The Delhi assembly elections promise to be unusually interesting, and not just because pollsters think it is too close to call. To a large extent, the elections have focused on issues quite unrelated to the identity politics (caste, community) that is common in other parts of the country. Instead, the elections are being contested on what can only be called 'middle class' issues like transport, air quality, law and order, and education. Even the poor want an education for their children, of course, but the issue is aspiration for upward mobility into the middle class. In other words, the voter is expected to decide on the quality of services provided by the state government, and then to choose whether she wants a change of government or not.
The BJP's campaign is of course focused on that perennial economic issue at election time, inflation, and also security concerns because of the bomb blasts that have affected the city, but the third issue to be highlighted is commuting time. Advertisements taken out by the party highlight how it takes an hour to travel from anywhere to anywhere in Delhi. What is Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit's riposte? That, under her, Delhi has got a metro, many flyovers, skywalks. When it comes to education, the Congress puts forward the claim that it has added 250 new schools in the city and dramatically improved the matriculation rate ... in one word, progress that it says would stop if the BJP came to power.
The focus on citizen-centred issues, and not personality-based politics, comes through even more clearly with the realisation that the Congress campaign projects the state's chief minister of the past decade, with no spotlight at all on the Gandhi family that is an inalienable part of a Congress campaign anywhere else in the country. In turn, the BJP focus is on its chief ministerial candidate, Vijay Kumar Malhotra, and his personal qualities (including a clean record).
The nature of the campaigns testifies to a trend witnessed in other parts of the world: as the size of the middle class reaches critical mass, the nature of politics changes. A sizeable middle class is going to be more concerned about jobs and inflation than, say, reservations along caste lines; it is a sizeable and mobile middle class, similarly, that is worried about the time taken for commuting; of the quality of schools and colleges; fair play; transparent rules; the list goes on. And the fact that Delhi has no dominant caste or linguistic group, and comprises migrants from every part of the country, makes it heterogeneous enough to obliterate any advantages that might be gained from identity-based politics. The growing importance of residents' welfare associations in the different 'colonies' that dot the city, and the role given to them by the government in its public-private partnership programme, highlight also the participative nature of the democratic culture that is evolving in the city.
These developments tie in neatly with the central thesis of Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani's book that was released on Monday-- that a sizeable middle class will make demands on the country's politicians that they will have to fulfil if they want to stay in office. As Mr Nilekani points out, at the time of Independence, India's politicians were ahead of the population when they pushed ideas like universal adult suffrage, but now they are falling behind what people aspire for.
