What Bihar’s done today…

In short, we are moving from a politics obsessed with redressing historic wrongs — Indira Gandhi’s Garibi Hatao, militant labour and kisan movements of the ’70s and ’80s, Mandal, Mandir — to one focused on attaining future dreams. Equally, today’s electorate is starting to view government less as a mai-baap granting entitlements — seats in colleges, jobs in the public sector, subsidies — and more as an enabler of opportunities. This is a quintessentially middle class ethos in the making, even if material reality for the vast majority is still a long way from middle class levels. The lack of political momentum behind the proposal to introduce reservations in the private sector is telling evidence of the new mindset.

Nitish’s campaign with its emphasis on good governance resonated with this emerging attitude, as have the policies of CMs as diverse as Sheila Dikshit in Delhi and Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee in Bengal. For India this is a seminal development. By only slowly expanding democratic franchise, virtually every developed country — Britain, the US, Germany, Japan, the Asian tigers — was able to postpone addressing the needs of its disadvantaged and socially excluded until after it attained a reasonable level of economic prosperity.

By contrast, India embarked on its development journey post-Independence with a fully enfranchised electorate. For just over the first four decades this looked like a very costly decision. As political entrepreneurs exploited democratic freedoms to mobilise group after group around the faultlines of class, caste, region and religion, India’s development suffered. Bad policies were justified in the name of helping the disadvantaged, be they the rural poor or unionised workers, backward castes or sons-of-the-soil. Many thoughtful Indians and their well-wishers began to wonder if too much democracy was crippling India’s development.

Now, recent events capped by Bihar have dealt us an unprecedented chance to break this deadlock. The emergence of a ‘middle class’ mentality is creating a viable electoral constituency that wants to go beyond fractious arguments over social and economic justice. Average income levels in India are still low, but the terms of political debate are shifting towards expanding the pie via good governance and rapid growth, rather than cutting up the existing (relatively stagnant) pie. Progress is no longer viewed as a zero sum game, requiring some to be pulled down if others are to get ahead.

This forward-looking mindset has not arrived a moment too soon. India’s progress depends on its policymakers paying attention to the needs of the society we are becoming — which given the trajectory of economic development will inevitably be more and more urban and middle class — over those of what we are leaving behind. Thus, we cannot afford to sacrifice the prospects of our manufacturing and services sectors (that have to create jobs to absorb people coming off farms that must get more productive), or of our cities and towns, to mischievous policies notionally in favour of the underprivileged (for example, free power for farmers). No longer can we accept the pernicious logic of “roads being only for the rich” or IT being elitist.

The strengthening of a ‘middle class’ ethos that Nitish’s victory signals is, therefore, critical. It creates the political space for the concerns of the new, emerging India to be tackled. Indeed, if these concerns are not addressed urgently this new India may never emerge.

For their part, India’s middle classes must respond to this historic opening.Despite being the backbone of the freedom struggle, they abdicated the political arena in the decades after Independence. In part this was because of their inability to cope with the coarseness, corruption and violence that inevitably accompanied the expansion of democratic participation. But deeper down, they sensed they had lost the right to speak for the nation, as political authenticity came to be defined by bloodline and birth (class, caste, region, religion). Now, as a broader populace adopts their outlook and aspirations, the middle classes have a legitimate constituency to lead. Indeed, they represent the vanguard of the sort of India that much of our citizenry now seeks to build.

The last few years of rapid economic progress, that helped create the pervasive middle class mentality, has also placed the middle classes in a good position to raise their voice in politics. They are at least 150-million strong and growing. Much of their new-found prosperity is being created outside the direct influence of government. So, they have both the wherewithal and independence from the powers-that-be to constructively challenge their priorities, and actively shape public policy. The captains of Bangalore’s IT industry can stand up to the policies of the Karnataka government because they are not beholden to the state’s babus and netas.

To become an effective political voice, however, the middle classes must shed their brahmanical abhorrence (although not their inherent civility, rectitude and distaste for unctuous obsequiousness before the powerful) for the rough and tumble of mass politics. They should reclaim the confidence to speak not just for themselves and those who share their mindset but for the nation as a whole, including the truly downtrodden and socially excluded whatever their caste, location or faith. In fact, the history of societies as diverse as Britain and the US, and our own experience in India with non-NGOs, shows that the middle classes are the most effective champions of the disadvantaged.

Two weeks ago, Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew reportedly urged Infosys’ Narayanamurthy to plunge into politics. Murthy, true to his middle class roots, demurred. But the man who transformed Singapore into an Asian tiger may have been on to something: India urgently needs its middle classes to stand up and be counted — not just in business and economy, but in politics.

The writer is a Mumbai-based management consultant. The views expressed here are his own