Ajit Balakrishnan: Indian salaryman: Changing times

The middle class has subtly manoeuvred without any strikes or protests for a share of the economic pie. Will this change soon?

I rubbed my eyes in disbelief the other morning when, on my way to work, I saw a group of well-dressed men and women standing resolutely in front of a nationalised bank branch across the street from where I live, with fists raised and chanting slogans. Some of the women had their sunglasses perched stylishly on their heads and were wearing kurtas and jeans, and held aloft big placards saying, "All India Bank Strike, Stop Banking Sector Reforms". I pinched myself to wake myself up. Had I, as I sometimes do, slipped into a reverie and conjured up an image of a bygone era, maybe the 1980s when at every other street corner and on every other day there would be a bank strike, at that time, against the introduction of computers. When I got to office, a little later, I checked with some of the folks in our accounts department about the bank strike - they were dismissive as if it was of no importance and confident that banks would resume their normal working that day or the next.

Is India moving away from the respectability of a routine white collar job, as it seems to be happening in Japan, where a middle class bank-employee (could be any white collar worker), is semi-derisively called a "salaryman"? A salaryman, typically a male white collar employee, who earns his salary working up to 60 hours a week, is hired straight after high school and expected to stay with one company until retirement. In return for their loyalty, companies rarely fire the salarymen. Japanese media often portray the salaryman as lacking initiative and originality. Although, not so long ago, being a salaryman was what all young people in Japan aspired to.

Again, why were these public sector bank employees, who make up the backbone of India's middle class, agitating against "reform"? I had to rub my eyes and pinch myself awake again. No day has passed in the last decade without some Indian journalist or the other writing that the government in power at that time was not proceeding fast enough on "reform". And it had become clear to all, that the word "reform" has, in the last decade, come to mean neither "social reform" as B R Ambedkar or Gandhiji used the term, nor "reform" as Martin Luther had originally used it, but meaning changing government policy to invite more private sector and foreign participation in publicly owned businesses, educational institutions etc. even if that meant giving these new players public land and, if necessary, evicting people on it quickly and cheaply. That's because it would mean jobs and other opportunities for middle class and their children.

No wonder the bank strike ended in a whimper; the Hindu Business Line online poll, for example, three days before the strike posed the question: "Are unions justified in opposing bank consolidation?" Of the 316 people voting, 67 per cent said "no". India's middle class clearly was separating itself from things such as bank strikes, and no longer saw strikes aligned to their self-interest.

For that matter, the middle class, throughout the world has, of late, been behaving mysteriously. For example, in China, the enormous middle class almost never raises its voice in favour of increasing democratic processes, as has been pointed out by Jie Chen, a professor at the University of Idaho, in his 2013 book, A Middle Class Without Democracy: Economic Growth and the Prospects for Democratisation in China. He attributes this to the contemporary Chinese middle class having and maintaining close ideational and institutional ties with the Chinese state and frequently using these ties for their social and economic well-being. This makes the middle class act in favour of the current Chinese system and puts it in opposition to democratic changes. We see, thus, the middle class support of authoritarian regimes in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Taiwan and South Korea.

For a long time, in India, an identification as middle class required a college education, and even among college graduates, people with professional qualifications such as a college teachers, lawyers, engineers, and doctors were immediately granted a middle class status regardless of how financially successful they were. Other markers were: High rates of house ownership, jobs which are perceived to be secure and most of all fluency, in English. Will this undergo a change too soon?

In India, the middle class has for years subtly manoeuvred itself without any strikes or protests for a disproportionate share of the economic pie. For example, even terms such as "inflation rate" are employed in the battle and must be seen to be not "objective" measures computed by dispassionate economists but symbolic numbers, to be employed for the benefit of some social group. Kaushik Basu, who till recently was the chief economist at the World Bank, points out, in his recent book, The Economist in the Real World, that the consumer price index as the inflation index of government workers in India and informally used even in private sector compensation discussion, is the consumer price index for industrial workers (CPI-IW). He says that "Since it is government workers and bureaucrats who collect the data for constructing the CPI(IW) index, there is a potential conflict of interest, with a possibility of a tendency to record higher numbers wherever the opportunity for this arises". Some studies, he says, have corroborated this.

The writer is the author of The Wave Rider, a Chronicle of the Information Age
ajitb@rediffmail.com