Manu Joseph: What’s gotten into India’s well-off-why are they finally out protesting?

Recently, in Bengaluru and Chennai, too, the upper classes have publicly demanded a better life from the government. In Gurugram, affluent people go around taking pictures of filth and garbage-burning to relentlessly post them on social media. The municipality sulks and does not respond, as it only does so if you speak to it nicely. Then it asks you the exact location of the problem, as though the rest of the city is Singapore.

The frequency and intensity of upper-crust protests are rising. This is good news, even though their voice is faint and their concerns do not worry politicians.

There is a reason why this is happening now—why India’s urban upper middle classes are shedding their coyness as a section that behaves like tourists in their own nation, why they are suddenly invested in its immediate future. It has to do with a changing America.

It is harder than ever, it appears, to migrate to that country. Studying there does not guarantee a prolonged life there, even in the science streams. Also, escaping India is not a guarantee of a better life anymore.

So a fervent wish has come to be: how nice it would be if life back home were not hell. Indians enjoy everything else about India, especially its vast supply of services provided by the poor at miraculous rates.

If the civic stirring among the upper classes increases, it could be one of the best things that could happen to India.

After the independence movement, which I consider an Indian upper-class war against a foreign elite that captured the imagination of the masses, the urban elites did not collectively take part in nation-building, except perhaps in Kerala and West Bengal. This was not only because they were disenchanted by the new rustic political class and the hopelessness of new India.

The very existence of more advanced nations in the West meant that escaping India was their idea of progress, even if most of them didn’t actually leave. By the 1980s, escaping was a possibility for the children of our urban middle classes if they did the right things. The finest of my generation were preoccupied with its preparation.

The finest of this generation are probably more invested in India in a way I have never seen. A vast section of young people and their parents have realized that India is where they could be happiest. America has changed; the West has changed.

Home has never been more alluring to an Indian who has the capacity to leave home forever. When escape from home is not a good idea, then maybe home improvement is a good project.

India’s mainstream protests, the domain of the average voter, are usually rural in nature even when they are held in cities. These are both serious, like the farmer protests not long ago, and farcical, like those where protestors claim their sentiments are ‘hurt’ by someone and they bring out an effigy which they must label with the name of the public figure who hurt their sentiments because it looks like any other effigy.

The sophisticates are perplexed that their issues are even considered problems of the ‘rich.’ After all, they do not fight for better speed-breakers for their low-chassis luxury cars. They fight for issues that concern everyone, like air quality and infrastructure.

There are reasons why the poor don’t join forces with the sophisticates. One is that the poor may have common ground with the new rich, who are culturally similar to them, but not with the sophisticates. Another is that useful issues, like the quality of air, are not as emotional as matters of identity that are whipped up by the provincial elite.

I have seen the poor agitate over not being allowed inside a theatre, but never for better schools and medical care. Also, the average voter has a host of problems, and issues that intersect with those of the rich—like air and roads—are not up there in their hierarchy of problems, even though they are problems.

This is not the first time that sophisticates are protesting. Over the years, such protests have come in spurts and vanished. The first time I saw an honest major uprising of the English-speaking affluent was after a terror attack in November 2008. South Bombay, considered India’s richest Lok Sabha constituency, was attacked. An anti-politician movement sprung up.

As the beautiful people went on their candle marches, I noticed that the average voter of Mumbai stayed on the sidelines. It, somehow, was not their fight, perhaps because different sort of people were leading it. But the new sophisticate protestors know that their voices are faint and that they can change nothing unless they infect average voters with their issues. That is hard to achieve.

I have an idea for more effective protests. Across all cities, for six months, Indians should stop buying high-value goods in protest. They should stop buying houses, cars and TVs in return for better air, parks and other forms of urban infrastructure. That is a legal way of not paying taxes, in protest.

The author is a journalist, novelist and screenwriter. His latest book is ‘Why the Poor Don’t Kill Us.’