Neither BJP nor Congress wants to engage with the middle class

File photo of Prime Minister Narendra Modi with former Congress president Rahul Gandhi | Sonu Mehta/Hindustan Times via Getty Images

Our leaders may be mistaken about the numbers or the spread of this part of the electorate.

India’s famed middle class is looking for political patrons. Not affluent enough to not care for a sympathetic dispensation and not poor enough to appeal to the bleeding hearts, they are left to fend for themselves today.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi sounded apologetic in an interview last week as he sought to play to their ‘Swabhiman’ (pride or self-respect), saying that the middle class is not given to living on anyone’s ‘daya daan’ (mercy) and is the only section of the society that wants maximum benefits to be given to the poorest.

Thank goodness he remembered them, finally! Or should they thank the electorate in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh? The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) got a drubbing even in urban areas in the Assembly elections, suggesting disenchantment of the middle class with the saffron party.

They had abandoned their traditional loyalty to the BJP to vote for Manmohan Singh in 2009 when the general elections saw even urban centres rooting for the Congress. They loved the face of economic reforms in India and were thrilled to see him take on the apparatchiks in his party to successfully push the Indo-US civil nuclear deal. They returned to the BJP fold en masse in 2014 when Narendra Modi led an Obama-esque ‘yes-we-can’ campaign built on hopes and dreams.

Five years since then and until last week, the middle class was a forgotten lot. Post-2014, Modi-Amit Shah’s social engineering strategy took the BJP’s expanse and reach to an unprecedented level. Its increased acceptability among backward classes, Dalits and tribals made it oblivious of the concerns of the middle class as a concrete and homogeneous interest group that serves as influencers for other strata.

But the electoral drubbing in the three states has prompted Modi to reach out to the middle class again. Modi and finance minister Arun Jaitley, in separate interviews last week, made a desperate bid to change this perception about the party’s apathy towards the middle class. “It is our responsibility to think about the middle class, not because they vote for us, but in the interest of the country,” said Modi.

The prime minister’s reassuring words to the middle class may have come a wee bit late. But do they have other options? As it is, the Rahul Gandhi-led Congress is unmindful of their existence. When was the last time you heard Gandhi addressing the concerns of the middle class himself, while we did hear him take a jibe at Modi for failing to do the same?

Gandhi is usually seen either commiserating with the poor or damning the rich and the powerful. If he gets any time in between, he takes a break from the temporal world to consecrate himself to Lord Shiva. But why blame just Modi and Gandhi? When was the last time you heard any other political party seeking to engage the middle class? Part of the reason is that this class may be aspirational but doesn’t come out on the roads to show its solidarity and strength-the way farmers, Dalits, tribals or other interest groups do.

That’s why the political class never feels threatened by them. There is also a perception that it’s the poor and the farmers who decide the winner in the elections.

Our political class may, however, be mistaken about the numerical strength or the geographical spread of the middle class today. According to economists Sandhya Krishnan and Neeraj Hatekar (‘Rise of the Middle Class in India and its Changing Structure‘, Economic and Political Weekly, June 2017), the middle class in India (those spending between $2 and $10 per capita per day) remained ‘largely stable’ between 1999-2000 and 2004-2005; their size, however, doubled between 2004-05 and 2011-12-to 604.3 million from 304.2 million. These economists used the national sample survey (NSS) consumer expenditure survey to arrive at these estimates.

They made three categories on the basis of spending per capita per day: lower middle class ($2-$4), middle-middle class ($4-$6) and upper middle class ($6-$10). As per their estimates, the middle class swelled in an ‘unprecedented fashion’ in eight years from 2004-05, though in the lower middle category because of several people coming out of poverty to join their ranks.

Their presence also expanded across states and in both rural and urban areas during this period.

Our politicians have failed to take note of the burgeoning middle class as the former mistakenly persists in believing that paying lip service to the farmers and the downtrodden would pay better political dividends. Or that’s the wisdom the Congress has got from its victories in three states as is evident from a string of sops, including the loan waivers, announced for the farmers by Congress governments.

It is true that the aspirational middle class is dismayed and dumbstruck by the saffron party’s decisive shift from ‘vikas’ to ‘Hindutva’ but the BJP hasn’t lost them permanently as the Congress would like to believe.

Krishnan and Hatekar point out the fact that the upper castes continue to dominate even the new, expanded middle class. “In 2011-12, when 50.3% of India was in the new middle class, a far larger share of 63.7% of upper castes were in the same category (compared to 44.3 % in 2004-05). In contrast to this, the lower castes are under-represented in the new middle class,” the two concluded, even as they added that the massive expansion in the size of the new middle class has benefited all caste groups evenly.

What this means is that the BJP, with its traditional bonds with the upper castes, hasn’t lost it completely yet. The middle class may be upset with the BJP today for demonetisation, lack of jobs, falling investments and the general sense of insecurity in times of institutional breakdowns. They would give a patient and sympathetic hearing to Rahul Gandhi whenever he talks about these issues.

But to wean this aspirational class away from the BJP, Gandhi needs to expand his politics beyond povertarianism and change his anti-capital image.