From Campa Cola to 2014 polls: The middle class is key to victory And this group is going to tilt the balance in 2014. Are the middle classes big enough to tilt a vote? If you define the real middle class as people who can think beyond subsistence, their numbers could be in the range of 70-150 million (of which more later). And theirs will be the casting vote next year. This message has been coming through loud and clear for over three years now, but the media has not quite got it. Arnab Goswami of Times Now – not one of my favourite news anchors – gets it, Bollywood gets it, Narendra Modi gets it, Chetan Bhagat gets it, even the Supreme Court gets it, but our ancient political class and old-school news anchors are barely coming to grips with this mind-boggling change, mired as they are in old ideologies, and tied to older power structures. This is the message from the Anna Hazare movement, the Delhi gangrape protests, the emergence of the Aam Aadmi Party as a destabilising factor in the Delhi assembly elections, and the Campa Cola building protests in Mumbai.
Posted on: Thu, 14 Nov 2013 06:12:06 +0000