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 didnt 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. Theres 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 couldnt 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…
