IT may not be inaccurate to say that Manmohan Singh created India’s middle class, and the middle class created Narendra Modi. Marxists call them/us the ‘vacillating class’. Janus-like, we are suspiciously double-faced and have a split identity. We look towards the capitalists with one face, wishing to join their ranks and protect property rights. And we look towards the working class with the other face, sharing their economic anxiety and fear of being ruined by big corporations. Given that powerful protests have mushroomed since July across India, mostly led by young students and unemployed youth, it could be signalling a significant disenchantment with the system that has wooed middle class support since 1991.

Before Manmohan Singh’s economic reforms as finance minister and his subsequent decade as prime minister (2004-2014), India’s middle class was miniscule, estimated at roughly 2.5 million people earning over $10,000 annually or representing a small, state-controlled bureaucratic and managerial stratum.

Following the 1991 liberalisation and the growth of the IT, services, and corporate sectors, the middle class expanded dramatically. By 2015, the number of Indians earning over $10,000 annually grew to 55m. Other estimates placed the middle class at roughly 142m people (about 12 per cent of the population) by the early 2010s, when they were entering various tiers of the middle or ‘neo-middle’ class depending on purchasing power parity of around $10-$50 per day.

After Singh left office in 2014, the expansion plateaued for many households due to rising living costs, stagnant real wages, and a K-shaped economic recovery, where wealth........

© Dawn