Opinion The halfway revolution
Am I wrong in suggesting that the candle-holding middle-class Indian is not very different from the Maoist in ideology?
In the three days that I was travelling and away from the TV set,my fellow citizens had plotted and enacted a revolution,and I missed it.
When I returned,our nations moral conscience that resides inside 24×7 idiot boxes had already inspired thousands of middle- and upper-class Indians to hold hands or light candles against corruption. In Delhis Jantar Mantar,the pavements were taken over by the well-to-do,who had come to express their solidarity with Anna Hazare in his crusade against corruption. Anything that gets the Great Indian Middle Class to hold a candle or give a fig about anything but themselves deserves to be called a revolution.
But am I wrong in suggesting that the candle-holding middle-class Indian is not very different from the Maoist in his or her ideology?
Both have no faith in the constitution. The Maoist takes up arms to dismantle Parliament. The middle-class dismantles it by shunning it,reviling it and neglecting it. Ironically,both are reactions to the concentration of power in the hands of a few; both will eventually erode democracy and concentrate power even further.
Let me explain. April 13 is the date for assembly elections in Tamil Nadu. In an effort to bring candidates to engage with voters,a group of people from a South Chennai constituency organised an all-candidate meeting on Saturday. A day earlier,many debutant middle-class activists had rushed off to the Marina Beach to join the call for a law against corruption. The organisers of the all-candidate meeting invited their public-spirited friends to also attend their function.
But many of the optimistic candle-holders were cynical. The organisers were told that politics was dirty,that politicians were evil,and that nothing good would come out of engaging with the assembly candidates.
MLAs and MPs are the lawmakers of the state and the country. We need to educate ourselves about them,educate them of our needs,and hold them accountable. Otherwise,no amount of holding candles will bring accountability and integrity in public life. Law-making is not the remit of hunger-strikers,although in a democracy that is a legitimate way to push ones point.
That said,I am faced with a terrible dilemma. I am as fearful of a silent,lazy middle-class as I am of a vocal,active one. What worries me is the predominant culture among the middle-classes that equates education with virtue,and suggests a strident libertarianism with openly anti-poor values as ideology. Bereft of any exposure to the extreme hardships faced by the poorer sections of society,this culture has no compunctions in prioritising the individual over the collective,with imposing a consensus on the conversion of multicultural cities into exclusive monocultural enclaves,or selectively calling vendors on the beach or on our sidewalks as encroachers,while leaving the corporate giants that forcibly take over indigenous lands out of the purview of that definition.
The practitioners of this culture view anything sarkari as automatically venal,corrupt,ridiculous,dirty and inherently immutable. This sentiment is being used to hand over state-run enterprises,the PDS and utilities to private players.
In Jantar Mantar last weekend,and every time I see the middle classes raise their substantial voices,I nurse a niggling fear that the stage is being set for a de facto dictatorship.
If I were to avert that,we need a radical transformation of middle class culture. We need a middle-class that is as moved to take to the streets to condemn police atrocities against adivasis in Chhattisgarh as it is to support the call for justice for Aarushi Talwar.
The writer is a Chennai-based journalist and researcher
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