Letters: Rising middle class

This refers to Archana Jahagirdar’s column ‘A Million Mutinies’, December 6, which was quite an interesting read.

One correction, though. The author says, “The phenomenon of middle class India speaking up can be traced to crimes such as Jessica Lal and Priyadarshini Mattoo cases...” Jahagirdar needs to go back to the history of protest in India a bit and update her file. In September 1990, a demonstration of middle class protest took even protest-jaded Kolkata by surprise. The protest was against power cuts, something that had become almost part of the city’s life for more than a decade before that. In a rare show of street power, almost 1,500 of us turned out on a rainy evening for a ‘March for Power’. We all wore black, carried lanterns and flashlights, shouted no slogans but carried black placards with luminous writing (such as, Left versus Right/ Citizens have no light — this was directed towards the Left government at the state and the Congress at the Centre).

The ‘March for Power’ was followed up by an open letter to the chief minister published in one of the leading dailies, signed by 50 prominent Calcuttans — all middle class, as you would like to describe them. We (PUBLIC, People United for Better Living in Calcutta) gave suggestions, asked for action but made it clear that “Enough was Enough” — a familiar phrase on some TV channels now.

We would be happy to see a little less manifestation of Mumbai- and Delhi-centric writing in future in your paper.

Bonani and Pradeep Kakkar, Kolkata