During the Second World War, stories were told of black marketeers who hoarded cigarettes, butter, and sugar, and sold them at obscene prices. The world despised them. They were looked at as parasites, gnawing at the miseries of ordinary folk, profiteering while others bled.
But here in India, oh how we have evolved!
Why be a small-time black marketeer when you can become a billionaire profiteer? Why smuggle cigarettes when you can smuggle in conscience, and while you’re at it, fill tankers with crude?
Look at the figures: according to data from the Finland-headquartered Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) Russian crude was just three percent of Jamnagar refinery’s total imports in 2021. Today, it’s fifty percent. Yes, five-zero. In the first seven months of this year alone, 18.3 million tonnes came from Russia, worth $8.7 billion. A neat sixty-four percent jump. And as the bombs fall on Ukrainian schools and hospitals, the cash registers in India’s plush corporate towers ring louder than church bells on Easter morning.
Tell me, dear reader, if during the war you hated the man selling sugar at ten times the price, how then do you applaud the man selling his soul a hundred times over?
And yet, what do we do? We clap. We praise. We write glowing business features of “India’s richest man.” We forget the butter and cigarettes, and instead celebrate barrels of oil that fund more missiles, more tanks, and more death. We admire “business acumen,” forgetting it is blood-stained arithmetic.
A small country fights a bully. The bully pounds it with rockets. And here we stand at the side of the bully, counting profits, sipping lattes, and saying, “Well, business is business.”
Shame on us.
When will we have the guts to call a spade a spade? When will we say profiteering at the cost of lives is not genius, but moral bankruptcy? That it is no different from a wartime black marketeer, only with a sharper suit and better PR?
The tragedy of today’s world is that we excuse billionaires what we condemn in ordinary men. The black marketeer is jailed, but the oil profiteer is garlanded. The petty thief is despised, the colossal profiteer knighted.
And as for us—oh, we are complicit. Every time we stay silent, every time we shrug, every time we whisper “practicality” we too fund the war.
Not with oil barrels, but with cowardice.
Yes, I hear you say, “But Bob, this is how nations survive!” No, my friend. This is how nations sell their souls. Survival without integrity is not life—it’s existence. And nations, like men, are remembered not by their profits, but by their principles.
So, the next time you see glowing headlines about record refinery profits, remember the black marketeer in his dingy den. And then ask yourself, is the man in the gleaming skyscraper very different?
Maybe it’s time we stopped applauding profiteers and started calling them what they are—funders of war.
And maybe, just maybe, it’s time we said: “Shame on us…!”