THE Indian politician may never have been this paralyzed by perplexity. Abused by an agitated middle class, crippled by the absence of a decisive leadership, confused by increasing electoral fragmentation and overwhelmed by the sudden demands of social media and new technology – the old rules of the games are redundant for today’s neta.

Accountability is the new matrix of this brave new world where, sometimes, innocence must be proven to a public inquisition before the charge of guilt can be fended off. The tectonic shift in how politicians are now viewed by the citizenry has created deep cracks in the traditional template of power. The conventional aura of invincibility around the politician has all but dissipated. Communication barriers that once kept a politician at a safe emotional distance from a volatile public – behind a teleprompter in a high-security office or on the dais talking down to the masses – are being rapidly pulled down.

In an age of hyper-information, when every beep on your phone delivers a fresh conversation, often with perfect strangers, people have come to expect their politicians to speak with them and not at them. Unsure politicians who once dismissed Twitter and Facebook as new-fangled trends best suited to teenagers are now tentatively embracing the changing idiom of their profession.

But this changing narrative has been scripted essentially by urban India. Therein is both its novelty value as well as questions around its staying power. A socio-economic stratum long regarded as apathetic is today angry, engaged and involved enough to move out of the drawing room onto the street. It was the middle class that provided the springboard for the launch of both the recent anti-corruption crusades and the robust protests against the gang rape of a young woman in Delhi. In both cases, the political class was unnerved enough to respond, albeit belatedly; in both cases policy was actually redrafted because of the fury of the agitators.

But both instances were also a reminder that sustaining movements is so much tougher than starting them. Arvind Kejriwal – at first the master of the media-moment – eventually had to confront the innately distracted character of the news industry and join the same political arena that he had played gladiator to from the outside. Now his success will be measured not by how many headlines he can capture but by how many votes his party can claim. Yet, if the middle class has been forced to learn that being apolitical will keep it irrelevant, its forceful, articulate antagonism to the entrenched status quo has also shaken up the system like never before.

Simultaneously, economics has had its own impact on politics. Liberalization has seen massive migration from rural to urban areas. Villages have grown into towns; towns have expanded into cities and mofussils have become mall-strips. The middle class – once a descriptive for the highly-educated, but modest income group of professionals and bureaucrats – is today expanding exponentially to include more contemporary aspirations. Though economists remain divided over how to quantify the middle class, most conservative estimates argue that by 2015 the numbers will cross 250 million people – that’s one fifth of the country’s population. The 2011 Census shows that a quarter of Indian families own a motor vehicle. Rising incomes, even if modest and evolving ambitions have meant that administrative efficiency is now rewarded in a way that it wasn’t previously. Incompetent governments are booted out, but it is no longer unusual for state chief ministers to buck anti-incumbency traditions and win consecutive terms if they are seen to be performers.

 

If the 1991 economic reforms show-cased the middle class for the first time as a group of consumers, there is anti-cipation that the 2014 elections may underscore them as a political constituency. No surprise then that the otherwise left-of-centre-leaning Congress President warned her party that they would have to readapt to ‘a younger, more aspirational, more demanding generation of voters in a "new", changing India.’ And while seeking a third term as Gujarat’s Chief Minister, Narendra Modi outlined a separate set of promises for what his manifesto called the ‘neo-middle class’.

Up until this point politicians who, typically, befriended the wealthy and wooed the poor, treated the middle class with indifference or disdain. Their disinterest has mirrored the contempt that urbanites have usually shown for electoral politics, throwing up a classic chicken-egg riddle. Is middle class disengagement a result of the historical political obsession with either the influential or the impoverished, leaving no space for those who fall in-between? Or is political listlessness a consequence of the desultory participation of urban India when it comes to voting?

 

Today, urban rage has captured the media chronicles and defines the public discourse. But if it doesn’t channelize itself into increased electoral participation and impact, it could lapse with the changing seasons. Though politics across the border is hardly comparable with India because of structural differences in how power is distributed, there is still an interesting lesson to draw from the amount of media attention cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan generated and the number of seats the hoopla eventually delivered. Whether our democracy is showing any substantive changes will eventually be measured the old-fashioned way – at the hustings.

To understand whether our politics is transforming would first need us to analyze why people vote, or don’t. It’s a question that political scientists have grappled with for years. In their oft-quoted paper (Why the Poor Vote in India: ‘If I don’t vote I am dead to the State’), Amit Ahuja and Pradeep Chibber have tried to explain why those who live on the margins of national attention and have never been shown any goodwill by the state, except when elections are near, still believe enough in the system to always vote in large numbers. They argue that because of the ‘capricious’ nature of the Indian state, the ‘poor see the act of voting as a Right. The non-poor by contrast vote either to gain some benefit or as fulfilling a civic duty.’

In other words, the poor are greater stakeholders in the system and still continue to determine the out-come of elections. The non-poor, non-rich by contrast have often seceded into a parallel world with its own moral code. A sense of exclusion from the system and the absence of an identifiable political voice have created multiple resentments. For example, a number of urban citizens will argue against paying full taxes to a system they see as corrupt, impenetrable and hostile to their welfare. But today, as their demand for a better functioning, less compromised political set-up finds resonance in civil-society activism and media agendas, the middle class is seeking a new contract between the state and the citizenry.

 

For the first time a question that has become moot to the outcome of the next elections is whether there is any leader who can appeal nationally to the growing urban base of voters while simultaneously navigating the complex caste arithmetic of individual parliamentary constituencies. Ironically, two contemporary politicians – deeply antithetical in style and ideology – have triggered middle class interest. The first was Prime Minister Manmohan Singh – initially seen as professorial, personally incorruptible, and unostentatious. In 2009, the urban classes gave him a resounding second chance especially after his assertiveness on the nuclear deal with the United States. Not many understood the details of the negotiations or the issues at stake, but middle class India, in any case culturally shaped by the West, liked the idea of a leader who stood for something even at the risk of losing his government. Besides, as an Oxbridge educated economist, in the middle class imagination Manmohan Singh was an alternative to the elite preconception of the uncouth, uneducated politician prototype.

Having lost the only popular election that he ever contested, the prime minister’s main constituency was the middle class. Now it is that same class that is entirely unforgiving of him, bewildered that despite a greater political mandate than the one he got in 2004, Manmohan Singh’s second term saw a sharp decline, both in his personal authority and his ability to take a stand. Besieged by multiple corruption scams, the prime minister’s constantly placing an arm’s length between his office and the latest scandal to stalk his government, has made him look increasingly like a man ‘not in charge’. The urban perception of the UPA as being a rudderless ship that has been left adrift at sea has provided readymade material to prime ministerial aspirants from the opposition.

 

That is why Narendra Modi – who remains a contentious, polarizing political figure – is now fashioning himself as the second middle class hope. Though the long shadow of the 2002 anti-Muslim riots continues to trail him, the Gujarat chief minister has carved out a new identity for himself as an economic enabler. By winning over the influential corporate community, while simultaneously courting those who are above the poverty line, but nowhere close to economic comfort, in other words the lower-income middle class, he has sought to move away from his original association with the politics of Hindutva and recast himself as an efficient administrator whose agenda is shaped by development.

That Modi is seen to be entirely autocratic – especially by his own party colleagues – has done nothing to diminish his appeal in the imagination of sections of the middle class who actually approve of political machismo and welcome it as a break from what they see as feeble leadership. After all, it is not uncommon for India’s upper middle class to look longingly at the well-ordered social structures of China or even Singapore and lament at our own messy, vibrant democracy. A free press, civil rights, the space to abuse politicians – all the things we take for granted in our democracy – would be happily surrendered at the altar of economic efficiency by these votaries of muscular leadership.

 

As the Congress comes to grips with its losing influence in India’s urban centres, the party is finally beginning to confront its crisis of diminishing returns in this constituency. There are whispers that Rahul Gandhi may well want to outsource the top job – if it were his for the taking – just like his mother did. And that if he looks for his Manmohan Singh, it would be politically smart to look for a personality who has resonance in the urban imagination, but is less controversial than his main challenger in the BJP is set to be.

On the other hand, this presidential style election could be the figment of a headline-hunting media that likes to centre political discourse on personalities. It is much more likely that neither of the main political parties will declare a prime ministerial candidate and complicated number crunching will determine who leads India next. One of the more significant consequences delivered by an increasingly cynical electorate is in fact the demise of the pan-India leader. It is hard to spot any single politician, from any party, who could repair the fractures across caste, religion, region and class and inspire hope. A cataclysmic turn of events could change that of course. But that would be change driven by tragedy, instead of hope.