How the Middle Class Lost Itself and Lost India

 by Suranya Aiyar

15 April 2024, New Delhi

Recent Meme on Facebook

Since these may be the last few weeks left before we are all jailed or silenced, I thought I would put some things down here for us to think about as we are being violated by jail wardens or picking the lice out of our hair, or simply gazing upon our utter and final irrelevance to this country, India, that is (determined to be) Bharat.

I write this from my home in Delhi, in the lap of a kind of plenty and indulgence that I could not even have imagined in my childhood of the 1980s.

I am in every sense a child of Manmohan-Montek’s liberalised India. The profession that provides for my household – corporate law – came into existence only because of Liberalisation. I met my future husband in a top law firm whose founding partner literally started the practice with advising foreign clients seeking to apply to invest in India through the Foreign Investment Promotion Board (FIPB). This was the regulatory agency established in 1991, the year of India’s Liberalisation, to process proposals for foreign investment.

I joined the firm in 2004, during the worldwide financial markets boom in the firm’s parallelly booming private equity investment and capital markets practice. This was the trajectory of numerous corporate law firms around the country.

My story is the story of all the corporate lawyers, chartered accountants, investment bankers and tech-related start-up entrepreneurs of my generation in India. We can trace our professions and enterprises directly to Liberalisation. We saw India change before our eyes with Liberalisation. More relevant to the point of this essay are two things: first, that we did very well; and second, that Liberalisation was entirely a Congress Party project.

So, it is peculiar that these same middle class professionals always think of (and grumble about) the Congress Party as the anti-market, anti-business party in the firmament of Indian politics.

Peculiar, but not unreasonable, because the Congress Party has always presented itself as the socialist option to the country. The irony of this is astonishing considering that no party other than the Congress can claim responsibility for walking India away from the path of socialism and state-planning to that of the free market.

For me personally, as the daughter of committed socialist Congress politician Mani Shankar Aiyar, whom I saw being politely but firmly, and not a little ruthlessly, kept at bay by Manmohan Singh (the father of Liberalisation) and Montek Singh Ahluwalia (his able lieutenant) in the time of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) Government from 2004 to 2014, the irony is rich indeed.   

This dissonance between the image and reality of the Congress Party is partly the result of the consciously cultivated and highly visible public engagement by Congress Governments down the ages with what used to be called when I was at school, “social service”; and became, when I was in college “social development”; and entered middle-age, with me, as “welfare”.

Now, the thing is, that welfare is very much a part of the liberal world order, and has been for over half a century atleast. There is no capitalist polity from the United States to Europe to New Zealand that does not have welfare. Disagreements are only on its size and scope, and never, not for decades, on the principle of welfare. There is not a politician in sight who would say, as Malthusians did during the Irish Potato Famine, that deprivation was best dealt with by leaving the poor to depopulate.

So, the espousal of welfare alone ought not to have played so large a role as it has done in maintaining the socialist image of the Congress Party. Mulling over this riddle it occurred to me that some role might have been played by Manmohan Singh’s famously unprepossessing personality. Had he or Montek Singh Ahluwalia been bombastic men, things would have been different……but also the same.

Different in that the aspirational middle class – people like me - who believed in and benefited from the opportunities of Liberalisation, might have felt more understood and included in the business of the country. And before all you socialists go up in arms at this remark, I am talking about feelings and not the facts that I know you are going over in your collective consciousness as I say this! Politics is about feelings as much as it is about facts, so just stay with me for a few more pages.

As I was saying, things would have been both different and the same - the same in that we, the middle class, would have lost the country then too, except in a different way.

Let me explain. Yesterday (April 14^th) Arvind Panagariya, our newly appointed Chairman of the 16^th Finance Commission was quoted as having said that economic reform in India is difficult because of socialism among old Indian Administrative Services (“IAS”) officers and new IAS officers; and old economists and new economists; and intellectuals; and also, wait for this….. businessmen!

I am having an argument elsewhere with Modi Bhakts about the lack of educational qualifications not just of the Prime Minister, but his Ministers and the entire BJP ecosystem. One Bhakt replied saying he knew several idiots with foreign PhDs. Perhaps Bhakts and Mani Shankar Aiyar’s daughter (they keep repeating that I am that as a response to anything I say!) can agree on something.

Arvind Panagariya is a “Professor of Indian Political Economy” at Columbia University. He was appointed as consultant to the Indian Government in the form of Vice Chairman of its in-house economic planning agency, the Niti Ayog, in 2015. He was forced out two years later after having reportedly come up against political opposition both from his political colleagues on the Niti Ayog and the RSS.           

So it would appear that there are socialists everywhere – even in the Modi Regime and its ideological affiliates!

Except that he says it like the American that he is, rather than as an Indian, Professor Panagariya basically expresses the long-held dislike and mistrust of the Indian middle class with pro-poor and pro-farmer policies in India.

The trouble is that Professor Panagariya and the Indian middle class are completely alone on this issue politically. Despite Panagariya’s appointment to the Finance Commission by PM Modi over the objections of those who forced him out of the Niti Ayog in 2017, the PM’s socially redistributive 5-kilo ration scheme that Conservative American economists like Panagariya would sniff at, clearly counts among those who are willing to vote Modi back to power. I say this based on random interviews of members of the public from UP and Bihar by various You Tube news channels that I have been watching as a form of spiritual rejuvenation in these past few weeks of Remains-of-the-Day times.  These are anti-Modi channels. So this is not scientific, but I think it is fair as a basis for making a reckoning on what counts with Modi-supporters who are poor, i.e., the mass of the country’s voters.

I suggest that what emerges from all this is a clear message from India’s politicians from both sides of the aisle - that without strong and committed pro-poor measures and public image, you cannot be in business in politics in India. Not so long as you have a semblance of democracy.

So it is high time for the Indian middle class to reconsider their grudge against the Congress for its so-called socialism.

For one thing, this is not socialism strictly speaking. We are not looking at ideological dogma here. And nor are we looking at a welfare-manufactured society, which you only really find even today in countries like Norway and Sweden. My work helping Indian expat families trapped by their child protection services has shown me how the welfare state in Scandinavia has indeed taken over and eliminated, with Orwellian consequences, many aspects of social and cultural life. For example, the family no longer exists as the building block of society in those countries, thanks in large part to the take-over of the economic function of families by the state.

But we are a long way from that in India.

What you have in India, whether they are the UPA’s MNREGA schemes or the Modi Regime’s help with rations, pukka dwellings and cooking gas, is ad hoc measures of poverty alleviation in a basically free market context. These are measures that any Indian political party would have to be crazy, or change the Constitution to a dictatorship, to give up.

If 1947 only marked the first phase of India’s Freedom, which is to reach its end in the coming weeks, I will leave a few more thoughts here for people to think about in our next Freedom Struggle.

Did we, the middle class, have the wrong attitude to our country and our polity? Bringing our democracy to the brink over something as inconsequential as presentation, and when it comes to “socialism” presentation is the only substantial difference between the Congress and the Modi Regime, is as silly and unconsidered as anything that Prof. Panagariya and Dr D Anantha Nageshwaran, our Chief Economic Advisor who recently wondered aloud what the government can do about unemployment, can say.

Incidentally, if the nativist objector to PhDs is reading this – please explain to me why the Government is using these foreign PhDs if, as you say, they don’t matter and if, as one of your fellow Bhakts said in the course of the same argument, that running a country does not need education and that PM Modi’s travelling around India for 30 years with only 3 kurta pyjamas was more than sufficient qualification to govern India?   

The only sectors of the economy that had a measure of protection left by the time Narendra Modi came to power were those which are protected in almost every other free market economy in the world – agriculture, banking, insurance, public transport and infrastructure.

We did not so much need reform as good management. And the high turnover at the Niti Ayog and RBI, and the supreme lunacy of wasting the capital of a decisive Parliamentary majority because you do not see the need to speak to people and carry them with you, as demonstrated in the fiasco over the Farm Laws, show the woeful managerial skills of the Modi Regime. Management requires tact, of which the Modi Regime has none. The middle class needs to think about whether it confused brute strength with sound management.

Then we come to the other bugbear of the Indian middle class - corruption. The seeds of Narendra Modi’s rise to the Prime Ministership of India were sown in the India Anti-Corruption movement of 2011 led by Arvind Kejriwal. It was extraordinary to see the outpouring of sentiment during that movement from middle class India. I saw middle class contemporaries who had never concerned themselves with politics donate good money to the Aam Admi Party. In Delhi, I saw Arvind Kejriwal sweep up hoards of hitherto firmly apolitical professionals into politics and activism.

Five years on, Arvind Kejriwal is in jail on corruption claims as vehemently alleged against him by Modi ka Parivar as the Kejriwal-led movement’s claims against the UPA. The accused UPA ministers in the 2G Scam that set-off the India Anti-Corruption Movement have been acquitted in 2017 - on Modi’s watch.

Moreover, the Electoral Bond Scam has shown that black money is as inseparable across the board from party politics as is secularism from the survival of India, that is Bharat, which has been its co-name since our Constitution came into force before Narendra Modi was born, and not since 2014, the Kangana Ranaut Year of Indian Independence.

Sorry, middle class friends, but corruption is a bit like human nature. We should all try to be better, but it is hard. Think of that the next time you come out of a meeting with your Income Tax Accountant. Do you think that the masses should revolt against our democracy because of your sordid little private tax planning? No? Exactly.  

Anyway, I have noticed that the Modi Regime’s alleged corruption quite simply does not have you, middle class India, frothing at the mouth in the same way as that alleged against the Congress Party or the Aam Admi Party. So what gives?

I have an inkling of what really lies behind your visceral hatred of the Gandhis. It is simply that it is visceral. I don’t hold that against you – I feel pretty visceral about your guy right now. That’s politics. But haven’t you let your emotions run away with you a bit?

Do you really think that because you detest the Gandhis you have done something great by tolerating the low-as-low-can-be language being used today for our Muslim brothers and sisters? Are you happy to be getting on the godawful Veg/Non-Veg bandwagon? Do you feel proud of Kangana Ranaut, Smriti Irani, Nupur Sharma and Ramesh Bidhuri?

So, Sardar Patel was pipped to the post of PM by Jawaharlal Nehru. That is politics, for god’s sake. Nehru had a disastrous last term in office – which Prime Minister does not? Even Winston Churchill lost power after Britain won the Second World War under his passionate leadership.

This is all plain vanilla everyday politics and does not deserve to be elevated to the level of an epic age-defining national drama in which you put our democracy on the line. And repudiate so noble and gentle a soul that the world reveres as Mahatma Gandhi!   

Come on, middle class India. This is your country. All the disagreements you have with all the parties on the other side of the BJP – on whether India should be a dove or a hawk, court the free market or plan welfare, favour cultural homogeneity or diversity – these are disagreements that every free market democracy around you is having. And they are not that important. So long as we can get along relatively corruption-free, relatively patriotic, relatively coherent as a culture, relatively compassionate to the underprivileged and relatively prosperous, things are not so bad as to need you to put everything - our history, our social harmony, our very real world-recognised historical achievements and, saddest of all your sorry mistakes, our national treasure in the form of Mahatma Gandhi, on the line.

You keep saying that you want better leaders. You are the leaders. You are the elite. The trouble is that you just never took charge. My entire batch from St Stephen’s College is in the USA and Australia (ironically hating Donald Trump while loving Modi).

You left.

And those of you who stayed, steered clear of politics except to complain of policy paralysis and “socialism”. We’ve spoken about socialism already. So far as policy paralysis is concerned, some amount of policy blockage is part of the deal in a democracy.

When I was at University in the USA, I undertook research in military coups for my Constitutional Law seminar. I studied Pakistan and Nigeria. You know what struck me - there has never been a coup in the name of any but the noblest sentiments of public upliftment. Getting the job done is the slogan and justification for any military junta. Only in the Ramayana was the tyrant Ravana open about his arrogance and lust for power. That was the Treta Yuga where Dharma is said to have walked on two feet and thus, I suppose, even bad people did not lie.

In the Kaliyuga, Dharma hops on one foot, and tyrants speak the language of public good and public-spirited sacrifice. Jago, middle class, jago!

The concern about policy paralysis is real. On too many issues – from the Ram Mandir, to Kashmir, to agricultural reform – the Congress let matters fester for years and years, or made a mess of things trying to keep everyone happy. Not taking a stand can be as poisonous over time as taking a poisonous stand a la the Sangh Parivar. Not taking a stand also allows the wrong side, the wrong viewpoint, to take over and win, as I believe has happened with the Ram Mandir and Kashmir.

But, middle class India, you get the kind of leadership that you back. Such fraught issues as the Ram Mandir and Kashmir needed the sort of decisive leadership that can only come if the people decide to back their leader all the way. The middle class never gave the Congress this kind of backing in my lifetime (except after the two Gandhi assassinations). It chose instead to summon up all the faith in the world for Narendra Modi, who does not know the difference between being tough and being a toughie.

I suggest to you, middle class, that if you want to keep things civilised in a complex country like India, then you have to be much stronger in your backing of the available civilised leaders. Instead of treating liberal leaders as “service providers” who are supposed to have courage and vision on tap, while you only sit back to judge them, you needed to be more actively engaged in seeking and supporting courageous and visionary solutions for our country. 

You never took responsibility. Even now, I wonder how many of you will bother to go out and vote.

This completes my advice for the next Freedom Struggle. I don’t know if I will live long enough to participate in it, even if I avoid being sent to jail for saying all this.

My beloved Freedom Fighters of tomorrow: Morituri te salutant!

Jai Hind.