The middle class march

In a previous article on this subject which appeared in these columns on August 31, I had tried to underline the seeming contradiction between the progress the Indian middle classes have achieved during the past two decades and their frenzied protests against the very system that had engineered that progress. The same period had also witnessed a marked up gradation in India’s standing in the comity of nations. This is an attempt to explain this contradiction whose impact had gripped the entire nation for two weeks.

Looking at the pattern of wealth distribution in India, a peasant rebellion would have been more in order. India’s rural population contains its poorest. Reportedly there have been 180,000 incidents of rural suicide during the past ten years. Large segments of rural India seem to have been bypassed by that country’s phenomenal economic success. Yet this class barely joined the Anna Hazare led protests. Instructively, severe deprivation did not provide sufficient motivation for protest.

Colonialism, despite its packaging as “the white man’s burden” was essentially an extortionist creed, a conveyor belt for transferring resources from the colonised nations to their imperial masters. Initially acquired through force, the territories were kept in subjugation through unique and innovative mechanisms. In India, an ingenious colonial structure underpinned by an anglicised bureaucracy, the military, feudal aristocracy and the trading classes was nurtured to perpetuate the empire. After independence, the bureaucrat found a new ally in the political class hailing mostly from the feudal hinterland. The colonial impulse continued to dominate the philosophy of governance despite the dawn of freedom.

In India, the landed class was neutralised through extensive land reforms and, thanks to men like Nehru, the military was placed firmly under the control of elected governments. The politico-bureaucratic alliance was thus able to take over the entire political space, its extortionist mindset, inherited from the colonial era, intact.

The interface between the citizen and the state remained devoid of dignity worsening with time as the even more voracious indigenous mentality progressively superseded the norms of discipline bequeathed by the British. Being an extension of an age old pattern of behaviour, this was never seriously challenged. Life continued as it always had, an endless episode of recurring humiliation at every point of interaction between the people and the agents of the state.

The economic reforms of the early 1990s opened India to the outside world. Along with wealth and exposure came greater self confidence and a sharper sensitivity to and revulsion against state high-handedness. Imbued with an internationalist outlook, better educated and more assertive of its rights, the middle class finally stood up to reject the lopsided relationship between the citizen and the state.

Anna Hazare provided the platform and a rallying point for this sentiment. His personal integrity, simple life style and his methods of protest, non-political, peaceful and result oriented, evoked deep resonance in people’s psyche. Millions poured into the streets ostensibly to support Hazare but in fact to stake their own individual claim to equal rights as citizens of a free country. The corruption index may or may not have changed in recent times, Bofors happened much earlier, but the character of its victims certainly did.

The mass protests were basically a collision between the old and new India, the former represented by antiquated state machinery and mindset, essentially predatory in approach, and the latter by an awakened and modernistic middle class. What final shape this confrontation takes is difficult to say. Would the state change its nature by exhibiting a measure of dignity in its interactions with the people or will the latter, in the course of time, allow the former to revert to its entrenched ways to which it would be naturally inclined? This would be a fascinating struggle to watch.

The Lokpal (Ombudsman) is seen as a definitive answer to India’s corruption. This is debatable. Undeniably, the Lokpal will provide an institution for investigating and prosecuting corrupt individuals. Much however will depend on how it is run. The Lokpal officials will be drawn from the Indian civil services, police, judiciary and the CBI. How can it be assumed that these officials, whose behaviour was the cause of the protests in the first instance, would transform themselves after induction into the new organisation? Would it ever be possible to cleanse the lower bureaucracy of corruption, the constable, clerk, patwari, who have to tend to large families with abysmal salaries? The whole issue of remuneration of public officials would need to be looked in to. Strict electoral reforms would also be required to control political corruption.

The Lokpal when enacted would just be the starting point. In the final analysis, the people of India with the middle classes in the vanguard would be called upon to exercise constant vigilance, punctuated by mass protests when necessary, to rid their country of this scourge. Whether they rise to the challenge would determine the quality of governance in India in the years to come.

The writer is Pakistan’s former Ambassador to the United Nations and European Union. He can be contacted at [email protected]