India’s middle class is a bit like me. When unhappy we both simmer for a while, get more and more resentful and then explode suddenly. Once our rage is out in the open, we start looking for random reasons to fuel our fury.
This is precisely what we are seeing with middle-class discourse right now. And it is showing up in India’s legacy media.
The signs of middle-class discontent had remained submerged for the past couple of years, breaking through to the surface once in a while, and then dissipating quickly, thanks to the stentorian proclamations of godi anchors, that anyone who questions power is anti-national.
The election results changed that. CSDS-Lokniti’s post poll survey, suggested that the BJP’s biggest losses were among the middle- and upper-income groups. In both these segments, India’s hitherto unassailable ruling party had lost three-percentage points. That’s a significant shift in a first past the post system.
I had argued earlier in a piece here that the election results will inevitably cause a shift in legacy media’s relationship with the government. It was clear to me that growing middle-class disaffection would force newsroom bosses to slowly slide off Modi Sarkar’s godi.
But I too am surprised by the speed at which this shift has taken place.
It began, somewhat tentatively, with the NEET examination scam, and accelerated as the entire system of competitive exams came unravelling. Such scams had been reported almost every year (remember Vyapam?) in the past, but didn’t make even the smallest of dents on public mood. Suddenly, the exam mess has become a proxy for all that is wrong with middle-class lives.
If the reportage on the exam scams were aimed at an isolated arm of the government, the broadsides on the union budget were a direct attack on the centre. Some of the biggest faces of TV news did sarcastic turns, in the style of standup comics, asking middle-class taxpayers how they would spend the ‘largesse’ of the 600-odd rupees that the FM’s tax cuts had left in their wallets.
One prominent anchor, who could never be accused of having ever questioned the Modi government in the past, said that the money taken from taxpayers was being used to finance collapsing bridges, and crumbling airports. He termed such infrastructure building “the biggest fraud (sabse bada fraud hai)”.
This is exactly what the middle class wants to hear right now, especially when they are wading through waterlogged, pothole-ridden roads, in the middle of the monsoon. They want someone to speak for them – that they pay taxes, but get nothing in return. Go to any social media platform and you will hear this same refrain.
Does this remind you of anything?
Recall the Anna Andolan that hit UPA within two years of coming back to power with a bigger mandate. At that time, the world was still trying to deal with the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis of 2008-09. The Manmohan Singh government had papered over the economic crisis by spending massively, and giving a big bonanza to government servants through pay commission-driven arrears. That helped sustain demand for a couple of years, but it soon dried up when the government returned to its path of fiscal austerity.
White collar workers saw job opportunities shrink, pay packages get frozen, while several sectors were hit by layoffs. At the same time, the middle class had to face a huge rise in inflation. Rising petrol prices became the trigger for widespread anger over the cost of living. News media fanned that anger by asking questions of the government over why it was taxing fuel so much.
Middle-class discontent spilled over onto the streets as people, who habitually paid bribes to avoid traffic challans, held candlelight marches in favour of an anti-corruption Lokpal Bill. Anna Hazare was feted as the new Mahatma, as TV channels vied with each other to find the best camera angles to capture images of the fasting ‘Gandhian’.
Scams – real and imagined – erupted on TV screens, as feisty reporters waved documents that had been ‘leaked’ to them by babus and netas, who had suddenly rediscovered their conscience. Primetime anchors fed that ‘scandal’ machine, because that is what the ‘nation wanted to know’.
But, as I mentioned right at the beginning, middle-class rage is often a thing-in-itself, which once unleashed, seeks out random objects to inhabit. There were many such occasions during UPA-2, the most famous of them being the public anger around the ‘Nirbhaya case’.
We are back in that space once again.
People are losing jobs everywhere. Senior managers are approaching headhunters to place them in more stable positions, even if it means taking pay cuts. People in their late-40s and early-50s, who made the most during the financial bubble years of the early 2000s, are seeing their children struggling to get decent salaries. Even those who have been to elite professional institutions – like IIMs and IITs – are having to settle for mediocre pay packages.
Today India’s middle class is caught between the pincer grip of shrinking incomes and a huge real inflation rate that is underreported in official statistics. As income estimates made by the Paris-based World Inequality Labs show, except for the top 0.5 percent of households, people in the richest 10 percent have had very little real income growth in the past few years.
It should surprise no one then that the middle class today is outraging about events they wouldn’t have spent a second on, a few years ago. Whether it is the case of student deaths in a coaching centre or repeated train accidents, public discourse has returned to the idea of corruption and misgovernance.
What were earlier just a few bubbles of disenchantment have now coalesced into a tide of despair.
TV news channels have no option but to take this anger on board. The middle class might be small in number, but it is legacy media’s key constituency. If it is unhappy, keeping silent would cost TRPs, and hence, be bad for business.
Already, YouTube’s reach has equalled that of traditional broadcast TV in most of north India. Several independent YouTube journalists have outstripped news channels in viewership during the elections. This is a clear signal to big media networks that they too need to make visible changes.
That is one reason why Rahul Gandhi is finding significant primetime space on TV channels that till very recently virtually ignored him. One example was what the popular fiction writer Chetan Bhagat pointed out in a recent TV debate show – Lok Sabha TV had allowed only a second of Rahul Gandhi holding up a photograph of the finance minister with her budget-making team. Yet, TV channels had frozen that shot and were playing it on loop. According to Bhagat, this was a sign of the changed times that we live in.
This process is only going to get further amplified in the coming months. The days of one-sided news coverage are over now. The change was inevitable, but it is taking place faster than anyone expected.
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