THE RISE OF THE MIDDLE CLASS

Anna Hazare’s Movement has gathered an unprecedented support from the oft lazy Middle class Indians. Their unrelented support throughout his fast has stirred many sociologists. Whether one agrees or not with the substance of Hazare’s Lokpal bill, we are undoubtedly witnessing a remarkable social movement. What is surprising that Why has India’s urban middle class become the social base of Hazare’s movement? And why has this class chosen the route of movement led by civil society, as opposed to electoral politics led by political parties?
India now has one third urban population, according to the 2011 census. This growing is financially powerful and carries disdain for the politicians. Politics, for it, is not about democracy and constitutionalism. It is about delivering governance – even if it means electing CEOs to run cities rather than mayors and politicos. Corruption and bribery are obstacles to its progress. This is why it is backing the Jan Lokpal Bill. It may not know anything about the Bill’s specifics, or the Draconian nature of the Hazare version of it. But it will back the Bill just because it promises to put the fear of Lokpal into netas and babus. This new middle class is reared in private sector post 1991. It encounters the state only when it buys property, applies for a driving license, birth or death certificate, pays income tax, wants a passport, drives a vehicle or has an accident. These arenas of public life are highly corrupt.
Anger, frustration and helplessness has for the first time driven the middle class to come to streets and protest against corruption and assert its citizenship right to get a cleaner Government. The ironic part is that it is fighting for a bill which will reduce corruption at higher level but won’t bring in much change at their level. Routine corruption is more likely to go down if the middle class re-engaging itself in politics. Indian democracy is rural centric. Village panchayats receive more attention than municipal governance. Decisions about the city are made not by elected municipalities, but by state and central governments, who are more concerned with the rural vote. The situation has now changed. India is more urban and more affluent than before. The urban middle class should use the new political movement to return to electoral politics and start fighting for electoral reforms and push criminals of out Parliaments. They must take up issues which directly affects them. Like Police, economic, political & educational reforms. I would not debate about the merits & demerits of the Janlokpal Bill, but one thing is certain; reliance on civil society alone will not fix India’s governance problems, urban or rural. An anti-corruption Lokpal can only be part of a larger political process; It will not be a magic wand. . If the middle class wants cleaner and better governance, it needs to step into the arena of politics and change the system by engaging themselves into it.

This movement has achieved one advantage. It has shaken the politicians out of their slumber. It has sent a huge message across the Parliament that the time has come when the elected representative start behaving responsibly, else matters will now be decided in Ramlila maidan.

AUGUST SURPRISE

AUGUST SURPRISE

August is supposed to be a month full of celebrations, but instead it has been full of surprise. The first on was the working of our Parliament. Instead of the mindless disruptions in the Parliament, we actually saw the opposition cornering the ruling government on CWG mess through some robust debates and facts. We were beginning to settle with adjournment and Logjams as synonyms for the parliament all thanks to our opposition parties. But good sense prevailed this time on BJP and finally the Loksabha looked like what it used to be. For the BJP, the debate was also a much-needed act of atonement. While the BJP's all-out offensive against the Prime Minister's Office for corruption over the 2010 Commonwealth Games might be part of a larger political strategy, there are certain charges that the government must answer. One of them is the appointment of Suresh Kalmadi despite three consecutive sports ministers writing to the PMO and warning against him and his style of working. Kalmadi may rightly be in the dock for wrongdoing, but he couldn't have had a free rein without the support, of his political bosses. Similarly, Delhi chief minister Sheila Dikshit’s role cannot be ignored after the allegations made by the CAG audit and Shunglu committee reports. Her Government is accused of favoring particular companies in getting imported lights for the streets of Delhi among other things. Multiple civic bodies and sub-committees set up to decorate the capital city for the international event only facilitated the lack of accountability and over expenditure thus resulting in a huge mess and loot of the public coffers.
Our Next surprises were on the international front. The London riots and their powerless Police. Also the sorry state of the world’s richest economy resulting in a turbulent market across the world including our own. “The return of the recession” seems to be the scary movie which we would all be watching for the next year or so thanks to the Udhaar State of America. Both these things will affect us directly. Whereas the markets are still not steady after the last week’s spin, the UK riots worry us, given the intensive India-UK trade ties and a large Indian diaspora. Britishers rake their heads to find reasons for mindless looting and rioting, among rising concerns on erosion of authority in the English society. A chorus of establishment voices responded to pictures of school-age children looting late at night by reaching to blame the parents. MPs and David Cameron were talking about a broken Britain and its culture, and London's mayor said adults and teachers needed to be given back the right to impose authority. With nation wide calls from the Prime minister himself and debates on poor parenting and bad schooling, we Indians and Chinese including Amy Chua are happy to see our methods of strict parenting and disciplined schools being endorsed by the our ex rulers. Let us hope that Amy Chua's 'Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother' would be the one book that would be flying off the shelf of the Bookstores in UK.

Back to Business

Back to Business
Parliament finally returns to business after the complete washout of the winter session due to the stand-off over the 2G spectrum allocation issue. This was the longest shutdown ever. The Government has finally got a chance to explain in Parliament what it is doing about corruption and inflation- the two burning issues faced by the nation. However, the blame game for the loss of valuable 77 days of business and parliamentary practices continues.
Lament on the decline of Parliaments is not new. There is a sense of unease with the way the Parliament and the State legislatures are functioning. It is due to a decline in recent years in both the quantity and quality of work done by them. Over the years the number of days on which the houses sit to transact legislative and other business has come down very significantly. Even the relatively fewer days on which the houses meet are often marked by unseemly incidents, including use of force to intimidate opponents, shouting and shutting out of debate and discussion resulting in frequent adjournments. There is increasing concern about the decline of Parliament, falling standards of debate, erosion of the moral authority and prestige of the supreme tribune of the people. Corrective steps are urgently needed to strengthen Parliament's role as the authentic voice of the people as they struggle and suffer to realise the inspiring vision of a free and just society enshrined in the Constitution. Also, it is of the utmost importance for survival of democracy that Parliament continues to occupy a position of the highest esteem in the minds and hearts of the people.

The most important mechanism that diminishes Parliament is the diminishing individual legislator. An individual legislator is even more dependent upon the party hierarchy than in the past. No more than three or four leaders have any social base that allows them to be secure in the knowledge that they can stand their own ground against a party hierarchy. The individuality of MPs has also been effaced by the anti-defection law, which has made party whips ubiquitous. Parliament can do itself a great favour by endorsing the sensible bill introduced by Manish Tewari, restricting whips to only certain classes of issues. This will allow the individuality of voices to emerge, and MPs can be judged on their record rather than a party whip. Otherwise individual MPs will remain hostage to the phenomenon James Bryce’s in his Modern Democracies so colorfully described: “Moreover, the so-called ‘Party Machines’, which have been wont to nominate candidates, and on whose pleasure depends the political future of a large proportion of the members, prevented the will of the people from prevailing, making many members feel themselves responsible rather to it than to their constituencies.”
Parliament is taken seriously when leaders take it seriously; the House of Commons retains interest because the prime minister directly answers questions. We underestimate how much Nehru’s personal presence in Parliament elevated it. The second temptation is this: as the TRS legislators hinted, after the JPC episode, every party is now learning the lesson that blocking Parliament is an effective way of getting an obdurate government to respond.