The Battle of Haldighati in 1576 had left Maharana Pratap of Mewar in severe financial distress. He was forced to retreat into the Aravali hills with a small group of loyal followers. His resources were exhausted and like the not-so-committed soldiers in the entire history of warfare, the bulk of his unpaid army had deserted. Bhama Shah, the Jain Prime Minister of Mewar and his brother Tarachand met the Maharana in the forest with their accumulated wealth. They gave their several generations’ largesse, 20,000 gold coins and 25 lakh silver coins to their king to help revive his army; the wealth could sustain a 25,000 strong army for 12 years.

Russia under Putin, and China, since the days of the reforms of Deng Xiaoping, have followed policies that have created hordes of billionaires. The Ukraine war, that has severely hit the common Russians and hurt the country’s economy, actually helped the rich. The number of billionaires in Russia was 123 in 2021. It has increased steadily since then, to 125 in 2024, 140 in 2025 and 155 at the present time. That is no surprise. Putin has been pouring Russia’s wealth into the war furnace, even borrowing from the state-owned banks with sovereign guarantees and all that money has been going to the oligarchs who own everything from armament factories to military uniform production.

Russia was cut-off from international financial markets due to sanctions and so the Russian banks had to take the burden. The domestic state debt zoomed from 23.7 trillion roubles at the beginning of 2025 to 36.6 trillion roubles ($428 billion) at present. In September, on a single day, Russia mopped up $11.55 in bond auctions and that was not a record. In November 2025, a single day had yielded $21.8 billion. The banks are now stressed as the money is not coming back and the Central Bank of Russia printed huge amounts of currency to keep up the liquidity of the banks. It fed inflation forcing the Central Bank to hike interest rates to an insane 21%. This happened in spite of India and China shoring up the Russian economy with their oil purchases and now Trump says that he too will join, hopefully dropping the 100% tariff on India for buying this oil.

But we digress. Where could Putin go from this point when his options were narrowing down by the day. The oligarchs’ purses, as noted above, were getting fatter all this time as they owned every component of the war-related production. So, Putin, the former player at USSR’s KGB and Russia’s FSB, knew where to look. On 26 March, 2026, he held a closed-door meeting with the biggest oligarchs. Later, he emerged from the meeting with a smile on his face; the ‘patriotic’ Bhama Shahs of Russia have placed their wealth to the tune of $5.63 billion at his feet to boost the war effort of the motherland. Some of the commentaries around the world were rather blatantly realistic. On 30 March, 2026, the Centre for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) wrote, “Putin tells billionaires to fill the begging bowl.” Yet, it was just the beginning.

Both the rich and the not-so-rich were extremely worried and started moving their wealth and, in some cases even their families, to safer havens abroad. It had been happening since the beginning of the war as some of the rich had anticipated the wealth grab and the actual confiscation only accelerated it. In July 2024 Ukrainska Pravda had published “Russian Oligarchs move billions abroad for fear of asset confiscation.” The asset confiscation, however, has hit even those who are accused of holding wealth abroad. Ordinary Russian were also worried that the dictator would freeze their savings and deposits in the banks to prevent the banks from collapsing. They made a beeline for withdrawing their money and Euro News published on 19 August, 2026, “Russians pull billions from banks fearing Kremlin will seize savings for war.”

The people’s apprehensions were not unfounded. The Bank of Russia started to enforce nine criteria that would flag suspicious activity by a depositor. Then the depositor would be restricted to 50,000 roubles, less than $600, within 48 hours and bigger sums would require a visit to the bank, where serious questioning might expose the depositor to criminal action. More often than not, as people queued at the ATMs, messages appeared on the screens about system outages. The Moscow Times wrote on 16 March, 2026, “Russians turn to cash as card blocks, mobile internet outages erode trust in digital payments.” Welcome to the Brave New World of Putin’s Russia!

Let us come to Putin’s neighbouring dictator and his frenemy Xi Jinping, who is happy to see Russia go down and yield the second superpower throne to China. In China, once you are in the good books of the Communist Party, you are free to accumulate wealth. With the Party’s blessings, there were an estimated 698 billionaires in China in 2021 and the number rose to 1,110 by 2026; the US and EU have less than a thousand each. India has less than 300 but that may be an undercount because the value of real estate is under-reported and there is considerable hidden wealth in cash, precious metals and benami properties. Yet, unlike India, China is a Communist country with an ideology of governing only for the peasants and workers!

The story of Jack Ma, the richest man of China at one time not too distant in the past, is symptomatic of dictators coveting the wealth of those who they enabled to get rich in the first place. He was the pride of the Party till on 24 October, 2020 he said that the Chinese “must change the pawnshop mentality of today’s finance.” All hell broke loose on Jack Ma’s businesses; his $37 billion IPO was suspended and his companies, scrutinised with a fine comb, were fined; $2.8 billion on Alibaba and $1 billion on the Ant Group. His personal wealth dropped from $61.7 billion to $30 billion and it is still falling. More ominous was his disappearance from public view on the same day as he made his speech. He reappeared with a low profile three months later and subsequently ceded controlling rights in the Ant Group. Five years on, having apparently appeased the Party, his rehabilitation was hinted in 2025, but without the bulk of his wealth, when he was seen with Xi Jinping. In the intervening period, in May 2023, the University of Tokyo’s Tokyo College announced that Jack Ma had joined there as a visiting professor!

Jack Ma was not the only one to have a taste of the power of the Party over the power of their wealth. Hui Ka Yan, founder of the collapsed real-estate giant Evergrande, too was once China’s richest man. He was sentenced to life in prison in August 2026 after a confession, that being the norm in China in criminal cases, of large-scale fraud and bribery. His entire property was confiscated and his companies were fined more than $2 billion. Xiao Jianhua was sentenced to 13 years in prison and his company Tomorrow Holdings was fined more than $8 billion. These and many other cases show that not paying attention to Xi Jinping’s directive to Chinese companies of contributing to “common prosperity” is futile; the Party always has ways to transform the rich into generous Bhama Shahs.India’s Bhama Shah voluntarily helped Maharana Pratap resume his patriotic struggle; the ones in Russia and China are being forced to shore up the rule of mortal dictators, even as their nations bleed.

( DAILYWORLD )