24 Middle class Activism in the City

Binti Singh

Section 1: Introduction

This module discusses the rise of middle class-led civic activism and its attendant ideologies in cities across India. Difficult to define, yet powerful in its presence, the middle class has been theorised in different ways by authors like Fernandes (2004), Fernandes and Heller (2006) and (Mawdsley 2004). These authors have also admitted to the difficulty of operationalising the idea of the middle class given its size and diversity. For instance, Mawdsley (2004) admits that the conceptual variance of the middle class can be found “in the sheer range of current estimates, from around 50 million to 300 million people out of a billion” (Mawdsley 2004:84). In order to arrive at an understanding of the middle class, Fernandes and Heller (2006) suggest a more practical approach. They point out that it would be beneficial to understand the middle class as a “class-in-practice, that is, as a class defined by its politics and the every-day practices through which it reproduces its privileged position,” rather than as a “static category” (Mawdsley 2004: 497). India’s middle classes tend to be distinguished by cultural attributes such as higher educational attainment than working-class citizens, their command over the English language and more conspicuous consumption patterns. These distinctions build on pre-existing caste and class-based inequalities.

The proliferation of the ascendant middle class post-1990s, sometimes referred to as the new middle class, is linked to the new economic opportunities that became available after economic liberalisation. With their occupations in banking and finance, real estate and information technology, leisure and entertainment, this ascendant middle class is also benefited from global linkages resulting from the liberalisation of the Indian economy in 1991.

Fernandes argues that a distinguishing marker of the ascendant or new middle class from the older variety of middle class is the “culture of consumption” (Fernandes, 2004: 2415). This culture of consumption is not limited only to the goods and services that are available in the market, but also include the consumption of collective services (demanded by the citizen/consumer) like solid waste management, and the demand for better services like open spaces, green spaces, better roads, footpaths, more greenery, beautified and smart cities as well as accountability and efficiency from the municipal authority.

Confident in its own economic successes, this ascendant or new middle class, emerged out of the developments post-1990s. This group also harbours new aspirations and visions for the future, including its surrounding environments and habitats and the cities it lives in. It is no surprise, therefore, to find an increasing number of non-government organisations (NGOs), citizen groups, resident welfare associations (RWAs) led by this group since the 1990s across India. This profusion of middle-class activism is witnessed in most of the prominent cities in India.

The rest of the module is divided into four sections. Section 2 discusses the rise of middle class activism in the city in the post-1990s period. Though Indian cities witnessed social movements of a varied nature spearheaded by the middle class, civic activism in the form of growing number of civil society organisations (CSOs), particularly RWAs became more pronounced in the post-1990s period. It identifies specifically the driving forces behind the rise of middle class-led activism in urban India post- the 1990s. This section explains this phenomenon using concepts of political society and civil society borrowed from Partha Chatterjee and the idea of bourgeois environmentalism associated with Amita Baviskar. Section 3 discusses how middle class associations like RWAs operate, drawing on examples from Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Bangalore and Hyderabad. In particular, it highlights the distinct class character of these associations. Section 4 discusses the political implications of the rise of middle class-led associations in terms of overemphasising administrative efficiency to the disregard of electoral representation. This section also comments on the anti-corruption movement and the Aam Admi Party (AAP). The section “In Brief” concludes.

Section 2: Rise of Middle Class activism in the City in the Post-1990s

Historically, civil society movements have taken various forms and have usually been led by the educated urban middle classes. For instance, in Mumbai, these engagements have taken various forms: citizens’ movements for rights and privileges; interventions through the press; informal and formal workings of governance that cut across civil society and political society; working class movements; and movements around language and ethnicity. The evolution of Mumbai’s first “civil society”, is strongly embedded in the city’s colonial history. Appadurai (2000) notes that throughout the 20th century — and even earlier, in the 19th century — Mumbai has had powerful civic traditions of philanthropy, social work, political activism, and social justice. These observations are reiterated by authors like Desai (1999). Even the most rudimentary forms of early civil society in the city were marked by an engagement with the state for certain specific rights.

However, it is only in the changed political context of the 1990s that the relationship between civic activism and the middle classes has become more pronounced. The changed political context of the 1990s resulting from economic liberalisation, the move towards democratic decentralisation after the 74th Constitutional Amendment Act (CAA), 1992, and the good governance discourse provided greater opportunities for CSOs to be involved in sectors that were so far dominated by government agencies. Increasingly CSOs proliferated in sectors like education, health, children’s and women’s welfare, governance, solid waste management, housing for the poor among others. With governance models encouraging increasing participation of citizens and partnerships with government, middle class-led CSOs became more visible and dominant. Significant legislations like the Right to Information (2005) further empowered the educated middle class citizenry in India. TThe law actually places citizens and government as two parties and empowers the citizens enormously vis-a-vis the government. Citizen activism across India has used right to information (RTI) as a powerful tool to get things done concerning everyday lives of people like potholes not filled, encroachments, garbage collection, getting a ration card, etc.The RTI has, therefore, equipped the middle class and their associations to undertake several initiatives to negotiate and bargain with the government for better delivery of services in cities.

The final impetus for the rise of middle class-led CSOs was a spate of natural disasters that hit the country in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Disasters like the super-cyclone in Orissa in 1999, the earthquake in Bhuj in 2001, the tsunami in Tamil Nadu in 2004 triggered greater involvement of NGOs in post-disaster recovery work. These calamities reinforced the need for stronger partnerships between government and CSOs. The need for fruitful partnerships has been time and again established in various policy documents of the government ( Jain 2003).

The post-1990s provided an opportunity for the “new middle classes” (Fernandes 2004; Nandy 2010) to lead such CSOs for several reasons . First, the middle class has the resources to articulate common interests and mobilise around a common agenda. Second, many members of middle class-led associations have strong ties with government officials; these prove useful during their interactions and in “getting things done”. Some of the members of these associations are former insiders and are well-versed with how government departments function. Finally, members of the middle class have access to various other resources including the printing media, television channels and the internet, which significantly enhance their public visibility and profile.

Since the 1990s, the term “civil society” has been increasingly invoked by India’s urban middle classes to describe their own expectations and aspirations for governance. This is reflected in the rise of government and middle class-driven civil society partnerships in many cities of India, particularly big metropolitan and mega cities like Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Chennai. The advanced locality management (ALM) partnership in Mumbai, the Bhagidari partnership in Delhi, PROOF and the BATF in Bangalore are some of the well known examples of such partnerships. Partha Chatterjee (2004) distinguishes between civil society and political society in the post-colonial context of India. Civil society is the domain of middle class citizens whose relations with the State are framed within a structure of constitutionally protected rights. Associations of citizens in civil society could demand the attention of governmental authorities as a matter of right, whereas population groups, comprising the poor, constitute political society. In political society, unlike civil society, multiple and flexible policies are put into operation, producing multiple and strategic responses from population groups seeking to adapt to, cope with or make use of these policies. The authorities do not treat associations of squatters or pavement hawkers (representing the poor) on the same footing as legitimate associations of civil society (representing “proper” citizens); the relations of government agencies with population groups of the urban poor are determined not on the terrain of civil society, but on that of political society.

Amita Baviskar (2003) introduces the concept of bourgeois environmentalism to explain middle class-led activism in urban India. Bourgeois environmentalism is the middle-class pursuit of order, hygiene and safety, and ecological conservation, through the public sphere. She argues that middle class activists mobilise the discourse of public interest and citizenship to articulate civic concerns in a manner that constitutes a public that excludes the city’s poorer sections.

Section 3 Activism and Middle Class Ideologies in the City

Associational life, CSOs and collective action in the form of RWAs and neighbourhood organisations bear a distinct class character across cities of India. For instance, in Bangalore, the upper stratum of highly professional associations, has been very much concerned with the problems of the urban environment, roads, rather than public transport; garbage and pollution rather than public housing; mosquitoes and public toilets rather than public health (Nair 2005:336). In Bangalore, large traditional middle class RWAs consist primarily of retired or older middle and higher level bureaucrats and formal sector employees, located in stable, older, core areas which have not experienced much growth. These typically tend to focus their collective action efforts on local cultural and religious programmes. Such RWAs exist side by side with RWAs of new elites working in new globalised service sectors like information technology, living in enclaves and largely insulated from the problems of lack of amenities due to their location in gated communities.

Similarly, Harriss (2007) argues that in the context of liberalisation, governance is the idea of the desirability of partnership both between government and the private sector, and government and citizens (Harris 2007: 2716). In a study of the Bhagidari Scheme in Delhi, Harriss (2005) explains that the Bhagidari Scheme intended to develop joint ownership by citizens and the government, involving partnerships between RWAs and Market Traders Associations and the Delhi government. The scheme involved such tasks as securing payment and collection of water bills, electricity meter reading, house tax collection, the supervision of sanitation services, and the maintenance of community parks and community halls. He notes that it gained more prominence in planned colonies and other higher income areas, and not in slum clusters and other poor parts of the city. In Mumbai as well, Zerah (2009) notes the prominence of traditional elites and higher socio-economic groups in suburbs like Bandra, where citizen activism is more pronounced.

In their study in Chennai, Coelho and Venkat (2009) note that middle class RWAs, particularly in the southern wards and suburbs of their sample Besantnagar/Shastrinagar, Alandur and Perungudi are dominated by Brahmins and upper castes. The brahminical character of RWAs is seen not only in their composition, but also in their vision and agenda, which are driven by a pursuit of cleanliness and a sense of order based on a functional segregation of spaces, separating commercial and unauthorised activities from residential precincts (Coelho and Venkat: 360). In Chennai, Harriss (2007) again argues that, there are organisations, concerned mainly with issues of urban governance and the interests of consumer-citizens, that are quite elitist, run by upper middle class people, mostly Brahmins. These organisations have adopted the formal language of citizenship and speak of participation in budgeting and of transparency and accountability in local government are run with substantial budgets with a high degree of genuine professionalism, but they do not have, not even seek a broad popular base (Harris 2007: 2720).

Section 4: Political Implications of Middle Class Activism and Ideologies in the City

The absence of spaces for addressing concerns of middle class citizens and a perception that the poor (favoured by elected representatives) are in a better negotiating position with the State – these are two reasons why middle class, educated, and professional citizens form their own associations to voice concerns related to their own class situations. The shortfalls in governance had become quite acute: inefficient delivery of basic services like water and solid waste management; bureaucratic delays in accessing municipal services; corrupt practices in government offices; poor maintenance of roads, gardens and open spaces, footpaths; irregular collection and disposal of garbage; lack of scientific techniques in the management of solid waste that were affecting all sections of the population. At the same time, middle class citizens lacked the faith in local politicians to solve these. This further provided the impetus to form their own associations like RWAs.

Lama-Rewal (2007) points out that civil society groups like RWAs lack faith in the elected representatives because of their low educational and social status and saw them as incompetent and inefficient. The municipal councillors are believed to favour the urban poor in cases of conflict of interest, since unlike the middle classes, the poor vote en masse in municipal elections. RWAs perceive electoral politics as being characterised by vested interests, vote banks and corruption. The RWAs, therefore, prefer to interact with the non-elected executive wings of the municipal authority like the Additional Municipal Commissioner (AMC), who is an Indian Administrative Officer (IAS) officer appointed by the State government. For these RWAs, administrative efficiency takes precedence over electoral accountability.

In a case study of Hyderabad, a city considered at the forefront of municipal reforms), Kennedy (2008) has noted that although the councillors enter office under the 74th CAA their scope of action has not changed substantially. With the increasing involvement of international organisations like the World Bank, the United Kingdom (UK) Development Agency (DFID) and UN-Habitat and Cities Alliance, they may even enjoy less discretionary power than previously period.

Thus, in some ways, such RWA-led participatory politics defeats the goals of strengthening local self-government, as envisaged in the 74th CAA, by undermining and bypassing the elected representatives. More generally, autonomous citizen bodies with a considerable representation of middle class interests and ideologies hinder rather than facilitate the goals of democratic decentralisation and undermine the power of urban local bodies by ignoring their views.

The middle class-led RWAs also function in exclusionary ways. For instance, in Mumbai, the Advanced Locality Mangement/ALM groups that adopted public gardens from the municipal authority for maintenance, invariably barred neighbouring slum residents from entry into the space (on the pretext of maintaining cleanliness), locked the gates, hired security personnel and kept the keys of the garden with themselves (Singh 2012). These attempts are in tune with what Fernandes (2004) refers to as “the politics of spatial purification.” Such attempts of spatial purification are also directed towards slum communities that are treated as “eyesores” and “nuisance” and stand in the way of creating world-class cities in India.

In some recent judgments, the judiciary has also interpreted rights in favour of middle class based associations rather than slum communities. In his study on Delhi, Ghertner (2008) has tracked the emergence of the “nuisance discourse” in the early 2000s and explained how it has recalibrated the factors used to determine a settlements legality and re-problematised slums as nuisance.

Similarly Ghosh (2005) notes that how organisations like the Bangalore Action Task Force (BATF) work with municipal agencies that provide the core infrastructure for the city, and the services that most affect their businesses and private lives like land development and planning, water, power and telecommunication services, to the complete disregard of social welfare departments like Department of Education and Department of Health and the Karnataka Slum Clearance Board (KSCB).This clearly indicates the bias in favour of the rich. This suggests an exclusivist kind of civic activism when it comes to partnering with the government. In Bangalore, Delhi and Hyderabad too, CSOs of this kind have emerged as a collective force and partnered with the executive wing of the local government and bypassed elected representatives in the process.

The success of the anticorruption movement and eventual political mobilisation in the form of support to the AAP can partly be attributed to the disillusionment and disgruntled educated middle class. Members of the middle class are usually politically reticent unlike other sections of society. Middle class citizens, particularly in urban areas have preferred to remain politically aloof, or apolitical, because of the general distrust towards the political class and the world of politics being ridden with crime, money and muscle power.

In Brief

The rise of middle class activism like RWAs is visible in the major cities of India. Such associations are heavily informed by the class experience of the members who form them. The membership profiles, prioritisation of issues and modus operandi reflect these class interests. That, in turn, positions them against other non-elite groups. Notions of residents, citizens, law-abiding tax paying citizen, encroachers, illegal habitants, and nuisance are common to these discourses. Street vendors and slum communities are viewed as perennial problems, often categorised as nuisance.

Newly acquired legal tools like the RTI have greatly empowered such associations to acquire greater accountability from the government. Whether to reclaim urban spaces or negotiate with the municipal officials to get better services, associations of middle class citizens like the ALMs and RWAs have facilitated middle class politics in ways that were unknown earlier. Indeed, their rise seems to affirm Nandy’s claim that “the entire ideology of the Indian state is so formatted and customized that it is bound to make more sense – and give political advantages – to the urban middle classes” (2010:4). The anti-corruption movement came at a time when middle class activism was simmering across many cities of India. The fervour of the movement could strike the right chords with these sentiments and that explains why it found such a huge support base among the middle class.

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