Why do we never talk about inequality?

It is now a little over two years since the OECD told us that inequality had doubled in India over 20 years, making India the worst performer in this regard among the emerging economies. After some media attention the issue was forgotten and so was never debated publicly--- not the way corruption continues to be. Nor has it become part of the agenda of contestants in the coming election.

In a recent article, social scientist and writer Sunil Khilnani bemoaned the absence of discussion on an issue that has excited the public and leaders elsewhere. Perhaps it might be more appropriate to ask the question of ourselves: why doesn’t the articulate section of the middle class with access to several media forums, information and a supposedly developed faculty for critical thought, not see the hiatus in incomes and standards of living for what it is? It is a crisis that may remain unresolved because the path to growth we have chosen is itself unsustainable.

Yet ‘growth’ is the plank on which the main contestants will pitch their campaigns for the heart and mind of the Indian voter. The Congress will wax eloquent on the years of its stewardship of high growth, the BJP and the AAP on the sleaze that undermined it. The BJP and Congress with their regional allies will position new personalities capable of taking India to the next round of high growth while the Aam Aadmi Party ties itself and the public in knots over personalities whom Arvind Kejriwal considers ‘corrupt’. And they will do this because that is what the Indian middle-class that sets the standards of debate and discourse for the entire nation wants: fall guys to justify its self-righteousness and a charismatic leader to ignite it with the right words.

So in order to understand why politicians do not talk of income inequality, we have to ask why it isn’t engaging the hearts and minds of Indians, barring the subaltern lot that is increasingly falling prey to an extremism nibbling away at the margins of India’s backwardness.

The reason why middle-class Indians do not think of income inequalities as critical, or at least something to be concerned about, is its increasing insularity and self-absorption. Contrary to the literal meaning of the word, globalisation hasn’t opened up our minds enough to grasp the implications of its worst-ever breakdown in 2008 or thereafter.

The parameters of that model — increasing de-regulation, more privatisation of resources, pricing every service and good, and the slow decimation of public welfare — may be increasingly questioned in the West by a growing section of middle-class being nudged into penury. But in India we cannot have enough of that model. Evidence may point to the increasing disparity in incomes and wealth but the idea that more growth based on untrammelled “animal spirits”, reduced oversight and taxes on the upper middle-class and the super-rich, and fast-tracking will improve the situation rather than worsen it, has taken firm hold of the urban public and media.

This fascination arises from the wholehearted rejection of the old “mixed economy” model that kept India an elephant To morph into a tiger, so the discourse tells us, we need all that the West gave itself by leaving not merely the production of goods and services but people’s destinies to the market to evaluate, price and exchange.

The social Darwinism of unbridled market economics seems liberating after decades of the heavy hand of babu -dom.

If the old model that we would happily forget did not give us more jobs, higher pay and all those goodies we had to buy from our friendly smuggler, surely the new economic discourse will? For five years it seemed to fulfil the promise. Why else do we have a skilled labour shortage if not for the fact that growth absorbed the unemployed wasting away in the shadows of the public sector economy?

That skills gap justified the privatisation of higher education and the massive growth of private colleges devoted to management education, media, engineering and IT skills. But growth did not fulfil its promise of more jobs. Various studies from National Sample Surveys to the US Department of Labor show that jobs in the formal manufacturing sector became scarcer during the years of high growth.

Where were these fresh graduates to go in order to repay their astronomical fees? The brighter and probably richer of them made it to the back offices of Main and Wall Street firms and multinationals in America through third party contractors, to be paid by the hour without social security or fringe benefits. No one cried “Brain Drain!” because their remittances added to the consumption demand of the high growth period. Some were absorbed by domestic IT firms, shipped out to project sites in Europe or the US.

But such avenues could only absorb a relatively small number of the youth that constitutes India’s demographic dividend. For the larger section, “skilled” or otherwise, the only option would be the informal sector — or politics.

We already know the informal sector to be the highest employment generator. Data on how politics attracts young minds from India’s rural or urban marginalised are not readily available. But it is possible that politics proves a great attraction for the young from the lower castes. These may suffer a double deprivation — of social ostracism and jobless growth. The only options for upward mobility then would be the bureaucracy and politics.

It must be the most ironical part of market-oriented growth in India that it fosters and perpetuates the very institutions it considers inimical to its expansion.

More than the bureaucracy, politics offers the rural disadvantaged young an option for upward mobility like no other. And if the idea that politics as a career is a viable option for those looking to escape a historically driven fate is valid, then that may help explain the antipathy the urban middle-class feels for politics and politicians in general.

It may also help explain their self-absorption and indifference to rising income inequality.

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