Will the Indian middle class measure up to its task?

It is estimated that more than 30 years of liberalisation of the Indian economy has created a 300 million-strong middle class. This middle class, as every marketing professional knows, is an avid consumer of goods and services. Economists revel in this middle class which provides constant fodder for their theories and speculations. History, however, assigns a different role for a nation’s middle class. 

The history of the advanced nations of the West, such as the United Kingdom and France, tells us that the middle class played a great and fundamentally transformative role, at least internally, in making them the developed and advanced countries – democracies – of today. In both these nations, and elsewhere in the West, the middle class stood for, and led, the social, political and economic revolutions that transformed them. 

These revolutions consisted in breaking with their feudal past, demolishing the ‘divine right’ of kings and princelings, and founding a new society, economy and, above all, a democratic polity imbued with the ideas and ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity. 

The French Revolution, as Charles Dickens depicted in A Tale of Two Cities, was a middle-class and lower middle-class revolution, albeit one that turned violent and brought forth the terror of the guillotine. The French middle class, through its violent revolution, brought about a new world. The revolution declared, for the first time in human history, the principles of the rights of man and citizen. Men and women were called equal citizens and were called upon to protect the revolution of the middle class and its values. 

The French Revolution, which heralded the modern world, complete with the new ideals of liberty, egalitarianism, and emphasis on fraternity, was a bitterly fought struggle against feudal nobility. The remnants of feudalism were abolished in the fire and fury of the middle-class revolution. The titles, ranks and honorifics of the feudal nobility were abolished henceforth. This middle-class revolution heralded a new liberal world of universal rights, abolition of serfdom, and the end of feudalism as the French knew it. The ideals of that revolution have since found expression in many a national Constitution. The Preamble of the Constitution of India states these ideals – liberty, equality, fraternity -- as the founding principles of modern India. 

In Britain, too, the internal struggles for a more egalitarian society resulted in the abolition of the ‘divine right’ of kings after much strife, crises, and civil wars. What took shape finally was a constitutional monarchy under the supremacy of parliamentary democracy. History, therefore, says it is foolish to underestimate the power and role of the middle class. 

If that is so, what can we expect from the Indian middle class? Is it up to its task as middle classes elsewhere showed themselves to be? Can the Indian middle class take the liberal revolution forward by becoming conscious of the historical role that the middle class has played in the advanced countries?

Contrary to the examples presented above, though, the Indian middle class seems to be in deep slumber. It was handed down the ideals of the French Revolution through the Constitution, and it got its democracy without the crisis and turbulence that middle classes elsewhere had to go through. The result is that the Indian middle class is too complacent about the values and democratic heritage it received. And having received what has been bestowed upon it, it now yearns for supernatural salvation, taking the liberal values, the democratic procedures and the historical provenance of all these, for granted.

Political Scientist Rajni Kothari once said that we should inculcate the “consciousness of history in the history of consciousness”. But the current middle class, it seems, will have none of it. There are two things that the Indian middle class is busy with, having abdicated its historical function: Consuming all the goods and services and entertainment it can, and hopping from one temple to another, praying for more of the same. Indeed, the Indian middle class, given its historical caste baggage and steeped in conservatism, detests the principles of the middle-class revolutions of history.

Last, but importantly, the middle-class revolutions in the developed countries involved the birth of market economies alongside liberal social and political rights. The latter were called the “inalienable rights” of every human being. The baggage of feudal serfdom, servility and religious bigotry were abolished in those countries in the thick of middle-class revolutions. Can the Indian middle class think of doing so? Will it stand up to the historical role that middle classes elsewhere have played in advancing their societies? 

As of now, there are few indications that the Indian middle class can or will. Either due to its own feudal and semi-feudal mindsets, and/or because of the goodies that globalisation and technology have brought to its doors easily, the Indian middle class prefers to be a passive recipient of the gifts of history without caring to struggle for them. Today’s middle class is too complacent about the gifts of history that it has received, and therefore risks losing them, unless it wakes up to its task of preserving and advancing those gifts.

It is true that the middle class provides a solid bulwark for democracy, but in a developing democracy with historical baggage such as ours, it can do so only when it realises that the liberties it enjoys can exist only in a liberal democracy, that its role therefore cannot be to practice and entrench religious conservatism but to break free of it. But, to say it again, today’s Indian middle class is placid, passive, complacent and even ignorant — and arrogant, because it is ignorant -- about its historical role. It is in a deep slumber when it must be championing and building upon liberal democracy, capitalism without caste-ridden feudalism, with a thorough avowal of liberty, equality, and fraternity. This then is the crisis of the largest democracy in the world, without a democratic revolution to call its own.

(The writer is Professor of Political Science, Centre for Political
Institutions, Governance and Development, Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bengaluru)