Privileges are distributed by class, but it would be a mistake to suppose that virtue or ability or the cogency of argument is. But by constructing images of caste conspiracy, we are assuming precisely that. Rather than soberly diagnosing the true causes of our discontents, we are simply in a blame game. I think the political parties, and critics of so-called middle-class dominance are misreading trends on the ground in significant ways. Like any class, the middle class is not an unalloyed carrier of virtue. There are many things it has to answer for: its inability to recognise the dignity of labour, its flirtation with Hindu nationalism. But I think we are underestimating the degree to which this class is the wave of the future and is now struggling to articulate new conceptions of social justice. But it has no political vehicle to do so and therefore sometimes it is manifest in pathological forms. This class will not oppose, as it might have years ago, a general expansion of education and opportunity, and it will put its money where its mouth is. Its frustration is precisely that, in the name of democratic empowerment, we have focussed on side issues of representation rather than effective public policy. And it is the height of presumptuous hubris to keep dismissing this two-hundred-million-odd middle class, composed of all castes, as some kind of freak phenomenon that should be dismissed by simply saying they are anti-justice or elitist. The charge of elitism has become a ruse in the hands of those who do not want to take arguments seriously. It is also symptomatic that in an atmosphere where fault lines of class conflict are being highlighted many of the real faultiness on the ground are being rendered invisible: the tensions between SCs/ and OBCs, between various subcastes amongst SCs.

... contd.