Shekhar Gupta: 'Kanwarias' vs halloweeners

Modi-BJP govt draws its instincts from the street and responds likewise. This has flummoxed the Congress and isolated the critical elite

Five years ago, in a National Interest headlined “Them Versus Them”, I had traced a unique new faultline within India’s dominant elites for public debate: The governing classes versus the ruling classes. The governing elites are the politicians and bureaucrats, judiciary, conventional intelligentsia and journalists, police and armed forces brass. The ruling elites are the economically arrived Indians outside the formal establishment: The corporates, new professionals, especially from IT and banking/finance, and offspring of earlier generations of governing elites, and foundation-funded activists.

The point was that the traditional elites and the new ones had so little in common, they were