When we hear the term "middle class," we tend naturally to imagine the average or median person in a society. Roughly, we might justifiably believe that the term refers to a class of individuals earning an annual income roughly equal to or around the per capita GDP of a country. A large middle class has, since Aristotle, been seen as a key ingredient of a stable polity insofar as it balances competing societal interests. Moreover, a large and growing middle class is often seen as the sign of a healthy modern democracy.
In India, however, with an annual per capita income of roughly $1,200 (Rs. 55,000), the situation is rather different. To be middle class is not so much to be an average Indian in income terms, but to enjoy the status of a Western-educated professional and to consume a basket of commodities that comes with that status. For Americans studying Indian or South Asian society, this is puzzling or even odd. Yet Indians (or Pakistanis or Bangladeshis) rarely think critically about what it means to be middle class. Is it not bizarre that, after nearly 65 years of independence, Westernization remains the basis for being middle class in India?
To my mind, the only explanation for this state of affairs lies in the peculiar history of this class of men and women in the subcontinent. It is well-known that the social origins of this class lie in the colonial period when a class of professional men were inducted into the colonial bureaucracy as "babus" or clerks, and later, as civil servants in the three Presidency cities of Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras. As products of a Macaulyite education, they no longer received a "traditional" education in Persian, Sanskrit or Tamil, but Western literary and scientific learning in English. Under the new system of education, correctly identifying the five causes for Clive's victory at Plassey or mimicking Macaulay's florid prose in an exam could hold the key to government jobs and social prestige. Rote-and-regurgitate represented the joint triumph of brahminism and colonialism in nineteenth-century India. Babus or clerks in the lower rungs of the colonial bureaucracy were certainly inferior to members of the provincial or the covenanted civil services. Doctors, lawyers, and teachers, too, joined middle-class ranks to sustain the fledgling civil society among the natives of the Presidencies. Above them were the ruling caste of white men and women; below them were the vast labouring populations of the subcontinent who lacked the "civility" to be part of the urban elite clubs of the day. "Middle" thus implied comprador more than median or average.
Postcolonial India inherited colonial civil society with its Westernized middle class. This is because the Gandhian nationalist movement did little to alter the class structure of Indian society; indeed, it concretized the deepest prejudices and injustices in late colonial India. In the 1950s, at the top were the IAS/IFS/IPS cadres, the armed forces, and a handful of well-to-do barristers, doctors, and professors; below them, babus, clerks and petty businessmen formed the lower middle class. The Nehruvian upper middle class basically assumed the privileges of the colonial ruling caste with much enthusiasm. "English rule without Englishmen," Gandhi had warned in Hind Swaraj, would simply mean retaining the tiger's nature after getting rid of the tiger per se. But that is, of course exactly, what Nehru and his ilk sought in their quest to put India on the world map. To compete with their former colonizers, India, they argued, ought to mimic and outdo them at their own game. To speak English fluently and to affect Western manners were usually enough to be a member of the privileged middle class across urban India. The actual incomes earned by these men (and they were usually men!) were nothing to boast about, but the prestige their status in society commanded could not be weighed in purely monetary terms. It would have been regarded as crass to unfavourably compare, for instance, an IAS officer's salary to the earnings of a well-to-do timber contractor or mill owner. Nehruvian India had no place for such crassness; its manners were impeccably English.
Capitalism itself, for the Nehrvian elite, was a dirty word. Science became the buzz word for the nation-builders who wished the state would control and regulate the economy and polity. Education, in the post-independence polity, meant a smattering of English education alongside large doses of mathematical, scientific and other technical formulae. Naturally, this kind of policy shift meant an expansion of the existing boundaries of the Indian middle class to incorporate the engineers who would build big dams and managers who would run public sector companies efficiently. Nehru, who had been a third-rate student of chemistry at Cambridge, had ironically made his name writing historical and political treatises. Yet he inaugurated a science-focused expansion of middle class India to buttress his socialist theory of government. The new techno-managerial parvenu class, however, lacked the social graces of their more Westernized contemporaries in the '50s and '60s. They, therefore, ended up being slotted between the upper and lower middle classes, envying the former and despising the latter. Although products of the new postcolonial programme of science, the techno-managerial middle class remained much attached to the "vernacular" modes of life they had left behind in their small towns and villages. Hostile towards the Westernized values and lifestyles of their social superiors, they fell back on an indigenous conservatism in habits and mores that emphasized their earthiness as much as their aspirations. Keen to overtake their Westernized superiors, the vernacular middle classes remained cheerlessly within the Nehruvian regime of socialism.
In response to Indira Gandhi's well-calculated populism, the vernacular middle classes were restless for social change. The Garibi Hatao agenda followed from solid Nehruvian foundations, yet it was compromised by the political alliances made by the Indira Congress in the states. When alternative leadership in the form of the Jan Sangh or parties led by rising middle-caste leaders such as Charan Singh emerged, they unsurprisingly caught the imagination of the vernacular middle classes. To speak as "the people" in one unanimous voice against a tyrannical government seemed to bring to mind the stratagems of Gandhian mass politics. The homegrown conservatism of those resentful of the Westernized Nehruvian middle class came to the fore in the JP movement of the mid-'70s. (The Nehruvian middle class, by contrast, tended to support the Emergency as a necessary evil: after all, trains ran on time, and corruption could be curbed.) It did not matter whether one's ideological convictions swayed left or right, because both could be accommodated in the fight against the tyranny of the Westernized woman and her cronies in power. The lower middle classes in cities as well as rural elites ended up as significant allies in the fight against the dictatorship of Mrs. Gandhi's government. When the Janata government came to power, it banned Coca-Cola and other Western evils because it ostensibly poisoned the young virile men and fecund women of India. Similarly, it opened diplomatic talks with China after Mao's death, a sharp departure from the foreign policy of the Westward-looking Congress regime. Swadeshi, not socialism, became the new buzzword for this short-lived foray by the new middle classes into mainstream politics in India.
Although the Janata government is a forgotten episode in Indian political history, it is worth looking back today to recognize the origins of contemporary middle-class politics in the late '70s. Swadeshi was always a charade that had gone too far. Soon, Sanjay Gandhi had given the middle classes the opportunity to buy Maruti cars manufactured with the assistance of Suzuki Motors in Japan. Then, with rising incomes in the '80s, came the opportunity to buy more goods made in India and abroad. Flourishing markets in smuggled and second-handed clothes, toys, food items, etc, found excited buyers among all those with the money to buy them. The country's import and forex restrictions remained hurdles though, until a cuddly Sardarji in a light blue turban cut loose the remaining shackles that bound the feet of the Indian middle class consumer. Looking every bit like the Air India Maharaja, he became, curiously enough, its very antithesis. Shackles cut and hurdles removed, middle class India set about accumulating wealth and goods sans ideology, morality or any of those old-fashioned words that held back their forefathers. Something like the gold rush had begun. Here was an opportunity to radically remake the class hierarchies of Nehruvian India, besides stomping out the last embers of its socialist ways. The Nehruvian middle classes, distinctly uncomfortable in this new milieu, made haste to follow the Brits outside the country, whether in racist America or Australia or in declining Britain and Europe. Those who remained tethered to Indian shores were forced to compete with those they regarded as their social inferiors, Hindiwallahs, Marathi manooses, Kannadigas, Punjabi refugees and others. Some won, some lost, the winners often ending up isolated as intellectual, artistic, and cultural elites. But the overarching story of the past two decades is the political and economic ascendancy of the growing vernacular middle classes in India.
The vernacular middle classes are not a homogeneous lot, of course. There are sharp gradations between earlier and later entrants to middle class ranks. Often enough, two generations of Western schooling still counts for twice the social privileges of someone with a single generation of formal rote learning. Sometimes, however, a bloke from the country sneaks up on his social superiors and beats them to the much-prized engineering programmes at an IIT. Or a small-town boy makes it big as an entrepreneur. These exceptions to the rule nonetheless do not threaten the overall class structure of urban India. Westernization today means American ways of speaking and living rather than the older colonial or English habits of the Nehruvian elite. The Westernized Indian settled in the US is now the envy of the Indian middle class family. Domestic imitations of the same occupy second place in the new caste system. Those below them lack the linguistic and cultural familiarity with contemporary Western ways, though they struggle to acquire it slowly but steadily.
A strong disdain for the rural and the folk unites the new Indian middle classes even as they experiment with new forms of conservatism and indigenism. Emerging as they do out of the Nehruvian vision of scientific high modernism, they retain a firm dislike towards these "backward" social formations. These are forms of life that must dissolve into the pages of history, not haunt the present and future of India. Pro-poor politics is seen as implicitly pro-poverty, which is how the legacy of Nehruvian socialism is interpreted today in middle class India. The Left is largely obsolete from this perspective. The Centre itself has shifted rightwards on the ideological spectrum. Virulent nationalism, instead of being the last resort of the scoundrel, is a badge of honour and pride. Nationalism requires a coherent cultural ideology, and Hindutva offers this. Hindutva is an alternative, as Savarkar cogently argued, to the everyday superstitions and stupidities of popular Hinduism over the ages. It is, at core, ruthlessly instrumental and modern in its rationality. Such a thoroughly secular ideology, indeed epistemology, dovetails nicely with the training of the techno-managerial modernist trained, ironically enough, in Nehruvian IITs and IIMs. National pride thus connotes Hindu civilizational pride, which necessarily entails a demonization of Muslims, Christians, and other marginalized social groups. Hindu pride also connotes a revival of older nationalistic idioms of virile masculinity and subservient femininity in the home and the world. Caste is treated as a matter of the past, even as virtually every Hindutva-approved marriage follows strict caste lines. The bizarre spectacle of caste- and region-specific matrimonial websites today thus ties the virtual world of Hindu conservatism with its everyday social realities.
Cloaking this conservative ideology is the virtuous appearance of being opposed to politics (anti-political"). After all, isn't the spiritual father of the contemporary middle classes, the Sardarji in the Blue Turban, the symbol of anti-politics? Politics, on this view, is not an activity that pits competing social interests and ideas against each other, but a corrupt, pernicious one that weakens and destabilizes the nation. The only kind of politics is thus anti-politics, which means technocracy in the language of what is now called "governance." Proper nationalistic political conduct takes the form of problem-solving. As good positivists, the aim is to reduce the messy complexities of social problems into solvable problems. If adivasis are located atop valuable minerals, simply displace them at the earliest to acquire land for profitable and patriotic nation-building activities. In solving social problems so peremptorily, the prejudices of caste and creed themselves transparently. The rule of experts in technical domains of life correspond to the rule of new-age gurus in the private sphere. This is not so much a separation of the public and private, but one realm reinforcing another. It is commonplace today, therefore, for someone designing her house along the lines of Vastu Shastra to claim scientific validity for her action. The public slides into the private realm and vice-versa. Just as politics is debilitating in a polity, so too are divorce, homosexuality, liberated women, dalits, adivasis, Muslims, etc. To be anti-political is, therefore, to be above the conflicting claims and contestations that democracy inevitably throws up. It is, in other words, an authoritarian stance that is deeply wedded to the status quo and hostile to progressive social change.
The bulk of the middle classes in India today are new to these ranks, i.e., they have spent either a generation or two enjoying the social privileges of this class. The latest figures tell us that roughly 25-30% of India's 1.2 billion people are now middle class. Above them is a small slice of billionaires and millionaires (or arabpatis and crorepatis), and below are more than 70% of the country excluded at present from middle-class citizenship. The older colonial or Nehruvian middle classes continue to retain some of their social privileges in India and abroad, but they are increasingly drawn into competition with the nouveau riches. It is not always the case that the Nehruvians win these battles. Among those earning between Rs. 2.5 to10 lacs annually ($5,500 to 22,000), roughly four to sixteen times the per capita income, the Nehruvians are less than a fifth. Among those earning over Rs. 10 lacs ($22,000), the Nehruvians are even fewer, perhaps not even a tenth. The postcolonial middle classes thus consist overwhelmingly of those whose fortunes rely on techno-managerial and/or commercial occupations, social conservatism, and an "anti-political" political orientation.
It should hardly surprise us, therefore, when this class of people, probably no more than a fifth of the country's population, claims to speak for all of India in one voice. This sleight of hand is remarkable as much for its utter blindness to existing social realities as for its wholesome disdain for those below on the social ladder. We are India, nothing else matters. This is the new slogan of the contemporary middle classes in India. When, therefore, they come out onto the streets in support of Anna Hazare's campaign against corruption, do not be puzzled. Those whose have never known better are now gathered to direct public policy in accordance with their class interests. To subvert democracy in the name of democracy will be a fitting agenda for the contemporary middle classes. Hoisting up the bastard by his own petard, as it were. For such a class, the old ideological divisions of Left and Right matter no longer. Cultural nationalism seeks to paper over any social differences that might threaten the sacred nation and its boundaries. To win at all costs, as in cricket matches, is the only option. Welcome to this brave new world, my friends...
In India, however, with an annual per capita income of roughly $1,200 (Rs. 55,000), the situation is rather different. To be middle class is not so much to be an average Indian in income terms, but to enjoy the status of a Western-educated professional and to consume a basket of commodities that comes with that status. For Americans studying Indian or South Asian society, this is puzzling or even odd. Yet Indians (or Pakistanis or Bangladeshis) rarely think critically about what it means to be middle class. Is it not bizarre that, after nearly 65 years of independence, Westernization remains the basis for being middle class in India?
To my mind, the only explanation for this state of affairs lies in the peculiar history of this class of men and women in the subcontinent. It is well-known that the social origins of this class lie in the colonial period when a class of professional men were inducted into the colonial bureaucracy as "babus" or clerks, and later, as civil servants in the three Presidency cities of Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras. As products of a Macaulyite education, they no longer received a "traditional" education in Persian, Sanskrit or Tamil, but Western literary and scientific learning in English. Under the new system of education, correctly identifying the five causes for Clive's victory at Plassey or mimicking Macaulay's florid prose in an exam could hold the key to government jobs and social prestige. Rote-and-regurgitate represented the joint triumph of brahminism and colonialism in nineteenth-century India. Babus or clerks in the lower rungs of the colonial bureaucracy were certainly inferior to members of the provincial or the covenanted civil services. Doctors, lawyers, and teachers, too, joined middle-class ranks to sustain the fledgling civil society among the natives of the Presidencies. Above them were the ruling caste of white men and women; below them were the vast labouring populations of the subcontinent who lacked the "civility" to be part of the urban elite clubs of the day. "Middle" thus implied comprador more than median or average.
Postcolonial India inherited colonial civil society with its Westernized middle class. This is because the Gandhian nationalist movement did little to alter the class structure of Indian society; indeed, it concretized the deepest prejudices and injustices in late colonial India. In the 1950s, at the top were the IAS/IFS/IPS cadres, the armed forces, and a handful of well-to-do barristers, doctors, and professors; below them, babus, clerks and petty businessmen formed the lower middle class. The Nehruvian upper middle class basically assumed the privileges of the colonial ruling caste with much enthusiasm. "English rule without Englishmen," Gandhi had warned in Hind Swaraj, would simply mean retaining the tiger's nature after getting rid of the tiger per se. But that is, of course exactly, what Nehru and his ilk sought in their quest to put India on the world map. To compete with their former colonizers, India, they argued, ought to mimic and outdo them at their own game. To speak English fluently and to affect Western manners were usually enough to be a member of the privileged middle class across urban India. The actual incomes earned by these men (and they were usually men!) were nothing to boast about, but the prestige their status in society commanded could not be weighed in purely monetary terms. It would have been regarded as crass to unfavourably compare, for instance, an IAS officer's salary to the earnings of a well-to-do timber contractor or mill owner. Nehruvian India had no place for such crassness; its manners were impeccably English.
Capitalism itself, for the Nehrvian elite, was a dirty word. Science became the buzz word for the nation-builders who wished the state would control and regulate the economy and polity. Education, in the post-independence polity, meant a smattering of English education alongside large doses of mathematical, scientific and other technical formulae. Naturally, this kind of policy shift meant an expansion of the existing boundaries of the Indian middle class to incorporate the engineers who would build big dams and managers who would run public sector companies efficiently. Nehru, who had been a third-rate student of chemistry at Cambridge, had ironically made his name writing historical and political treatises. Yet he inaugurated a science-focused expansion of middle class India to buttress his socialist theory of government. The new techno-managerial parvenu class, however, lacked the social graces of their more Westernized contemporaries in the '50s and '60s. They, therefore, ended up being slotted between the upper and lower middle classes, envying the former and despising the latter. Although products of the new postcolonial programme of science, the techno-managerial middle class remained much attached to the "vernacular" modes of life they had left behind in their small towns and villages. Hostile towards the Westernized values and lifestyles of their social superiors, they fell back on an indigenous conservatism in habits and mores that emphasized their earthiness as much as their aspirations. Keen to overtake their Westernized superiors, the vernacular middle classes remained cheerlessly within the Nehruvian regime of socialism.
In response to Indira Gandhi's well-calculated populism, the vernacular middle classes were restless for social change. The Garibi Hatao agenda followed from solid Nehruvian foundations, yet it was compromised by the political alliances made by the Indira Congress in the states. When alternative leadership in the form of the Jan Sangh or parties led by rising middle-caste leaders such as Charan Singh emerged, they unsurprisingly caught the imagination of the vernacular middle classes. To speak as "the people" in one unanimous voice against a tyrannical government seemed to bring to mind the stratagems of Gandhian mass politics. The homegrown conservatism of those resentful of the Westernized Nehruvian middle class came to the fore in the JP movement of the mid-'70s. (The Nehruvian middle class, by contrast, tended to support the Emergency as a necessary evil: after all, trains ran on time, and corruption could be curbed.) It did not matter whether one's ideological convictions swayed left or right, because both could be accommodated in the fight against the tyranny of the Westernized woman and her cronies in power. The lower middle classes in cities as well as rural elites ended up as significant allies in the fight against the dictatorship of Mrs. Gandhi's government. When the Janata government came to power, it banned Coca-Cola and other Western evils because it ostensibly poisoned the young virile men and fecund women of India. Similarly, it opened diplomatic talks with China after Mao's death, a sharp departure from the foreign policy of the Westward-looking Congress regime. Swadeshi, not socialism, became the new buzzword for this short-lived foray by the new middle classes into mainstream politics in India.
Although the Janata government is a forgotten episode in Indian political history, it is worth looking back today to recognize the origins of contemporary middle-class politics in the late '70s. Swadeshi was always a charade that had gone too far. Soon, Sanjay Gandhi had given the middle classes the opportunity to buy Maruti cars manufactured with the assistance of Suzuki Motors in Japan. Then, with rising incomes in the '80s, came the opportunity to buy more goods made in India and abroad. Flourishing markets in smuggled and second-handed clothes, toys, food items, etc, found excited buyers among all those with the money to buy them. The country's import and forex restrictions remained hurdles though, until a cuddly Sardarji in a light blue turban cut loose the remaining shackles that bound the feet of the Indian middle class consumer. Looking every bit like the Air India Maharaja, he became, curiously enough, its very antithesis. Shackles cut and hurdles removed, middle class India set about accumulating wealth and goods sans ideology, morality or any of those old-fashioned words that held back their forefathers. Something like the gold rush had begun. Here was an opportunity to radically remake the class hierarchies of Nehruvian India, besides stomping out the last embers of its socialist ways. The Nehruvian middle classes, distinctly uncomfortable in this new milieu, made haste to follow the Brits outside the country, whether in racist America or Australia or in declining Britain and Europe. Those who remained tethered to Indian shores were forced to compete with those they regarded as their social inferiors, Hindiwallahs, Marathi manooses, Kannadigas, Punjabi refugees and others. Some won, some lost, the winners often ending up isolated as intellectual, artistic, and cultural elites. But the overarching story of the past two decades is the political and economic ascendancy of the growing vernacular middle classes in India.
The vernacular middle classes are not a homogeneous lot, of course. There are sharp gradations between earlier and later entrants to middle class ranks. Often enough, two generations of Western schooling still counts for twice the social privileges of someone with a single generation of formal rote learning. Sometimes, however, a bloke from the country sneaks up on his social superiors and beats them to the much-prized engineering programmes at an IIT. Or a small-town boy makes it big as an entrepreneur. These exceptions to the rule nonetheless do not threaten the overall class structure of urban India. Westernization today means American ways of speaking and living rather than the older colonial or English habits of the Nehruvian elite. The Westernized Indian settled in the US is now the envy of the Indian middle class family. Domestic imitations of the same occupy second place in the new caste system. Those below them lack the linguistic and cultural familiarity with contemporary Western ways, though they struggle to acquire it slowly but steadily.
A strong disdain for the rural and the folk unites the new Indian middle classes even as they experiment with new forms of conservatism and indigenism. Emerging as they do out of the Nehruvian vision of scientific high modernism, they retain a firm dislike towards these "backward" social formations. These are forms of life that must dissolve into the pages of history, not haunt the present and future of India. Pro-poor politics is seen as implicitly pro-poverty, which is how the legacy of Nehruvian socialism is interpreted today in middle class India. The Left is largely obsolete from this perspective. The Centre itself has shifted rightwards on the ideological spectrum. Virulent nationalism, instead of being the last resort of the scoundrel, is a badge of honour and pride. Nationalism requires a coherent cultural ideology, and Hindutva offers this. Hindutva is an alternative, as Savarkar cogently argued, to the everyday superstitions and stupidities of popular Hinduism over the ages. It is, at core, ruthlessly instrumental and modern in its rationality. Such a thoroughly secular ideology, indeed epistemology, dovetails nicely with the training of the techno-managerial modernist trained, ironically enough, in Nehruvian IITs and IIMs. National pride thus connotes Hindu civilizational pride, which necessarily entails a demonization of Muslims, Christians, and other marginalized social groups. Hindu pride also connotes a revival of older nationalistic idioms of virile masculinity and subservient femininity in the home and the world. Caste is treated as a matter of the past, even as virtually every Hindutva-approved marriage follows strict caste lines. The bizarre spectacle of caste- and region-specific matrimonial websites today thus ties the virtual world of Hindu conservatism with its everyday social realities.
Cloaking this conservative ideology is the virtuous appearance of being opposed to politics (anti-political"). After all, isn't the spiritual father of the contemporary middle classes, the Sardarji in the Blue Turban, the symbol of anti-politics? Politics, on this view, is not an activity that pits competing social interests and ideas against each other, but a corrupt, pernicious one that weakens and destabilizes the nation. The only kind of politics is thus anti-politics, which means technocracy in the language of what is now called "governance." Proper nationalistic political conduct takes the form of problem-solving. As good positivists, the aim is to reduce the messy complexities of social problems into solvable problems. If adivasis are located atop valuable minerals, simply displace them at the earliest to acquire land for profitable and patriotic nation-building activities. In solving social problems so peremptorily, the prejudices of caste and creed themselves transparently. The rule of experts in technical domains of life correspond to the rule of new-age gurus in the private sphere. This is not so much a separation of the public and private, but one realm reinforcing another. It is commonplace today, therefore, for someone designing her house along the lines of Vastu Shastra to claim scientific validity for her action. The public slides into the private realm and vice-versa. Just as politics is debilitating in a polity, so too are divorce, homosexuality, liberated women, dalits, adivasis, Muslims, etc. To be anti-political is, therefore, to be above the conflicting claims and contestations that democracy inevitably throws up. It is, in other words, an authoritarian stance that is deeply wedded to the status quo and hostile to progressive social change.
The bulk of the middle classes in India today are new to these ranks, i.e., they have spent either a generation or two enjoying the social privileges of this class. The latest figures tell us that roughly 25-30% of India's 1.2 billion people are now middle class. Above them is a small slice of billionaires and millionaires (or arabpatis and crorepatis), and below are more than 70% of the country excluded at present from middle-class citizenship. The older colonial or Nehruvian middle classes continue to retain some of their social privileges in India and abroad, but they are increasingly drawn into competition with the nouveau riches. It is not always the case that the Nehruvians win these battles. Among those earning between Rs. 2.5 to10 lacs annually ($5,500 to 22,000), roughly four to sixteen times the per capita income, the Nehruvians are less than a fifth. Among those earning over Rs. 10 lacs ($22,000), the Nehruvians are even fewer, perhaps not even a tenth. The postcolonial middle classes thus consist overwhelmingly of those whose fortunes rely on techno-managerial and/or commercial occupations, social conservatism, and an "anti-political" political orientation.
It should hardly surprise us, therefore, when this class of people, probably no more than a fifth of the country's population, claims to speak for all of India in one voice. This sleight of hand is remarkable as much for its utter blindness to existing social realities as for its wholesome disdain for those below on the social ladder. We are India, nothing else matters. This is the new slogan of the contemporary middle classes in India. When, therefore, they come out onto the streets in support of Anna Hazare's campaign against corruption, do not be puzzled. Those whose have never known better are now gathered to direct public policy in accordance with their class interests. To subvert democracy in the name of democracy will be a fitting agenda for the contemporary middle classes. Hoisting up the bastard by his own petard, as it were. For such a class, the old ideological divisions of Left and Right matter no longer. Cultural nationalism seeks to paper over any social differences that might threaten the sacred nation and its boundaries. To win at all costs, as in cricket matches, is the only option. Welcome to this brave new world, my friends...
In walked Old Father Time himself through the gates. Dressed in a yellow silk kurta and a Nehru jacket, Father Time smiled and seated himself next to me. "Where are you going?" he asked. "Patel Chowk," I replied. "Long way to go, my boy. These coaches are old, you see, but the new ones they've got will be faster and smoother without the jerkiness we have now." Hmmm, I responded, wondering how he knew about the DMRC's plans. I suppose my laconic responses put off the old man. So he began talking to a rotund gentleman who seemed intrigued by the tidbit about the new coaches. "Bhaisahab, there is no hope for us Hindus nowadays. See how the government equivocates when it comes to terrorism. They didn't even want to hang Afzal Guru." Bhaisahab concurred: "And now they speak of Hindu terror. What a travesty!" That comment clearly struck a chord. It promised to pave the way for a long discourse on minority appeasement and Hindu insecurities in contemporary India. But nothing of the sort happened because a young, bespectacled man in a skullcap and sherwani stood beside us. The joys of Indian secularism!
their butts pinched or breasts grabbed in the other coaches. But with the new reserved coach for women, the "normal" passengers (male, aged 15-60 years) can rule the roost elsewhere and ignore the bright green signs that dare to impose a kind of civility in the early days of the Metro. Butt-pinching and breast-grabbing are now perfectly acceptable in three-quarters of every Metro train. Indeed, they are vital to maintaining the new zenana culture: "segregate, or else we'll, molest you" is the message to women.
is its most visible face in rural India today, the Delhi Metro is the blueprint for urban transformations in India today. Move over, Narayan Murthy and the BATF. Metro coaches are awash with public sector advertisements for yoga and naturopathy from the Health Ministry and mobile and internet plans from MTNL and BSNL. The state continue to enforce the writ of the law throughout the metro station. If you spit or travel without tokens, be prepared to pay a hefty fine. If you enter the women's coach forcibly, be prepared to be pulled out by a cop policing the gendered borderlands between the coaches. And don't urinate on the platform or clamber atop the train! The government hopes to impose a distinctly bourgeois civility on those whose notions of morality are characteristically different. It is not clear yet who or what will prevail.