Being middle class is ok

One of the more insidious effects of quota politics is that identity has colonised reason. We assume that positions on issues are determined by who people are. On this view the upper caste will oppose quotas, because it is in their caste interests, and the so-called lower castes will demand them because it is in their interest. There is no doubt much self-interested calculation at work in our positions, and there is gratuitous name-calling. Protesters against the quota sometimes used images that could be construed as demeaning; just as defenders of quota level the charge manuwadi or draw analogies of upper castes with the Ku-Klux clan, as if such moral charges should be bandied about easily. There is little doubt that different groups are often not as well represented in different walks of life as they should be. But from this premise we have gone to the insidious conclusion that identity determines the validity of arguments. Show me your identity and I can impugn you, the logic of the argument be damned. This is the profound sense in which caste based politics has diminished us. All there is, is a clash of interests and wills. No leader or thinker can speak on behalf of the whole, the authority of each will remain confined to the groups they come from. What a corrosion of democracy and subversion of public reason! The whole idea of citizenship and reciprocity is effaced if caste is equated with reason, which many protagonists in the debate are doing.

The second corrosion we have witnessed is that democracy has been equated with a numbers game and reduced to pure identity head counts. Of course in a representative democracy, numbers matter; and in the end we have no option but to accede to elected representatives. But when instead of focusing on the quality of arguments and consequences of policy, mere numbers are cited only a tiny minority thinks this, democracy is put at risk. After all, this is exactly the logic that pure majoritarian politics pursues: if you have the numbers you are right. Many have argued that the last decade or so has seen a considerable deepening of Indian democracy. Power has shifted to hitherto marginalised groups, and politics has indeed become a more representative space. But is this all that there is to deepening democracy, the counting of heads and identities represented? It is probably true that the middle class, by virtue of its financial and educational endowments has more access to media spaces. But we seem not to worry about the fact that politics itself has become such a closed space. When no political party has even the slightest space for any dissent on the quota issue, when all political parties appeal to the logic of nameless numbers to dismiss alternative arguments as the elitist or products of middle-class selfishness, what kind of open democratic spaces are we taking about? We have become so single-minded in our invocation of democracy that we do not pause to think of its relationship with other values we cherish: liberty, constitutionalism to name just two. Just as people often argue that concerns about quality, merit, competitiveness are mere ruses to subordinate marginalised groups, it could equally be argued that the rhetoric of social justice and democracy is invoked to curb real argument and discussion.

Privileges are distributed by class, but it would be a mistake to suppose that virtue or ability or the cogency of argument is. But by constructing images of caste conspiracy, we are assuming precisely that. Rather than soberly diagnosing the true causes of our discontents, we are simply in a blame game. I think the political parties, and critics of so-called middle-class dominance are misreading trends on the ground in significant ways. Like any class, the middle class is not an unalloyed carrier of virtue. There are many things it has to answer for: its inability to recognise the dignity of labour, its flirtation with Hindu nationalism. But I think we are underestimating the degree to which this class is the wave of the future and is now struggling to articulate new conceptions of social justice. But it has no political vehicle to do so and therefore sometimes it is manifest in pathological forms. This class will not oppose, as it might have years ago, a general expansion of education and opportunity, and it will put its money where its mouth is. Its frustration is precisely that, in the name of democratic empowerment, we have focussed on side issues of representation rather than effective public policy. And it is the height of presumptuous hubris to keep dismissing this two-hundred-million-odd middle class, composed of all castes, as some kind of freak phenomenon that should be dismissed by simply saying they are anti-justice or elitist. The charge of elitism has become a ruse in the hands of those who do not want to take arguments seriously. It is also symptomatic that in an atmosphere where fault lines of class conflict are being highlighted many of the real faultiness on the ground are being rendered invisible: the tensions between SCs/ and OBCs, between various subcastes amongst SCs.

This democracy is threatened by the fact that it does not have enough elitism. By elitism I do not mean inherited privilege structured along class or class lines. By elitism I simply mean a confidence to speak for your own thoughts without second guessing the logic of numbers. Elitism is also an aspiration towards intellectual distinction, an aspiration that public opinion can be brought around to the right argument, rather than the right argument being defined by it. Elitism is the view that what matters is the rightness of the argument, not the identity of who made it. Elitism is the view that once can aspire to uphold values and interests that are not just of particular sections, that one is not simply defending ones8217; own cause. What is striking about our founding generation, Ambedkar, Gandhi, Nehru, Patel or even Lohia, was that they never thought of themselves as sectarian leaders. They would accuse each other of being deeply mistaken, but they would not reduce their arguments to a mere articulation of identity.

Perhaps this diminution of public space has deeper roots; there is a lot of noise of contending parties. But there is also a crisis of articulacy that is putting public reason at risk. But when democracy is reduced to a clash of interests and counting of numbers, you know it is at serious risk.

The writer is president, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi pratapbmehtagmail.com