India's middle class failure
by Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad
India's 200m-strong middle class is the most economically dynamic group on the planet, but is largely uninterested in politics or social reform. Until it begins to engage politically, India will suffer from a lop-sided modernisation
Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad is professor of comparative religion and philosophy at Lancaster University

Jaya Mary is a cleaner. Tall and thin, with some English, and at least two Indian languages, she quietly challenged her main employer, a medium-sized company, when it recently threatened to fire her without the pension to which she is entitled. When she works in a private house, she has no contract, and depends on the goodwill of the householder. She is a Christian, but also adheres to many cultural expressions of Hinduism. Her husband left her with two small children, and she relies on the support of her mother and brother. Her boy is in a local-language state school, but her clever daughter is in a private English-language school, which costs Jaya 20 per cent of her income. She has an empty bank account, but acquired a mobile phone from her scooter-driving brother (whose wife, a sworn enemy of Jaya, has just left him). Languages, religions, integrity, suffering, family stresses and ties, education, dependence, global aspiration—she encompasses them all, she is a Mother India. (And she is a very real person.)

As the actual Mother India celebrates the 60th anniversary of her independence, there is—as in Jaya Mary's life—both surging optimism and crushing despair about her future. As the saying goes, everything and its opposite is true in India. The seven Indian Institutes of Technology rank near the top of global surveys, and job offers to graduates from the Indian Institutes of Management rival those to graduates of the famous US business schools; yet a third of the country is still illiterate. Three hundred million Indians live on less than $1 a day—a quarter of the world's utterly poor—yet since 1985, more than 400m (out of a total population of 1bn) have risen out of relative poverty—to $5 a day—and another 300m will follow over the next two decades if the economy continues to grow at over 7 per cent a year. Population growth, even at a slower pace, will mean that there will still be millions below the poverty line, but the fall in number will be steady. At the other end of the scale, India has the largest number of dollar billionaires outside the US and Russia.

Historical success led India and China to their current demographic challenges. Their populations grew into the tens of millions because they were so economically advanced at the start of the first millennium—at a time when even the Roman empire lagged behind. By the time of the birth of European modernity, when technology provided leverage for smaller populations to improve their lives, India and China already had too many people for this to be possible. The legacy of this early success underlies both India's scale and the polarity of opinion over what the place is all about. India is near the top, or the bottom, of most international economic tables. To grapple with such extremes, and to peer into the country's future, we must above all try to understand India's rapidly growing middle class.

For a country that was born of partition, has had a history of separatism, and that encompasses such linguistic, ethnic, social, religious and geographic variety, it is strange that even critics talk of India as if its legal unity was sufficient guarantor of its actual unity. Statistics that combine the city of Chennai, in the stable southern state of Tamil Nadu, with a village in newly constituted Jharkhand state, in eastern India, are likely to deceive as much as those that try to encompass both Denmark and Kosovo.

"India" could have been many other things—an even larger, undivided India, but also a much smaller one, or just a cluster of ancestral formations. Only the British empire and then the resolve of the leaders of the independence struggle ensured that the ancient yet amorphous idea became a single nation state. Sixty years later, there is a functional Indian state that is a rising world power despite its huge variations—but there is also a dysfunctional Indian state that cannot realise the social purpose that the idea of national citizenship is meant to provide.

In Tamil Nadu, half the population lived below the poverty line in the mid-1960s, but effective contraception, female education and primary healthcare led to population stability and a consequent drop in poverty by the end of the century. But in Bihar, which had the same percentage of people below the poverty line in the 1960s, the population still grows at a staggering pace, making anti-poverty measures hard to pursue. Both Assam and Punjab have histories of political violence and a poor school system, but the latter's infrastructure allows for a standard of life far ahead of the former.

Among the middle class, in much of the media, in the malls and airports, in houses (however small) with water and electricity, there is still a commitment to an India which plays a decisive role on the international stage—but now, instead of through "non-aligned" solidarity and ancient history, it is through software and finance. Ten years after the buzz caused by the nuclear tests, the middle classes take India's new status for granted; they simply assume it is India's due to be treated as the "equal" of the US and the rest, and move on to talk of economic opportunities. This commitment to their own idea of India and their central role in its economic rise makes the middle classes sure of themselves. But at the same time, their sense of citizenship is weak: they do not, on the whole, extend a sense of solidarity to the poor; they often do not acknowledge the role of the state in their own rise or its capacity to solve any of the country's problems; and they are, in general, politically apathetic.

What explains this introversion? Middle classes at all stages of development, whether in 19th-century Europe or now, distrust those who have not risen with them. Yet in more homogeneous societies, the better off are more likely to care for the worse off. Highly diverse societies, like India, find it more difficult to institutionalise such fellow feeling.
The key to the diversity of Indian society is the

jati system—intermarrying among consanguineous groups with hereditary (if often notional) occupations. But these groups are also placed within the ancient hierarchy of the varna, or "caste," system—the fivefold division of society on the axis of ritual purity from priests to warriors to merchants to labourers to those beyond the possibility of purity and therefore untouchable. Over the centuries, there have been many efforts to extend a sense of common humanity across castes. The caste system has also allowed for unparalleled pluralism of belief and practice; according to the logic of purity, the Brahmin priest has no control over practices beyond his realm, making for a thrilling diversity of temples, festivals and deities. Nonetheless, the varna concept that people are intrinsically pure or impure has blighted the idea of citizenship on the subcontinent. And while the 1950 Indian constitution sought to end such division (which the British had exploited), caste sentiment still drives rural violence and the separation of privileged groups.

more at: http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/printarticle.php?id=9776

I thought you said you weren't going fishing this weekend.

__________________
-Marty

1986 300E 220,000 miles+ transmission impossible
(Now waiting under a bridge in order to become one)

Reading your M103 duty cycle:
http://www.peachparts.com/shopforum/831799-post13.html
http://www.peachparts.com/shopforum/831807-post14.html

If you believe in the caste system then you are doomed to repeat it.....

__________________
"It's normal for these things to empty your wallet and break your heart in the process."
2012 SLK 350
1987 420 SEL

yea.. I thought this was a fishing thread..

Something to think about while at the in-laws, watching the seconds tick by agonizingly slowly . . .

__________________
" We have nothing to fear but the main stream media itself . . . ."- Adapted from Franklin D Roosevelt for the 21st century

OBK #55

1998 Lincoln Continental - Sold
Max 1984 300TD 285,000 miles - Sold
The Dee8gonator 1987 560SEC 196,000 miles - Sold
Orgasmatron - 2006 CLS500 90,000 miles
2002 C320 Wagon 122,000 miles
2016 AMG GTS 12,000 miles

Ain' it da troof?

Maybe you could come up with the cure for cancer after several of those visits . . .

That reminds me, I've been reading the new bio of A Einstein. It amazes me how much he came up with in his "thought experiments," as I think he referred to them. What a guy! He must have spent a lot of time at HIS in-laws'

__________________
" We have nothing to fear but the main stream media itself . . . ."- Adapted from Franklin D Roosevelt for the 21st century

OBK #55

1998 Lincoln Continental - Sold
Max 1984 300TD 285,000 miles - Sold
The Dee8gonator 1987 560SEC 196,000 miles - Sold
Orgasmatron - 2006 CLS500 90,000 miles
2002 C320 Wagon 122,000 miles
2016 AMG GTS 12,000 miles

nothing phisy about it....whatchu talkin bout willis!

__________________
"It's normal for these things to empty your wallet and break your heart in the process."
2012 SLK 350
1987 420 SEL

Good article, with a few things I disagree with.

That's a good saying.

Basically the equivalent population of the US live on less than $1, and the equivalent population of the US will rise out of poverty in two decades.




Seems like the author is English/living in England, because if he lived in America, he could see how diverse people can still be a united country.




This explosion of the middle class (and rich class too) is very new. I think the caste system cannot survive progress, especially as men outnumber women. It's going to take more than a couple of years of progress to change though.

__________________
1984 300TD

[QUOTE=tankdriver;1607776]Good article, with a few things I disagree with.


Basically the equivalent population of the US live on less than $1, and the equivalent population of the US will rise out of poverty in two decades.



Rise out of poverty or are we heading deeper into poverty? This lending debacle isn't going away anytime soon and the after effects won't be seen for awhile.

__________________
"It's normal for these things to empty your wallet and break your heart in the process."
2012 SLK 350
1987 420 SEL