Anna Hazare inspires young, middle-class awakening in India

NEW DELHI — As he waited in the rain for India’s veteran anti-corruption crusader to emerge from jail, call-center employee Amit Bhardwaj was still troubled by the bribe he was forced to pay three months ago to get a birth certificate for his firstborn son.

“I hated it,” he said, miming how the official had greedily counted the notes, worth about $20, in full public view. “I had hatred for myself and for him. This was the first thing I did for my newborn son.”

Like millions of other Indians, Bhardwaj has found a degree of personal redemption by joining a national movement against corruption led by the unlikely figure of 74-year-old Anna Hazare. The peaceful movement has drawn in Indians of all ages and from all walks of life, but it marks the first time India’s new, urban middle class has put aside creature comforts and personal ambition and taken to the streets for a political cause.

Unlike the Arab Spring, it is not an impassioned call for democracy or a new government. But it is an awakening of sorts, which could change the face of India’s democracy and, protesters and some commentators say, portend a deeper change in the national psyche and its tolerance for corrupt, arrogant and unresponsive leaders.

“The consumer revolution that we have experienced in the past two decades has told the citizen that he can expect a higher quality of governance,” said social anthropologist Shiv Viswanathan. “The information revolution has created a revolution of rising expectation.”

In the process, India’s anti-corruption movement may blow away a few myths — in particular, that the country’s middle class was too comfortable, apathetic and insignificant in number to swing elections.

Cynical lawmakers, in the past, figured they could get away with almost anything as long as they threw a few sops to the rural poor at election time every five years. But two decades of economic liberalization has brought into being a new Indian middle class, already numbering more than 200 million and growing fast, and whose votes and opinions can no longer be taken for granted. Unlike the older middle class, whose members held jobs in the government or state-owned companies, the new middle class has benefited from privatization and economic reforms in the past two decades.

“India has reached an inflexion point,” Swagato Ganguly wrote in the Times of India on Friday in a piece headlined “It’s the middle class, stupid.” “The ‘new’ middle class, which owes nothing to state employment, is eclipsing the ‘old’ middle class.”

High-profile scandals

The movement against corruption came to life at the end of last year after a string of high-profile corruption scandals. Using Facebook to mobilize and gather recruits, it started to snowball with Hazare’s nationally televised four-day fast in April.

India’s government, as senior officials now admit, consistently underestimated the movement’s power. Scorning it as a middle-class phenomenon, many felt its importance was being exaggerated by the nation’s often sensationalistic round-the-clock television news channels, while others questioned whether a small community of people using social media reflected the voice of India.