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The Congress and the ‘middle class’

Rahul Gandhi’s elevation as the Congress Party’s vice-president was an organisational non-event. He was already functioning as its Number Two, and dynastically destined to succeed his mother. The appointment’s significance is political.

First, the Congress, after its chintan shivir (contemplation camp) in Jaipur, decided to project Gandhi as its mascot in the next Lok Sabha election. Second, the thinking of Gandhi and his confidants (called “second-edition baba log” because of their elite backgrounds) found an unmistakable expression in various speeches at Jaipur. Ironically, Sonia Gandhi’s speech contained the clearest expression.

Rahul Gandhi reflected on the limitations of India’s political system, mediocrity in governance, and on state leaders’ failure to delegate powers to subordinate bodies. He also tugged at Congress workers’ emotions by talking about his personal trauma at the killing of his grandmother by the guards who had taught him to play badminton. However, it’s Sonia who asked the Congress to reach out to India’s “aspirational” middle classes, which represent “the new changing India…increasingly peopled by a younger, more aspirational, more impatient, more demanding and better educated generation.”

India’s youth, she added, “wants it voice to be heard…aided by …television, social media, mobile phones and the Internet, today’s India is better informed…people are expecting more from their political parties…We cannot allow growing educated middle classes to be alienated from the political process”.

This position was originally drafted by Rahul Gandhi’s team to distance him from Sonia Gandhi’s “left-of-centre orientation”. Rahul also asserted himself by ensuring that half the Jaipur invitees were from the Youth Congress. This line was faithfully reflected in the 56-point declaration, which promises “to create new opportunities” for the “rising educated and aspirational middle class” and a “climate conducive to their advancement.” It defines the Congress’s primary constituency not as poor, marginalised Dalits, Adivasis, religious minorities and Other Backward Classes (OBCs), but more vaguely: “The Congress pledges to speak for both the young middle class India and the young deprived India.”

The declaration frequently conjoins the middle class with the aam aadmi and exhorts the Congress to adopt a platform of “nationalism, social justice, economic growth for all – especially the aam aadmi and the middle class – and secularism.” Clearly, the Congress has illegitimately redefined ‘aam aadmi’ to include the upwardly-mobile middle class.

The term ‘middle class’ is a misnomer in India. Unlike in the west, where the middle class earns close to society’s median income and forms two-thirds of the population, in India the term connotes a much richer, narrower group. Even if all the income-tax-paying or vehicle-owning strata are included, this upper crust forms only 10-15 percent of India’s population – indisputably, the elite.

The Congress has executed this shift for three reasons. First, it’s worried that if it ignores the articulate urban elite, it may do badly in the next election in the cities – where the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance did well in 2009. Second, the Congress is buying into the “aspirational” discourse promoted by sections of the media. Third, under Rahul Gandhi, it’s moving further away even rhetorically from redistribution.

All the reasons are questionable. The UPA did somewhat, but not vastly, better in urban areas than in villages. It won 81 out of the 144 urban seats (a 56 percent strike-rate), compared to 147 of the 342 rural seats (43 percent). Its strike-rate was much higher (60 percent) in the big cities. It made a clean sweep of Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Hyderabad.

But the Congress’ story is different. Its urban strike-rate was 10 percentage-points lower than the UPA’s and unevenly spread across states. The bulk of its urban votes probably came from the poor and lower middle classes, including slum dwellers, and not from the upper middle class, which generally prefers the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and other non-Congress parties.

It would be foolish for the Congress to chase that class just because it became vocal in the recent anti-corruption and anti-rape mobilisations. The Congress should, of course, have taken a clear stand on corruption. It should also have been less defensive about its government’s shoddy handling of the anti-rape protests. But that doesn’t mean that it should have proactively wooed the upper middle class.

Second, much recent theorising about this class is simply wrong. It incorrectly argues that high ambition and aspirations uniformly bind India across urban-rural and class divides: While the ‘old’ aam aadmi wants ‘patronage’, the new middle class-mediated variant wants prosperity through ‘entrepreneurship’; the first spells the confrontational ‘politics of grievance’, the second the inclusive ‘politics of aspiration’.

This categorisation minimises India’s income, wealth and urban-rural disparities, and exaggerates the trickle-down effect of skewed, inequality-enhancing growth. It underrates people’s demand for basic public services, including health care, education, food security and employment. This demand is part of the universal democratic entitlement of all citizens to a decent life.

People expect public health-care services. If these aren’t available, they pauperise themselves by going to private hospitals or quacks. They pay 70 percent-plus of health expenses out-of-pocket. But they know that a single illness can instantly send a viable farmer’s family below the poverty line.

Finally, the Congress shift towards the upper middle class reflects Rahul Gandhi’s conservative outlook. He’s a believer in ‘growth-first’ or GDPism: poverty reduction demands rapid growth, not redistribution. Growth will increase the state’s revenues and allow it to fund welfare, preferably through direct cash transfers. This would obviate radical measures like universal health care or food security, leave alone land reforms, or higher taxes on the rich.

The UPA’s tax revenues have grown fourfold since 2004, but it has spent them to subsidise the rich, not empower the poor. Under neoliberal policies, corporations control investment. They have no incentive to promote employment-intensive growth or public welfare. So the basic growth process always remains skewed, perpetuates mass poverty, and further increases inequalities, which are already obscene in India.

That was India’s experience during the past two high-growth decades. The UPA half-heartedly tried to correct this through the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, food security laws, and other measures proposed by the National Advisory Council. But Sonia Gandhi allowed the NAC’s recommendations to be overturned or diluted, and changed its composition.

At Jaipur, she embraced the ‘growth-first’ perspective plus an obsessive emphasis on the upper middle class. This is likely to be a tragedy for the party, whose base among the broad, poor masses (barring Adivasis and Muslims) has shrunk greatly and is no wider than its 28 percent vote-share in the general population.

Although it still enjoys a higher vote-share and a broader base than the BJP, the Congress has ceased to be an agenda-laying party. It rules on its own only in Andhra, Rajasthan, Assam, Haryana, Himachal, Delhi, Uttarakhand and Manipur, and in coalitions in Maharashtra, Kerala and Jammu and Kashmir. It’s insignificant in major states like Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal and Tamil Nadu.

The Congress could have regained some lost ground had it returned to a pro-poor agenda. Instead, it has moved in the opposite direction. Rahul Gandhi’s strategy for reviving party organisation via the Youth Congress route has failed – as did his election campaigns in UP and Bihar. His upper middle class-based mobilisation strategy could well meet the same fate.

The writer, a former newspaper editor, is a researcher and peace and human-rights activist based in Delhi. Email: prafulbidwai1@yahoo.co.in

Praful Bidwai, "The Congress and the ‘middle class’," The News. 2013-01-28.
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