Rising middle class still lacks electoral clout

Elections make for responsive and accountable governments, or so goes the truism.

But can they also achieve the opposite — that is, encourage complacency, even callousness, among the elected representatives?

Last month’s headlines from India and China present a disquieting contrast between elected and unelected governments for anyone committed to democratic politics.

In Beijing, China’s new Communist Party General-Secretary, Mr Xi Jinping, has begun a huge crackdown on corruption, official pomp and ceremony, and “empty talk”.

According to the estimable China-watcher Melinda Liu: “If the changes take hold, they could have far-reaching implications both at home and abroad. Many Chinese seem heartened, even inspired, by Mr Xi’s down-to-earth style.”

Many Indians, on the other hand, are incensed with their sequestered governing class. Confronted last month with public outrage over the horrific assault on a young woman in New Delhi, it alternated abysmally between paralysis and insensitivity.

Having initially failed to respond, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh muttered some perfunctory expressions of governmental resolve; then, turning to his handlers while the television cameras were still rolling, he asked: “Theek hai?” Hindi for “Is that all right?”

MIDDLE-CLASS ANGER

In fact, the government responded to the spontaneous protesters as though they were militant insurgents from central India: It flooded Delhi’s streets with armed police and shut down roads and railways, revealing a formidable security apparatus that, many argued, could be put to better use ensuring the safety of ordinary citizens.

It was not just the government that acted ham-fistedly. Figures from all political parties seemed to vie with one another in their crass responses to an atrocious crime, and to the cultures of violence and cruelty it issued from.

Not surprisingly, India these days brims with a free-floating rage against an obscenely venal and cosseted political class that zealously guards its privileges and perks.

Middle-class anger has periodically erupted in recent months, and it even appeared to solidify briefly into mass political movements. First, Baba Ramdev, a yoga practitioner, enlisted tens of thousands to his anti-corruption crusade. He was followed by Mr Anna Hazare, a quasi-Gandhian activist, who managed to attract a motley crowd of industrialists, film stars, students on Facebook as well as urban professionals.

More recently, one of Mr Hazare’s former lieutenants, an ex-civil servant named Mr Arvind Kejriwal, has run a name-and-shame campaign against some of India’s most powerful politicians and businessmen.

Each of these events has been widely greeted as the harbinger of a politically awakened and empowered middle class. The government, however, has calculated otherwise.

It unleashed the police on Baba Ramdev, evicting him and his followers from their rally grounds in New Delhi. It was similarly ruthless with Mr Hazare, counting successfully on the inability of the educated and the salaried to sustain mass protests or follow them up with a political programme.

The government will probably have little to fear from Mr Kejriwal, whose new political party will struggle to get many votes outside pockets of the urban middle class.

And, though startled by public anger over the gang rape, the government will no doubt try to defuse it with some hasty legislation and emollient words.

SECURING SUPPORT

With elections due next year, the government is trying to secure its two main sources of support: Big-business men and the majority of poor Indians .

Recent economic policies, which allow greater foreign investment in multibrand retail, have somewhat mollified the corporate class, inspiring its representatives in the news media to again hail the lame-duck Prime Minister as a reformer. An ambitious plan of cash transfers to the poorest Indians — a definite vote-getter — was also recently inaugurated.

The government’s election strategy seems clear: It wants to be seen as redistributing the spoils of economic growth through greater subsidies, even as it facilitates greater access for India’s networks of crony capitalism.

In some respects, the gambit resembles that of Thailand’s populist authoritarian Thaksin Shinawatra, who cannily used his support among the rural poor to cement his status as chief crony capitalist.

As events here showed, the intolerably squeezed urban middle class, the supposed avant-garde of democracy, can do little except turn, unhelpfully, to even more authoritarian figures in the military and the old conservative elite.

In India, too, many among the relatively privileged — those, for instance, demanding public hangings and castrations of rapists — are contemptuous of democratic and legal processes and generally indifferent to the routine killings and rapes in Kashmir and the north-eastern states by security forces. With their narrow conception of civil rights, they are always vulnerable to self-proclaimed vendors of instant justice and efficiency.

In fact, middle-class support has helped the rise of authoritarian figures such as Mr Narendra Modi, the Chief Minister of Gujarat, who was re-elected last month despite accusations he was complicit in hundreds of deaths and rapes during an anti-Muslim pogrom in his state in 2002.

Mr Modi now hopes that the growing appeal among middle-class Indians of his apparently successful technocracy will help him unseat Mr Singh’s government in Delhi.

Mr Modi may not succeed. Still, his ascension through a devastated moral landscape points to the radical shrinking of political choices in India.

SELF-INTERESTED ELITE

This lamentable situation, where elected representatives act as yet another aggressively self-interested elite, is partly to be blamed on the fact that the formal and proceduralist features of democracy — elections — have superseded their substantive aspects: Strong, accountable and fair-minded institutions and officials.

Certainly, the importance of the latter is not lost on China’s unelected rulers. Buffeted by a series of scandals, they know that strong measures against corruption are essential to maintaining the communist regime’s legitimacy and ensuring its survival against a rising tide of discontent.

India’s own entrenched political class derives its legitimacy from routine elections and well-timed sops to the poor majority. These chosen people do not have much incentive to engage with middle-class protesters on the streets of Indian cities and do not have to think hard before dispelling them with brute force.

Indeed, it is now the turn of metropolitan Indians, after political dissenters in Kashmir, the north-east, and central India, to feel the heavy hand of the state.

The discontented middle class is a growing demographic. But it is deceptively over-represented for now by India’s many, perennially hysterical television anchors. Politically fragmented and unorganised, the urban middle class has little to look forward to in the short term, apart from the periodic rise and fall of ineffectual demagogues such as Mr Hazare and Mr Ramdev.

Its electoral insignificance in the world’s largest democracy has been carefully quantified by the people to be chosen next year. As the Prime Minister might put it, “Theek to hai na — that’s all right, then!” BLOOMBERG

Pankaj Mishra is the author of From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia. He is based in London and Mashobra, India.