Politicians squirm as middle class awakens
The Hazare movement offered a glimpse of what could happen if the middle class was mobilised across the country
Shubhrangshu Barman Roy and his childhood friends are among the winners in India’s economic rise.
They have earned graduate degrees, started small companies and settled into India’s expanding middle class. They sometimes take vacations together and meet for dinners or parties, maybe to celebrate a new baby or a new business deal.
Yet in August, Roy and his friends donned white Gandhi caps, boarded a Metro train in Delhi’s fast-growing suburb of Dwaraka and rode into New Delhi like a band of revolutionaries to join the large anti-corruption demonstrations led by the rural activist Anna Hazare. They waved Indian flags, distributed water to the crowds and vented their outrage at India’s political status quo. “I could feel that people really wanted change,” Roy, 36, recalled proudly.
It may seem unlikely that middle-class Indians would crave change. They mostly live in rapidly growing cities and can afford cars, appliances and other conveniences that remain beyond the reach of most Indians.
Theirs is the fastest growing demographic group in the country, and their buying power is expected to triple in the next 15 years, making India one of the most important consumer markets in the world. But buying power is not political power, at least not yet in India.
The wealthier India has become, the more politically disillusioned many of the beneficiaries have grown — an Indian paradox. The middle class has vast economic clout yet often remains politically marginalised in a huge democracy where the rural masses still dominate the outcome of elections and the tycoon class has the ear of politicians.
Elsewhere in Asia, emerging middle classes once helped topple authoritarian governments in South Korea and Taiwan, as rising incomes brought demands for greater democratic rights — an equation still simmering in China. But India had democracy before it had vast wealth, and the dissatisfaction of the middle class here has focused on the failings of the country’s democratic institutions.
For several years, the question of what, if anything, could awaken the middle class has hovered over Indian politics. Often dismissed as apathetic toward electoral politics, the middle class sometimes seemed to have in effect seceded from the nation — living in private compounds, using private schools and hospitals, and showing little interest in voting — minimising, when possible, its contact with the state.
“People have completely lost hope in all political parties and personalities,” said Arvind Kejriwal, a prominent activist and key adviser to Anna Hazare. “They believe that every five years, you just change the faces and the parties but nothing is going to happen. There was a huge sense of despair.”
A generation ago, the Indian middle class was smaller and centered around civil servants who lived in government housing and sent their children to government schools. Today’s middle class is a creature of the economic reforms of the 1990s and is tightly wedded to the private sector.
Its success is celebrated in Bollywood movies, and the Indian news media serve as a bullhorn for its views. If the earlier middle class saw some politicians as heroes, idolising Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, this middle class mostly regards politicians with contempt, placing more faith in business leaders or, in some cases, in nongovernmental organisations. Government is no longer regarded as a provider or enabler, but as an obstacle.
“This middle class is less about ‘what the state can do for me’ than ‘the state is preventing me from doing what I want to do,’ ” said Devesh Kapur, director of the Centre for the Advanced Study of India at the University of Pennsylvania.
The Hazare movement rattled India’s political establishment because it offered a glimpse of what could happen if the middle class was mobilised across the country. Professionals and college students provided the organisational spine and money, that brought hundreds of thousands of people of all backgrounds onto the streets in what many described as a political awakening.
Many analysts say that India needs a politically engaged middle class as a corrective force. Others are more sceptical, arguing that middle-class alienation is as much about caste as class — a backlash by upper castes against the rise of political parties representing the lower castes since the 1990s. And still others suggest that middle-class disgust with politicians stems from a lack of patience with the messy mechanics of democracy, an unrealistic desire for a Singaporean efficiency.
Roy and his friends say they have spent years focusing on their careers, acting mostly as spectators to politics, often as a jeering peanut gallery. “We’ve been told since our childhoods, ‘Politics is bad, don’t get into politics,’ ” said Partho Nag, one of Roy’s friends. “But the point is that somebody has to clean it up. We can’t just scold people.”
Mobilisation of middle class
No one likes corruption, yet the Hazare movement raised a question: Why did the middle class mobilise on this issue? Dissecting and defining the middle class is an obsession in the Indian news media, yet analysts warn against depicting it as a homogenous group or equating it economically with middle classes in the west.
Estimates of the group’s size range from 30 million to 300 million people, while incomes also vary widely. India’s poor have been the hardest hit by rising inflation, yet inflation has also deepened the anxieties of the middle class, including many of those who joined the Hazare protests.
McKinsey Global Institute, a consulting group, has estimated that India’s middle class could grow to nearly 600 million people by 2030. Today, nearly three-quarters of India’s gross domestic product comes from cities, where less than a third of India’s population lives, an imbalance that correlates with the divide between middle-class economic and political power.
“For politicians, the city has primarily become a site of extraction, and the countryside is predominantly a site of legitimacy and power,” Ashutosh Varshney, an India specialist at Brown University, wrote recently. “The countryside is where the vote is; the city is where the money is. Villages do have corruption, but the scale of corruption is vastly greater in cities.”
Roy found himself more drawn to Hazare partly because Hazare became a beacon for civil society figures who were filling the vacuum created by a weak government. Kejriwal, one Hazare loyalist, is well known for his role in the freedom of information movement that established a constitutional right for citizens to obtain government documents.
Another adviser, Kiran Bedi, famous as the first woman in India’s elite police civil service, became a social activist after getting sidelined in her career as a police reformer.
“She was the one who could have changed the system,” Roy said. “But she was the one thrown out of the system.”
That has led to a striking dissonance: Recent polls show that middle-class and college-age respondents are optimistic about their long-term economic future and that of the country, yet are deeply pessimistic about the state of politics and political parties. They are proud of India yet disgusted with Indian politics.
A lasting engagement?
On September 28, a month after Hazare ended his fast, a group of Hazare volunteers gathered around a young lawyer named Rishikesh Sharma as he pointed across Parliament Street at a columned, whitewashed New Delhi police station. They were preparing to march onto the station grounds and ask officers to sign pledges refusing to accept bribes.
“This is a regular government department,” Sharma said, reassuringly. “Since their salaries are paid with taxes we pay to the government, we have every right to pose questions about how it is being run.”
The station house protest was one of the events organised in recent weeks to keep the Hazare movement energised and the middle class engaged. As much as the government, the Hazare team had been startled by the huge outpouring during the August protests and has since tried to deepen its connection with the middle class.
“It’s really important to keep them,” said Prashant Bhushan, a Hazare adviser, in an interview in September. “This movement is not only about corruption and the Lokpal. This movement has acquired a deeper dimension of seeking to change the whole system.”
The question now is whether the middle-class activism is merely an outburst of discontent or the makings of a movement. In the past month, the Hazare team has waded into certain parliamentary races as part of a campaign to press the governing Congress Party on passage of a final Lokpal bill — even as it has struggled with internal squabbling.
Recently, Hazare distanced himself from Bhushan over comments he made about the restive region of Kashmir. Ms Bedi has also come under attack for her handling of airplane tickets for speaking engagements.
The disagreements underscore the movement’s lack of ideological coherence: Some critics have been suspicious because of the support given to Hazare by right-wing Hindu groups. At the same time, Bhushan is a left-leaning, vocal critic of the 1991 economic liberalisation policies — the policies credited with helping to create today’s middle class.
For now, Roy is drawn to Hazare because of his rectitude more than any ideological kinship. Roy’s group has made a personal pledge to no longer pay bribes. It is also running a small nongovernmental organisation to help students at a school in Uttar Pradesh state. Roy does not expect quick change on corruption, but he does think India’s economic beneficiary class now must engage in politics, too.
(Sruthi Gottipati, Nikhila Gill and Hari Kumar contributed to the article)
