First published on NewsYaps on 20 November 2013
So I’m sitting there, all of 8 years old, listening to the
conversation of a gaggle of aunts and uncles at a cousin’s birthday party. The
topic revolves around the perfidy of maid servants, always a popular topic at
our family gatherings.
“And that’s it. She just left. Without any notice, no
nothing. And after all that I’d done for her,” an aunt complained bitterly
about a recent maid in much the same vein as one would about a bad break-up.
“These people are like that only, baba.
No matter how much you do for them, it’s not enough. They know they can just
skip to a different job whenever they want. They know that and take advantage
of this fact,” chimed in an uncle sympathetically
“So true. Arre, it’s only us, the middle
class, which has these problems. The rich, of course, have their own lives. And
the poor, they don’t care. It’s us who get our backs broken,” said another aunt,
following this up with an appropriate sigh.
This middle class lament, that they’re the only class with
goodness, filled to the brim with virtues such as honesty, hard-work and diligence
is rather common. Apart from this, another recurring theme is a narrative of
victimisation: society, as well as the government, is out to get us and it’s
only us and our hard-work that keeps us afloat.
Of course, like most self-portraits, there are large inaccuracies
in how the middle class sees itself. The
exaggeration starts with the name itself. The middle class (defined liberally as
those with an income in excess of 3.4 lakh per annum) actually occupies the top 15% of the
country in terms of income. Looking at it mathematically, “upper class” would
be a far more accurate name for this class of white-collar workers.
The other untruth of course, is this narrative of victimisation.
This might seem like an obvious point—after all which state can victimise its
richest, most powerful citizens? Yet
this narrative exists. This was most recently
seen in the Campa Cola Compound episode. Milind Deora’s letter
to Sonia Gandhi captures much of this victimisation complex. The letter starts
off with describing the residents as “law abiding middle class families” and
then goes on to the blame the “builder/Corporation nexus” for this whole issue.
Of course, rather than abiding by the law, the residents were
well aware of the fact that they were purchasing illegal flats. In February
2013, the Supreme Court itself stated that, “Although the members of
the housing societies knew that the construction had been raised in violation
of the sanctioned plan and permission for occupation of the buildings had not
been issued by the competent authority, a large number of them occupied the
illegally constructed buildings. ”
Most crucially though, rather than victimising the residents,
the state went out of its way to help. In spite of the obvious illegality of
the compound, so strong was the political class’ support that it bordered on
the surreal. The Shiv Sena threatened to hit the streets against the demolition
squad of the Shiv Sena controlled BMC, the Congress MP from South Mumbai,
Milind Deora threatened Congress CM Prithviraj Chavan if action was not
taken to stop the demolition and, of course, the cherry on the cake, the
Supreme Court, taking suo moto cognisance of media reports,
stayed its own demolition order.
Victimisation? Hardly.
To further make the case, the state has
been far harsher with slums in Bombay, demolishing them at will. The names of Golibar, Sion Koliwada,
Ramnagar, Ambedkar Nagar and Ambujwadi come to mind where the residents were
just as guilty/innocent as those in Campa Cola. But, of course, they had no
media backing and had to go.
Following
Herman and Chomsky’s Propaganda Model of bias in news, the English media
pushes the interests of the middle class in order to keep up its funding which
comes mainly via advertisements. Since its readers and the people who consume
the advertisements are middle class folks, speaking up for their interests
becomes mandatory for the English media. This media, thus, acts as a massive middle
class pressure group.
Campa Cola is just one example amongst
many of this phenomenon. This is the same mechanism at work which raises such a
huge din when LPG prices are raised. Approximately 20% of India uses LPG and
they are usually the richest 20% of India. Yet, the government subsidises this
upper class and every small increase in prices is met with a strong push back
led again by the media.
An even more egregious instance of this
is the case of the BRT in Delhi. Multiple surveys have shown that the BRT in
Delhi is actually hugely popular with bus riders, an overwhelming majority of
the city’s population. Yet, the ruckus created by the English media has made it
appear as if the BRT is a failure when the only people who think so are the
tiny number of people who own private cars (for whom the roads have become more
congested). So strong is this pressure that at one time the Supreme Court even
cancelled the BRT system and the Sheila Dixit government has been forced to go
slow on expanding the project.
In recent years, there has been a popular
narrative of the middle class disengaging from democracy because, or so they
moan and complain, there is no space for them here. The system is castigated
loudly for being populist and politicians berated for pandering to "vote
banks" (as if politicians hankering after votes in a democracy is just the
worst abomination ever). Of course, as Campa Cola has most recently shown, vote
banks are not the only things which push the levers of power. Far from being
the frail little things the middle class like to cast themselves as, using
their megaphone, the English media, they wield enormous power and influence in
India; far more than the little power vote banks wield, in fact, as the sharp contrast
between the treatment meted out to Campa Cola and slums of Bombay show. And as
this middle class grows in size, its political influence can only get larger—something
Milind Deora and the Shiv Sena seem to have grasped in this episode. This
increased clout should certainly lead to interesting changes in the way
politics is conducted in our country.
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