CITYZEN. Inequality is rising, but who cares?

For those who have lived in Indian cities long enough, it is difficult to miss the remarkable change in people’s tolerance of economic inequality.

Back in the 1970s, economic inequality was a major part of the urban discourse.

The various dimensions of inequality dominated coffee house discussions, theatre and even popular cinema, contributing in no small way to the radicalisation of the young urban Indian.

In sharp contrast, today, economic inequality forms a very small part of the urban discourse. Social media — the modern replacement for the old coffee shop discussion — has little time for inequality.

And popular cinema, including films enjoyed by the urban poor, is increasingly populated by heroes who enjoy flaunting their wealth.

In the midst of the optimism generated by liberalisation it is easy to implicitly believe that inequality has reduced in recent decades.

But the evidence points in the other direction. UN Escap has calculated that the widely used measure of inequality, the Gini coefficient, increased for India from 30.8 in the early 1990s to 33.9 in the late 2000s. The Gini index ranges from zero to 100, with the former denoting complete inequality and the latter complete inequality.

And this inequality is sharper in cities that are home to both some of the richest individuals in the world as well as some of the poorest. Indian cities thus throw up the paradox of growing inequality accompanied by a greater tolerance of inequality by the poor.

Underlying this paradox are two rather different phenomena, one in the realm of the material and the other in the mind.

At the material level some of the sting of inequality can be reduced by providing specific concessions to the poor, such as BPL ration cards. And these transfers need not be through such formal, and legal, mechanisms alone.

At election time large sums of black money are funnelled into the system, with at least some of it going out as payments to the poor among the voters.

But even as these transfers soften the blows of poverty, they are hardly sufficient to convert the aggressive anti-poverty urban discourse of the 1970s into the celebration of inequality that marks today’s urban life.

We need to come to terms with the fact that the poor in our cities now see inequality in very different light.

In the 1970s the rhetoric for the poor was built around getting the rich to share their wealth.

Today the focus is much more on the poor believing they too can climb the income ladder. The greater the inequality the higher the urban poor, like anyone else, can hope to reach.

Growing inequality then only heightens what the sociologist Arjun Appadorai has termed “the capacity to aspire”.

An important aspect of the capacity to aspire in practice is that it is not unduly restricted by realism. Individuals can be expected to associate much more with the near-rags to riches story of Dhirubhai Ambani rather than the realism that failures would point to.

While there may well be a recognition that not all of the poor will succeed, there is nothing to stop each individual from believing that he or she will be the exception.

As and when realism does sink in, it is still possible to transfer those aspirations to their children.

A transformation in the capacity to aspire changes the nature of urban politics as well.

As long as this capacity is low the poor are content to demand the basic necessities of life, and the politician responds with slogans like ‘Garibi Hatao’.

But when the aspirations of the poor grow beyond the point of what can be realistically given to all of them, the focus shifts to chasing dreams.

And the political rhetoric follows suit. Development becomes the new slogan.

As with most Indian political slogans there is little time spent on working out the details of what exactly is meant by development, and how we are going to get there.

There is an implicit idea that development is the material wealth the West has achieved, and this in turn is translated into higher economic growth rates.

There is little thought given to the strategy for long-term growth, and even less to the larger questions of whether the world has the resources to provide every human being the materialistic lifestyle that is now being sold as development. The obvious flip side of this situation is that while those who succeed will gain astronomical amounts of wealth, those who do not will get increasingly bitter.

A vast mass of disgruntled Indians would make our cities fertile ground for social turmoil.

Politicians of various hues can then be expected to cultivate this fertile ground for their pet conflicts, ranging from mobs rampaging theatres to targeting women.

Inequality may no longer be the central theme of urban discussions, but it remains one of the root causes for violence in our cities.

The writer is a professor at the School of Social Science, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru