In sharp contradiction to the law of political participation the world over, in India it is the uneducated, and the poor who vote more than the educated middle class; Dalits and members of the “lower caste” vote more than upper castes, rural areas vote more than urban areas, women vote almost as much as men do. The new middle classes, in other words, are absent from electoral politics despite growing voter turnout.
The Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen in his book The Argumentative Indian wrote about India’s tradition of debate and argument. Indians indeed are noisy, disputative and opinionated. They love to flaunt their views and share their thoughts. No small wonder then that the maximum number of Facebook users are Indians - about 195 million compared to 191 million Americans, who form the second largestcountry group.
The only caveat here is that these often loud and assertive Indians almost invariably belong to the middle classes. The majority of Indians, on the other hand, neither have access to Facebook nor to newspaper columns. They are in many ways India’s silent majority, argumentative perhaps, who knows, but certainly unheard
The irony is that when it comes to politics it is not the decibel of opinions that count but the silent views of the toiling masses for whom democracy is not just an argument but a means to betterment.
Mainstream media which reflect middleclass views and sentiments have of late often been getting election predictions wrong despite undertaking massive surveys and spending crores on Gallup type polls. The reason is analysis tainted with middle-class prejudice.
The middle class assumes it knows how the country thinks and behaves. But increasingly the middle-class version is divorced from reality and fast diverging from the political heartbeat of the country.
The recent de-monetisation move by the Central Government sparked off scathing criticism in Social Media circles and middleclass drawing rooms. The government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi was condemned and obituaries written about its future.
Living in the suburbs in the country’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, I got a very different sense of things from working class people. They reacted to de-monetisation with a smile and a shrug and said very little.
I encountered similar sentiment in Chhattisgarh and rural Haryana. When I talked about this, my middle-class friends denounced me as a BJP agent and member of the unholy gang of Bhakts who are apparently preparing the country for a fascist rule.
Right wing intolerance in this country is a growing problem but so is the huge inequality between the affluent and the working classes. Hundreds of thousands of middle-class Indians spend on one dinner at a restaurant as much as they pay their drivers for an entire month. There is no outrage on this count.
What is worse perhaps is the Indian middle class increasingly does not put its vote where its mouth is. Voting statistics across the country show abysmal levels of voting in middle-class bastions in cities and towns.
In contrast, slum dwellers and villagers vote in large numbers. Delhi’s chief minister Arvind Kejriwal quickly realised where his votes are likely to come from and completely switched focus from middle class to working class priorities.
Not surprisingly, Delhi’s middle class have come to detest Kejriwal while the city’s majority continue to support him.
Kejriwal is one of the few politicians of middle-class descent who has been able to succeed in mass politics in recent times. In general, middle-class recruitment into fulltime politics has been on the decline
Yet, politics in India was traditionally a middle-class bastion beginning with the freedom movement in colonial times which was entirely led by the middle class. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi had stepped into Indian politics at a time when the middle-class leadership of the freedom movement was getting nowhere. The middleclass leadership was hollering about ideological values, notions of liberty and so on which made little sense to the average Indian peasant or mill worker.
Gandhi was hugely successful because he stepped out of the middle-class paradigm. In Chapra, Bihar, he for the first time articulated what could be called a “mass line”. He linked the end of colonial rule with the end of enforced cultivation of Indigo which was the ruination of the local peasantry. This link between choice in cultivation and the need to end colonial rule immediately struck a chord. The freedom movement was transformed from a middle class to a mass movement.
Despite Gandhi’s politics, politicians themselves mostly came from the middle classes and this trend continued during the first few decades after Independence
Then started the slow but inexorable influx of the underprivileged. Many of these politicians from the lower rungs were to muscle their way into India’s exclusive political club often using dodgy even criminal means. Not surprisingly, today an estimated third of Indian lawmakers are reported to have criminal records or are accused of criminal offences.
Corruption, criminality and brute power have conspired to keep the idealists among the middle classes from entering politics, leaving the fray to more and more of the strongmen variety.
Ironically, despite the lowered standards of probity amongst India’s political class, politics in many ways is much more democratic than it used to be. It is the aspirations of the poor, underprivileged silent minority that matters more today than middle-class opinions
Perhaps it is no coincidence that Mr Narendra Modi is India’s first prime minister who is not from a middle class or landowning family.Every other prime minister has been of middle or upper-class origin.
One reason for Mr Modi’s remarkable success is his ability to see beyond middleclass aspirations and opinions. His first biggest success was in snatching the leadership of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) from the hands of a middle-class oligarchy; his second was in relating to grassroots aspirations.
While the rising power of India’s underprivileged is a good thing, the decline of middle-class clout is not altogether welcome. For, traditionally the middle class has been society’s conscience keeper and ethical touchstone. A polity entirely bereft of dissent, conflicting ideologies and debate is a recipe for catastrophe
The middle classes in India’s financial capital, Mumbai, appear to have realised this as they watched their splendid city decay in front of their eyes under the rule of parochial populists. In the recent municipal polls, thousands of middle-class Mumbaikars came out to vote for the first time, flaunting their turnout on social media. It is quite possible that the middleclass vote had a significant impact on the municipal poll outcome. This hopefully is the beginning of a nationwide trend and the beginning of the return of the middle class to national politics.