Indian Express: Modi of the Middle Class by Christophe Jaffrelot (Mar 24, 2014)

Christophe Jaffrelot discusses Middle Class obsession about Narendra Modi and highlights my book 'Modi to Moditva: An Uncensored Truth' published 2012

He appeals to an urban class with eroding caste identities, increasing religiosity.

The negative reasons why the middle class “votes for Modi” are most obvious. There is a total rejection of the UPA regime, because of corruption and dynastic politics. There is also a fatigue with the government’s style of leadership and distrust vis-à-vis its policies. In spite of the fact that the middle class has benefited from Manmohanomics more than any other social group, it resents his inability to make growth sustainable (growth has declined in all emerging countries, including China, but that’s no reason for not blaming the government) and to counter the erosion of the rupee, which makes life so much more complicated abroad.

The “positive” reasons are more interesting. First, a section of the middle class perceives Narendra Modi as a super-CEO. One of his biographers, Nirendra Dev, points out that he “functions like a modern day CEO laying emphasis on the outcome and often allegedly putting the rules and normal norms in the backburner” (Modi to Moditva: An Uncensored Truth, 2012).

This image relies on a whole set of beliefs: he is less a politician than a manager (an assumption harking back to his past career as an organisation man, a pracharak) and he is for the liberalisation of the economy (didn’t he claim that he would transform Gujarat into “the SEZ of India” as early as 2007?). This last quality has affinities with the middle class’s trust in the private sector to modernise the economy. The upper layer of this class already lives in new towns where education, health, security, water, electricity etc are privatised.

If the middle class wants a super-CEO at the helm of India, it is also because it does not valorise parliamentary democracy as much as before, compared to a more managerial decision-making process. In 2008, the CSDS survey on the State of Democracy in South Asia showed that in India, 51 per cent of the respondents from the “elite” “strongly agreed” and 29 per cent “agreed” with the proposition: “All major decisions about the country should be taken by experts rather than politicians”. Among interviewees from the “mass”, 29 per cent “strongly agreed” and 22 per cent “agreed”, probably because they were not prepared to undermine one of their main assets: numbers.

Five years later, the popularity of democracy among the middle class has probably eroded further. The aggregated data that the CSDS has just made public show that, as a whole, satisfaction with the working of democracy has declined from 55 per cent to 46 per cent, a clear reflection of the impact of corruption and the criminalisation of politics, which affect almost equally all the political forces that have governed a state for some time.

There is also a caste element in the middle class’s affinities with Modi. He is perceived to be opposed to reservations, a preoccupation among the merit-oriented middle class ever since the Mandal moment. Reluctance towards reservations is common in the BJP, but it is naturally more remarkable in the case of Modi, given his OBC background.

For the upper caste middle class, he demonstrates that OBCs can succeed in life without positive discrimination and can even reject this policy as counterproductive. This assimilation of Modi into anti-reservationism has something to do with the fact that he comes from the state where the first massive anti-quota movement took place in the 1980s, while he was at the helm of the RSS in the state as prant pracharak — before becoming organising secretary of the state BJP in 1987.

Last but not least, the political culture of the Hindu middle class is more and more imbued with ethno-religious connotations. This development has resulted from the need to compensate with some religiosity an increasingly pervasive form of materialism that has crept in after years of high growth rate. But it also reflects the influence of years of Hindutva politics and the fear of Islamism, especially after the terrorist attacks of the last decade.

https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/modi-of-the-middle-class/