially if a publisher decides to yield to his demands without a real fight. Whether all of them belong in the top 50 list of not is of course up for debate. But until we can understand power as something that shapes how we think and not just what we buy, power lists, like the annual sex surveys, will keep packaging old wine in new bottles and rarely tell us anything interesting or unexpected about ourselves.