On a recent flight from Goa to Delhi, i was seated across the aisle from three loutish young men. Clearly new rich, they bristled with flashy phones and watches. They didn’t bother turning off their cell phones even after the stewardess made an announcement; instead, they went right ahead playing with their toys. I asked them to switch their phones off. They stared at me insolently and went into a huddle from which emerged crude sounds that I understood to be mocking laughter.
This is the newly emergent middle class that an open India has thrown up: crass, belligerent and reckless. It is the polar opposite of the privileged classes that presided over closed India: snobbish, full of intrigue and cautious. There’s not much to choose between the two. The new middle class is vile; the old was servile. While I have been a champion of the newly emergent middle class, I guess my view was coloured by my disdain for the privilegentsia of Fabian socialist India. But the new middle class is just as hideous as the privilegentsia. I call them vulgarians.
The privilegentsia was bred on elitism: right connections, right schools, one of the few best colleges, and preferably Oxford and Cambridge. The vulgarian instinct is to push and shove; and when push comes to shove — to buy their way out. On the other hand, while mouthing homilies about the rule of law, members of the privilegentsia held them-selves above the law. They never waited their turn for anything and without the slightest bit of embarrassment bent rules, flouted regulations and scorned the law. The emergent class of vulgarians makes no such pretence; they seem to believe everything has a price: schools, colleges, hospitals, and more worryingly — bureaucrats, policemen and judges.
During privilegentsia raj, India had to reckon with parasitic elites who dominated state coffers, extorted usurious taxes and provided few public goods in return. Under their dispensation, ordinary citizens were cruelly ignored: perpetual power, water, telephones and public transport shortages; ramshackle roads, airports; minimal primary education, housing, public healthcare and sanitation.
The minuscule unconnected middle class was especially targeted by privilegentsia policies and in many cases, driven into exile in the United States, Canada and Britain. Those who couldn’t emigrate saw conditions decline rapidly — famines, civil disturbances, war, scarcity, suspension of civil rights under the Emergency in 1975 and finally total bankruptcy, which forced the government to fly out its gold reserves in secret and mortgage them to the Bank of England.
Forced to open up the shackled economy, the government progressively scrapped industrial licensing and numerous other controls after the 1980s. In the process, it unleashed animal forces that transformed India. We went from being pitied as a ‘basket case’ to being admired as an emerging world power with a dynamic economy. With GDP growth of 9 percent plus for the past five years, millions were lifted from poverty. From being an apostrophe in the demographic profile, the middle class burgeoned and became one of the world’s sought after market segments. Global businesses rushed in to cater to its needs and desires; local businesses shaped up to provide quality goods and responsive services.
Sadly, the flawed education system has inhibited full transformation; it has delivered much less than what it should have. Under privilegentsia raj, primary education was neglected and higher education became a screening process to weed out “people like them”. Thus, the ordained ones went on to St. Stephen’s, Oxford and Cambridge to return to assured positions of power and pelf within the privilegentsia. The others, who had no connections with the ruling elite, were either exiled abroad to seek their fortune or stayed behind within an irrelevant higher education system subject to the whims of political leaders.
On the other hand, following the establishment of the IITs and IIMs, India produced engineers and managers whose skills were far too advanced to be accommodated in the makeshift Ambassador car economy. As such these elite institutions providing highly subsidised education became feeders to the global economy. All the Indian success stories in global business that are trumpeted in the pink papers, are outcomes of the privilegentsia’s misbegotten priorities.
Now with the rise of the vulgarians, education has become a commodity; something you must have to get a job. All manner of dubious institutions have sprung up to cater to these needs. With the unprecedented growth of the economy, the need for talent has become so acute that just about anyone with a degree or even a modicum of education can land a job. The three louts sitting across the aisle on the flight from Goa to Delhi were clearly among those. They probably had some basic education and had been snapped up by some company and enrolled in an internal training program. They were minimally trained personnel focused on specific cog-in-the-wheel type jobs.
Whatever happened to liberal values and civil norms as crucial objectives of education? Their paucity is India’s Achilles heel.
(Rajiv Desai is president of Comma Consulting and a well-known Delhi-based columnist)