By Jim Yardley
 |
Manpreet Romana for The New York Times
A family ate ice cream at a shopping mall in New Delhi. |
DWARKA, India
— 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, Mr. Roy
and his friends donned white Gandhi caps, boarded a Metro train in this
fast-growing suburb of the Indian capital and rode into New Delhi like a band
of revolutionaries to join the large anticorruption 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,” Mr. 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
marginalized 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 — minimizing, 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 Mr. 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, idolizing Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru,
this middle class mostly regards politicians with contempt, placing more faith
in business leaders or, in some cases, in nongovernmental organizations.
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 Center 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 mobilized across the country. Professionals and college students
provided the organizational 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 skeptical, 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.
Mr. 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 Mr. Roy’s friends. “But the point is that somebody has to clean it
up. We can’t just scold people.”
‘Help Your Country’
In April, Mr. Roy was
conducting a training seminar at an auto parts factory, ignoring the messages
piling up on his cellphone. A business consultant, Mr. Roy clicked through
PowerPoint slides as he lectured about 50 workers on topics like “operational
excellence.” During a tea break, he scrolled through his messages, stopping
cold at one from a friend.
“You shouldn’t be at
work,” it read. “You should be here, trying to help your country rather than
any company.”
“Here” was Jantar
Mantar, the famous protest site near the Parliament building in New Delhi,
where Anna Hazare was waging his initial hunger strike against
corruption. Mr. Roy had not been paying attention to the news and knew almost
nothing about Mr. Hazare. That night, he turned on his television and saw
thousands of people rallying as Mr. Hazare, 74, campaigned against the
government. He was jolted.
“I saw that he was doing
his bit,” Mr. Roy said. “So I thought, ‘Let me do my bit.’ I’ve done nothing
for the country. But I would love to do something.”
Mr. Roy and his friends,
including Mr. Nag, had grown up in New Delhi in the same government housing
development. They were all the sons of government bureaucrats who would later
offer similar advice: Get a government job.
“He always insisted,”
Mr. Nag recalled of his father’s prodding. “But we had an idea that a
government job was too lousy.”
They were teenagers in
the early 1990s when Indian leaders embarked on the reforms that began
dismantling the stifling licensing regulations that had choked the economy.
Private enterprise, large and small, would steadily emerge as the engine of
Indian growth and the delivery vehicle of growing aspirations. Mr. Nag would
open a small IT service firm. Two other friends would start a textile trading
company. Mr. Roy would earn graduate degrees and start a consulting firm.
Politics often seems to
saturate life in India, but it was mostly a sideshow for Mr. Roy and his
friends. Mr. Roy was soured by his first taste of politics: after the 1984
assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguard, riots
broke out and innocent Sikhs were killed, many set on fire, across northern
India. The father of one of Mr. Roy’s friends was dragged onto the street and
killed.
“I hated it,” he recalled.
“From age 18 to 26, I never voted because I thought my vote wouldn’t change
anything.”
In his professional
life, Mr. Roy found an ideology he could believe in, the management
philosophies of Toyota. His first job was with an Indian truck manufacturer
that teamed up with the Japanese auto giant. “I was blown away,” he said. “I
decided I wanted to use these Japanese practices.”
He went to business
school and began reading books by management gurus like Shigeo Shingo and James
P. Womack. He wrote a 300-page thesis on reforming Indian education and
eliminating corruption by using, in part, Japanese management philosophies.
He married, had a son
and settled in Dwarka, a planned suburb that is part of New Delhi. Politics
remained something his circle complained about over dinners, if studiously did
not participate in — until Mr. Hazare.
Mr. Hazare’s April
hunger strike forced the government into negotiations over a proposed
anticorruption agency, known as the Lokpal. After those negotiations collapsed,
Mr. Hazare, who is based in the western state of Maharashtra, returned to New
Delhi in August for a new hunger
strike, sparking demonstrations across the country. This time, Mr.
Roy and his friends rushed to support him. Mr. Hazare fasted for 12 days before
the government accepted some of his key demands. Mr. Roy rejoiced.
“At least when I grow
old, I can say that when that historic moment happened, I was there,” he said.
Paying the Water Bill
No one likes corruption,
yet the Hazare movement raised a question: Why did the middle class mobilize 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.
As a group, the middle
class has often seemed unmoved by India’s many social problems, more determined
to remain secluded inside the comfort of its self-spun cocoon. India’s poor
would seem more vulnerable to exploitation because they lack the economic power
to protect themselves. One reason for middle class discontent can be found on
the narrow street outside Mr. Roy’s home in Dwarka. Real estate has become an
engine of Indian growth, underpinning rising urban affluence, even as it has
become, more than ever, a locus of official corruption. On a recent afternoon,
Mr. Roy pointed to a crude asphalt scar in the road where workers had installed
an underground water connection. The scar extended along the road toward Mr.
Roy’s house, only to abruptly turn left in the direction of another building.
“You see this?” he
asked, angrily. “This is a connection that comes here, but it is illegal.”
For Mr. Roy, the scar in
the street marks the corruption and collusion and the failure of the state to
deliver on its end of India’s social contract. His family is supposed to get
water from a legal connection for $4 a month. Except that water is unusable.
For years, his father had paid a fee to fill large jugs from a private water
tanker — until his father slipped while carrying one of them.
Mr. Roy then spent about
$1,000 to build an underground water storage tank beside his home. Now, every
week a tanker delivers a $30 shipment of water into the tank, while Mr. Roy
also buys bottled water for drinking, bringing his monthly bill to about $160.
Mr. Roy suspects that local officials, rather than correcting the situation,
allow it to continue in exchange for kickbacks from the owners of the private
water tankers. In the end, though, he pays.
These tales of petty
graft proliferate across India, but especially in cities, analysts say, for the
simple reason that cities now have more money.
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.”
Mr. Roy found himself
more drawn to Mr. Hazare partly because Mr. Hazare became a beacon for civil
society figures who were filling the vacuum created by a weak government. Mr.
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,” Mr. 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 Sept. 28, a month
after Mr. 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,” Mr. 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 organized in recent weeks to keep the Hazare
movement energized 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, Mr. Hazare
distanced himself from Mr. 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 Mr. Hazare by right-wing Hindu groups. At the same time,
Mr. Bhushan is a left-leaning, vocal critic of the 1991 economic liberalization
policies — the policies credited with helping to create today’s middle class.
For now, Mr. Roy is
drawn to Mr. Hazare because of his rectitude more than any ideological kinship.
Mr. Roy’s group has made a personal pledge to no longer pay bribes. It is also
running a small nongovernmental organization to help students at a school in
Uttar Pradesh state. Mr. Roy does not expect quick change on corruption, or his
water situation, but he does think India’s economic beneficiary class now must
engage in politics, too.
“We have complained
enough.”
Sruthi Gottipati, Nikhila Gill and Hari Kumar
contributed reporting from New Delhi.
@ The New York Times
@ The New York Times
