The Great Indian Middle Class (GIMC) is both an asset and liability to India. While it drives economic growth, the GIMC also undermines the rule of law and accountability. It excuses corruption, protects political and bureaucratic wrongdoers, and fails to reform a colonial education system lacking human values. As the nation's largest demographic, the GIMC's expectations are high but its participation in governance and enforcement of accountability is lacking. Unless the GIMC embraces accountability and the greatest good for all people, it will remain a gargantuan liability blocking India's potential.

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The Great Indian Middle Class: Asset or Liability?
Shantanu Basu
A series of events reported in the national media in the last 2-3 weeks strung together
makes for a telling comment on the Great Indian Middle Class (GIMC). The first was the
unfortunate death of a promising IAS officer of the Karnataka cadre, DK Ravi. The panning
of the sequence of events was entirely predictable. It started with this demised officer’s links
to recoveries from tax evaders, evidently linked to political parties. On the second day,
coverage extended to an alleged romantic angle with a married colleague in the same cadre.
Presumably, the third day would certainly predictably draw Ravi’s hapless wife and perhaps
saddle her with a charge of infidelity! Maybe that is why the Nirbhaya crowds at India Gate
needed Baba Ramdev to guide them. Abrar Ahmad from Guwahati fared no better and
remains in hospital with broken bones. Majoni (name changed) from Udalguri in Assam was
sold off for a paltry Rupees fifty thousand and raped freely for close to a decade. And now it
is a research scholar from JNU, the target of lust of a Home Ministry babu. All the while,
criminal Amit Shukla was freely abusing telecom airwaves with impunity from the secure
confines of Tihar Jail. Activist Ketan Dixit was arrested and charged under IPC Sections 188
(violating public order) and 228 (revealing the identity of a rape victim/survivor) in the
course of exhibiting a BBC documentary on the Nirbhaya case. At the same time, Delhi
Police registered 300 FIRs of rape in the first two months of this year translating to a daily
average five rape cases lodged every day in the city. Last year, the number of FIRs filed
stood at 2,069. If molestation cases were added, this year's figure will double. In the first two
months of 2015, the number of FIRs registered under sections of 354 and 509 (molestation
and outraging modesty of women) of IPC is over 500, police officers say. Even preservers of
human health have turned into self-serving demons. A 25-year-old woman from Sikkim, the
wife of an army employee, was trafficked to Delhi where she was allegedly raped by an
AIIMS doctor in south Delhi's Hauz Khas area. Should there have been any ban at all on this
BBC documentary? What else was left for the State to cover as a semi-naked Nirbhaya lay on
the roadside with her innards fatally hanging out, mute testimony to the impotence of the
State?
Adding to the spice of these seemingly unrelated events was the brouhaha over
leakage of official secrets from ‘sensitive’ Ministries of the Govt. of India. Predictably, peons
and low level babus shouldered the blame. No one even asked why personnel in sensitive
posts, irrespective of official station, were not shuffled every three years as per CVC
guidelines. Or how these lowly educated personnel were able to read, distil and hand over the
‘sensitive’ documents to mandarins of corporate India without the generous helping mind of
their bosses and their executive assistants?
An Indian environment Nobel Prize-winning scientist of international repute, RK
Pachauri, had to seek anticipatory bail for sexually harassing his female juniors at TERI.
These are but a few seemingly unrelated events. In Bihar, graphic photos showed families
clambering up four-storeyed examination centres, to officially deliver answer chits to
examinees in the family. All the while, Ponzi schemes in Eastern and NE India using savings

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of the indigent to fuel election campaigns claims high profile political agents of commission
that find incarceration in state jails more comfortable than five-star hotels. Reports from
Assam suggest unparalleled siphoning of Central funds of several thousand crore Rupees in
the last decade, yet no action is taken. On the one hand, the media is choc-a-bloc with
promises of lakhs of crores of spectrum and coal auction proceeds, yet a largely lacklustre
budget seems to give lie to tall claims made by the powers-that-be. The nation does not even
know where and how these mega revenues will be accounted for and applied. Even the
government’s constitutional statutory oversight agency does not ask such inconvenient
questions.
What lessons do they throw up for the GIMC? First, the GIMC excels in shooting the
messenger, sully his or her reputation, and bring his or her family into utter disrepute, even
with official sanction for CBI inquiries in apparent deference to cash in on uneducated public
opinion and create alibis for non-performance of police and intelligence agencies. Otherwise,
how could public funds be diverted by GIMC politicians and bureaucrats with impunity to
private, perhaps even anti-national enterprise? Second, for the GIMC, all blame must start
and end with subaltern sections of society, lower division clerks and undersecretaries,
women, aliens from NE India, et al. Third, an utter disdain for law, in equal measure by the
GIMC preservers and destroyers of the law alike. Where else would senior Delhi Police Asst.
Commissioners be sentenced to life imprisonment for staging broad daylight encounters upon
innocent businessmen and then having the arrogant temerity to admit their
‘misunderstanding’? Where else would one find starred luxury jails, tailor made for GIMC
VIP occupants including Ponzi scheme looters? Fourth, how did high-profile GIMC members
arrogate to themselves the right to cast covetous glances on women young enough to be their
daughters and granddaughters and rape them over a cuppa coffee? Fifth, what has the GIMC
done to demolish and re-create a new education system that has regard for human life at its
heart? Sixth, why is it that the flitting panels of GIMC participants on TV channels never do
any more than putting on patently false visages of incredulity and sympathy for the looted,
raped, assaulted and killed? Seventh, why must the GIMC-operated national media invariably
project and magnify human misery for their pecuniary and sensational TRP values? Eighth,
why does it take gullible subalterns primed with oodles of doubtful finances, to win huge
legislative majorities but a minority GIMC to turn the tide to their financial advantage, to the
exclusion of the subalterns? Ninth, why has the GIMC fostered a regime of official secrecy
that places a premium on sheer non-performance and incompetence of senior levels and finds
scapegoats in the armies of low-level babus that populate the corridors of Raisina Hill and/or
recalcitrant political opponents in legislatures? Last, but not the least, is the purpose of a
GIMC-dominated government to live for itself or for the greatest good of the greatest
number?
India’s GIMC is the biggest single liability in the nation’s ambitions to realize
economic superpower status in the 21st
century, at least on par with China, even as it
contradictorily remains the key to the nation’s economic power house. Bred on a colonial
education system bereft of any regard for human life, the GIMC has crafted self-serving
mores for bribery and corruption, creation of a class of privileges obtained more by might
than right, subsidy and cash-for-vote crumbs for the gullible indigent voter and self-serving

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hijack of all organs of state spawning a regime based upon patronage for private sale of
public assets, all for the unbridled benefit of the GIMC. The GIMC’s expectations are sky-
high, yet their accountability at Hades’ level. Their participation in enforcing accountability
of the nation’s governors is nothing short of zilch. Why would they seek accountability?
They are bought off with hikes in standard deductions and exemptions, indecipherable tax
rebates for manufactured products, senior appointments at policy-making levels, reservations
in recruitment and admissions, the list is endless. At the heart of this gargantuan liability lie
vast swathes of the GIMC that stymies start-ups and out-of-the-box public policy initiatives,
bribes its way through and unhesitatingly accepts corruption as the national cottage industry,
indeed foil all attempts to enforce any accountability on any component of the GIMC. In his
Leading Principles of a Constitutional Code in 1823, Jeremy Bentham wrote, “In saying . . .
the proper end of government is the greatest happiness of all, or, in case of competition and to
the extent of the competition, the greatest happiness of the greatest number, it seems to me
that I have made a declaration of peace and good will to all men.” I too belong to the GIMC,
but raise these questions for my fellow travellers as a conscientious objector. India’s flesh is
willing but the GIMC’s pioneering utilitarian spirit is absent, save for individual enterprise
that has created the largest part of the nation’s official wealth.
The author is a social and political commentator