India’s middle classes have travelled a long way since the late 19th century when they planted the saplings of the freedom movement. On the way to India’s Independence, they filled the jails, and while they could not prevent the horrors of Partition, they wrote a unique document for the new nation: the Constitution of the Republic of India.
After Independence, it was the middle class again that supplied the teachers, doctors, engineers, lawyers, administrators and the other builders of Project India. It was a very imperfect project and there were strong disagreements, but there was no denying the pride these middle-class servants felt in building the Republic.
Middle-class activism Things have changed in recent decades. Beginning in the 1990s, India’s middle class — many times its size in 1947 and amorphous in its composition — started to have a sense only of itself. Gone is a sense of the nation as a country which, while divided, is still one where everyone has equal rights and where no one should be left behind. In its place, the middle class is now happy to wear a flag-waving nationalism on its sleeve and is concerned only about itself.
The middle class as driving public action is now a thing of the past. The last time India saw mass protest by the middle class was after the horrific rape in New Delhi in December 2012. That did lead to new legislation. But December 2012 was an exception and mostly women marched on the streets. Middle-class activism, as it is now called, is usually only about matters of immediate concern — the neighbourhood, the locality, and the city.
It is not a caricature to say that the better off among the middle class are worried today only about their next gadget, next holiday, next car and next home.
At one level, India’s middle class is now inured to the world outside its own class. At another level, it displays an aggressive nationalism and is completely disdainful of the idea of the community as a nation.
In the initial days after the demonetisation of Rs.500 and Rs.1,000 notes, the middle class played to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s script. It was willing to put up with its own inconvenience for what it saw as a larger cause. But the middle class is impervious to how the members of India’s vast informal sector, the rural communities in unbanked regions, the savers of cash holdings and others were going to manage.
Today, when middle-class concerns are expressed in strength, they are expressed on social media — with hate. The voices in anger are overwhelmingly directed against “anti-nationals”, religious minorities, and, if they are reckless enough, they can be casteist too.
Bhopal as a test case Consider, for example, the shooting in late October of eight Muslim undertrials after they purportedly broke out of Bhopal Central Jail while killing a prison guard. Even a decade or two ago, a shooting of such a large number and so suspiciously in abuse of the law would have attracted a measure of anger from the middle class which is aware of the rights guaranteed by the Constitution.
Not now.
There has been the isolated statement by a civil liberties group and the odd statement by one or two political parties. Nothing more. In the media few newspapers have either editorialised strongly or sent their reporters in hunt of the true story. It has required the rare and fine exceptions like this newspaper to expose the lies. The silence of TV has been deafening.
Instead, there have been online diatribes against those who question the official version. Here is one posted on Twitter on October 31: “Why [sic] people are raising questions whether the encounter was fake or not? Terrorists should be neutralised wherever found.” And here is one from the Letters column of the digital publication Scroll.in in response to an article questioning the official version: “These law-abiding SIMI terrorists stayed as state guests in a high-security establishment which relies on the tax payers money — and you’re okay with that? These people should have been shot dead a long time back”.
India’s online population remains small, and on social media it is infinitesimally small. But it wields a power far beyond its size. What it says resonates with the political powers in ascendance. And what these political forces say resonates with this vocal social media population — drawn entirely from the middle class.
This is not the first time that the murder of undertrials has evoked the barest of protests from the middle classes. In April 2015, five Muslim terror accused who were in handcuffs and were being shifted from one prison to another in Telangana were shot dead inside a van by the police because apparently one of them tried to grab a policeman’s rifle. (This happened within weeks of two incidents in the State in which two Students’ Islamic Movement of India activists and three policemen were killed.) A few questions from a few newspapers, a few statements, and one state Special Investigation Team probe which has gone nowhere. It does not seem to matter.
Of course, the “who-cares” attitude or the “they-deserved-it” reaction is most obvious when Muslims are involved.
It is not just the professional trolls who are venting spleen on the Net. Visit any story of any English newspaper or magazine and see the comments on a story about India’s Muslims. You can only despair for the future after reading the venom being spewed there. The online comments on “SIMI men had no guns, say witnesses” in The Hindu of November 2 are a representative sample.
Anti-minorityism out in the open It is time to stop pussyfooting about what the middle class (Hindus) think about some of their fellow citizens. We have to accept that a creeping anti-minorityism has now become full-blown among the middle class. From a whispering conversation among the like-minded it has now entered everyday conversation among families, friends and office colleagues. It is there all around us.
The disdain for everyone else is the outcome of the very successful build-up of Hindu majoritarianism over the past three decades. This has now reached a new peak under the Bharatiya Janata Party of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. It threatens to march even higher in the run-up to the next round of State elections in 2017 and the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. The majoritarianism of the middle class reflects the essential philosophy of the party in power and in return it strengthens this exclusionary philosophy.
It has been a long journey since the beginning of the freedom movement and the drafting of the Constitution.
C. Rammanohar Reddy is Readers’ Editor of Scroll.in
Published - November 17, 2016 01:04 am IST
