Terms of Trade | The indignity of pursuing self-interest
The urban poor, when they come to cities, hope to achieve basic sustenance on a regular income, which they cannot ensure in a village or a smaller town.
Students drowning when they are studying in a library, which they have paid lakhs of rupees to get access to; a doctor on duty brutally raped and killed in her own hospital in a metropolitan town; children dying of electrocution in parks of civic bodies, roads which resemble ponds in front of apartments, which are comparable to some of the most expensive real estate in the world and never-ending commutes which are only becoming worse without any recourse to a well-connected public transport system.
There are many such examples, which tell us that our urban governance is broken and even the successful ‘mind-your-own business’ elite have no escape from this. Behind every such disaster, macabre or mundane, is the larger story of underfunded, overcrowded, badly regulated systems with politicians actively facilitating such a subversion.
It is tempting to jump to the 'there is no quality of life in India' conclusion for the proverbial middle class, which has and continues to work very hard to achieve upward mobility in life and is also paying its dues to the state in taxes. Does that make India a failed state of sorts?
You only have to look at our neighbourhood to be grateful for what we have not become. Barring some remote pockets, India is still an oasis of political, economic and social stability. Some people might want to pick a quarrel with the last claim, but almost all empirical indicators unambiguously show that violence, social or political, has fallen sharply in the last two decades in the country.
Our problems of mass deprivation (whether or not we call it poverty is immaterial) notwithstanding, the economy has done well on both the growth and stability front. Its future prospects do not look discernibly worse from what they have been in the recent past. It might be heavily concentrated, but the larger economic story is still of upward mobility in India. Add to that the luxury of cheap labour to perform our daily chores, which cost a fortune in the first world, and the quality-of-life argument for the proverbial middle classes and the elite becomes significantly weaker.
So does India offer the proverbial Hobson’s choice to its elite, where in order to reap the material rewards of the larger political economy stability, one must be willing to put up with the nuisance, or fear of ending up on the wrong side of the probability distribution curve, where the systemic corruption and apathy regularly annoys and, in the worst case, destroys you? To accept this is to accept a mercenary way of life where you take your chances. This, essentially speaking, entails getting rid of empathy and, in a way, dehumanising yourself. It is not an easy task to do. This is exactly why we see occasional public outbursts of anger when the so-called system shocks us with its most gruesome face.
Occasional outbursts, however, do not change a system. What will it take to even reform the system if not change it completely? In principle, the answer is not very difficult.
Cities in India have become the epicentres of economic inequality. The bigger the city, the bigger the inequality quotient. What initially started as seasonal migration has now given way to a change in demography in cities with poor migrants becoming a more and more significant part of the population, and by extension, the universe of voters.
The urban poor, when they come to cities, are not exactly looking for quality of life. They never had one to begin with. What they hope to achieve is basic sustenance with a regular income, which they cannot ensure in a village or a smaller town. This lot has kept the tap of cheap labour – the proverbial cook, driver, cleaner, delivery boy – running but it is also bringing more and more chaos to the cities.
The system, willingly turns a blind eye to this chaos. Putting curbs on migration in India will perhaps lead to a volcanic eruption of sorts. Once it is compromised, the rich will also join the rule-breaking party and subvert it further. What we have in the end is actually not one but two cohorts of what Partha Chatterjee has described as a political society. Gangs of both the rich and poor negotiate with politicians, the former on the basis of political funding and the latter votes, to abuse and subvert the system from its ideal, sustainable state.
The cohort which would like to play by the rules and keep itself away from (what it sees as the cesspool of) politics is actually a numerical and financial minority in the political calculus. It is no wonder then that the so-called system gives a damn about their concerns.
Is this the only possible state of affairs? Not necessarily. There is more than enough objective ground for the middle classes to seek a common cause with the poor in terms of the provision of public services in our cities rather than participating in the self-defeating quest to create more and more segregated enclaves. This is a battle they have willingly, even if unconsciously, recused themselves from. The larger battle is of course to seek engagement rather than lack of it from the fundamentally unequal nature of our growth which is attracting both the rich and the poor to our already overburdened and almost collapsing mega cities.
But all this requires a fundamental change in the nature of the middle class’s political subconsciousness, which makes a virtue of being an apolitical self-interest-driven animal rather than an engaging citizen who is willing to look at their own material success of the last few decades from a more critical perspective.
Translating these thoughts into collective political praxis will take some amount of sacrificing individual pursuits and material fortunes. It is this leap of action from just anger on the part of the elite and the middle classes which has made them an engine of change in history including in moments such as India’s freedom struggle and other democratic struggles post-independence.
Has this subjective factor become weaker over time? Answering this question is in the realm of the metaphysical. However, there could also be an objective explanation for this tendency. Perhaps, our post-reform capitalist growth has increased the incentives for our middle class to continue with what can only be described as the indignity of self-interest.
The real and perceived opportunity cost of not pursuing private gains is much higher today than it was in the past. If one were to make a provocative one-liner, the growth of managerial capitalism, which has opened up high-income opportunities to a cohort which does not have capital endowments, has gone hand-in-hand with the rising indifference of our best and the brightest to the perversion of our politics and society.
Roshan Kishore, HT's Data and Political Economy Editor, writes a weekly column on the state of the country's economy and its political fall out, and vice-versa
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