Bharat, India and a third India: The importance of the not rich, not poor

Congress Vice-President Rahul Gandhi wants their vote. So do Narendra Modi and Arvind Kejriwal. They are the 70 crore (700 million) Indians who are neither desperately poor, nor comfortably middle class. Modi calls them the neo-middle class. Rahul calls them the working class. Kejriwal would probably call them the aam aadmis.

The fact is that as a composite group, they are larger in number than the poor (300 million) and the comfortable middle class (200 million) put together. If elections are about arithmetic it is this demographic which will decide who governs India next.

It has taken a while for politics and indeed the intelligentsia to recognize that there aren’t two Indias: the old dichotomy between the prosperous India of the big cities and deprived Bharat of the villages. There are, in fact, three Indias, the largest of which lives neither in big cities nor in decrepit villages but in rural-urban continuums across the length and breadth of India. It is this segment that is highly aspirational and impatient for a better quality of life. And every major political formation has trouble capturing its imagination.

The Congress never realized that it was this demographic, which grew exponentially during UPA1’s high growth rate tenure, which delivered it a second term - the Congress did very well outside the deep recesses of rural India. That is why, despite Rahul Gandhi’s articulation of the 70 crore, the party has nothing to offer them. The Congress is still very much focused on the bottom 300 million - that is the segment which is most likely to be appreciative of the rights-based/doles-based policy approach that the grand old party over-emphasizes.

Arvind Kejriwal had the ears of this demographic when he stormed into politics. His promise to eradicate corruption appealed most to this neo middle class - after all the rich paid bribes and the poor never had any access to the system at all. Arguably, Kejriwal’s style of populism in the form of the promise of cheap power and free water also appealed to this class, more than the Congress’s bare subsistence NREGA or Right to Food. Where Kejriwal lost out was in his unseemly hurry. He certainly lost the upper middle classes but by throwing away his opportunity in Delhi he left his neo-middle class base disappointed and disillusioned.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the BJP’s Prime Ministerial candidate Narendra Modi has done the most to capture the imagination of this segment. His is the only major contender promising a better, more prosperous life to this 70 crore. A future of skills, jobs and material well being. If Modi has a problem, it lies in the (hitherto limited) ability of his political rivals to paint him as someone whose philosophy of governance favours the 20 crore middle class and not the 70 crore neo-middle class. But the fact that Modi (who rose in life from abject poverty) is seen as more representative of this group than a Rahul Gandhi or Arvind Kejriwal helps neutralize some of the criticism of him being pro-rich.

That isn’t to argue that Modi has a complete stranglehold on this demographic. There are political parties and leaders in parts of India who can compete (and beat) Modi for this neo-middle class vote. It is when a leader or party has been able to convey a message of change and prosperity that he or she has captured this group’s vote. In varying degrees, Jayalalitha, Naveen Patnaik and Mamata Banerjee have won this demographic in their states. In Uttar Pradesh, the youthful Akhilesh Yadav has captured the imagination of the “not poor, not rich’ in 2012, but in his spectacular failure to provide governance has ceded much ground to Modi.

All those who end up on the losing side on May 16, 2014, will certainly introspect and recalibrate their strategies for the future. The voters of the “third” India ought to be at the core of a rethink.