Agents of Change?

Despite questions about the size and economic consequence of the middle class, there is no question that rising income levels across a large swath of the population is reshaping the country in rather profound ways.  India Calling, the new book by Anand Giridharadas, provides a good, albeit narrow, examination of the social shifts afoot.  And, of course, the economic transformations are simply seismic.  A new Asian Development Bank report finds that nearly 70 percent of the population could have middle class status within 15-years time, a development that would remake India into a heavily consumerist and urbanized place.  The rise of a young, urban-dwelling consumer class is credited, among other things, for the increasing number of contemporary music festivals similar to those in the United States and Europe, as well as making India more of a coffee-drinking nation and expanding its organized café market.

But is the middle class dynamic at the root of the political mobilizations championed by Hazare and Ramdev?  And is it the impulse behind the recent election results in West Bengal and Tamil Nadu, which have lead one observer to conclude that

the much-hyped middle class may finally be consolidating as a political force to be reckoned with, especially in the urban centers.  Educated and informed, it is starting to assert itself politically by exploiting the citizen’s levers in a free society, including the judiciary and a vigorously competitive electronic and print media.

Some caution might be in order, however.  Middle class participation in the electoral process continues to be limited and is in any case far outweighed by the hundreds of millions of rural Indians who have yet to enjoy much of the fruits of the country’s economic boom.  As evidenced by the long-delayed reform agenda and the persistent resort to economic populism, the political class continues to pay deference to poor rural voters.  Gurgaon, the world’s outsourcing capital that is located just outside of New Delhi, is a microcosm of the country’s middle class transformation.  Yet as a New York Times article last week makes clear, civic groups there trying to improve municipal life are easily ignored by politicians and government bureaucrats.  A comparable story occurred in the aftermath of the November 2008 terrorist strikes in Mumbai, when the bourgeoisie (I use the term in its social science meaning) rose in outrage at the government’s abject failure (see here and here) to respond effectively to – let alone prevent in the first place – the assaults.  Yet the clamor quickly petered out and had no effect on the mid-2009 parliamentary elections, when only 43 percent of Mumbai’s electorate bothered to turn out.  This outcome is consistent with a 2007 CNN-IBN survey that found that a majority of the middle class is simply not interested in politics. 

Data from the most recent (April-May) state elections likewise belie expectations that political change is a simple function of middle-class attainment.  Voter participation in prosperous urban areas in West Bengal and Tamil Nadu was markedly below state-wide averages.  A similar pattern held in Kerala, Assam and Puducherry.

So is there any connection at all between middle class expansion and increased political mobilization?  Noted American economist Nancy Birdsall suggests not.  She argues that India is actually missing a middle class, since most of the people usually viewed in that category are really among the most affluent in the country.  Nor does she believe that this population segment has much interest in bringing about political change, since virtually all urban households with apparent middle class status are comprised of workers who are in some way dependent on government for their income, whether as civil servants or employed by parastatals or other institutions (banks, extractive industries) highly dependent on public policies.

Rupa Subramanya Dehejia, at the Wall Street Journal’s India Real Time blog, offers an alternative perspective.  She opines that Hazare’s followers and Ramdev’s supporters really comprise two different categories and may have divergent policy agendas, to boot.  In her view, the former are largely drawn from the Anglicized and urbanized upper middle class, while the latter come from the vernacular and rural lower middle class.  Ramdev’s swadeshi rhetoric advocating economic autarchy also is at odds with the liberalizations that have empowered Hazare’s support base.  Rather than presenting a united front, the two groups may come into tension with each other in the future.

As with so much about contemporary India, the political trajectory and ultimate impact of its expanding middle class is a moving target.  Change is indeed happening, though a healthy skepticism about its exact contours and meaning is not out of place.