A slew of extravagant weddings has repulsed middle-class Indians, even though they may not be from the South. Too golden, too grand, too garish, they complained. How can you spend so much money when there is “agrarian distress”? The urban middle-class does not employ the poor merely to cook for them, drive them, and walk their dogs, but also to be used as moral pedestals to stand on and accuse those who are richer than them that they are “too vulgar in a poor country.” Some people were even reminded of the time when police raided wedding feasts because India was so deficient in food there were limits to how much food could be served. But now that Indians are allowed to be debauched, the middle-class is disgusted. But then do India’s vast poor make a serious distinction between the billionaires, multi-millionaires, the mere millionaires, and the rest of the top one percent?

Aren’t the Skodas of the conscientious “austere” Indians as gaudy as the Maybachs in the eyes of the starving? And isn’t the elegant and spare soiree on the lawns as vulgar as mega-weddings in the eyes of gaping drivers? And the disdain that Arundhati Roy has for Mukesh Ambani’s giant home, wouldn’t a malnourished tribal feel the same way for Roy’s affluent home in Delhi’s prime Jor Bagh?

The conscience of the nation are asset millionaires themselves, or at least they belong to the top one percent by income, considering the fact that India is so poor it takes only a household income of less than three lakhs a month to qualify. What they think is austerity is still vulgar in their impoverished nation. Also, to the poor, it is the upper middle-class that is the most visible section of the rich because the ionosphere of the superrich is beyond what their eyes can see. This is what commentators missed in the aftermath of “demonetisation” when they could not see its political popularity—in the public misery of the middle-class, the average voter saw the fall of the rich. Because the billionaire never queues up at the ATM.

The vulgarity of superrich weddings should ideally suggest to the Indian middle-class how vulgar they themselves appear to the poor. The classy think their wealth is hidden from plain sight, but there are things that are not invisible to the poor. In fact, class reminds them of both wealth and alien culture, the reason why class is politically more despicable than son-of-the-soil wealth. Isn’t it true, after all, that the average Indian relates more with Salman Khan, a multi-millionaire, than with any of Delhi’s “austere” intellectuals whose actual extravagance is invisible—the money their parents had spent on their upbringing and social equity.

From this fault line flows a stream of politics. Indian politics is the revenge of the poor, but it does not pain the provincial capitalists as much as it harms the global Indian, the believer in both the West European enlightenment and Peepal tree enlightenment. This is not exclusively an Indian phenomenon.

Millions of Americans find the sophisticates so vulgar that they identify more with Trump, a very rich man. The rise of strongmen across the world is a demonstration of the fact that the average voter despises the articulate global intellectual; so much that even when the intellectual talks sense, the voter hates sense itself.

People are not irrational; they just hate some people more than other people. This is why it has been an excellent strategy for some intellectuals to seek refuge in activism, where they are more endearing.

You may argue that the poor can tell the difference between you, who is in the backseat of a car, and a billionaire who commutes in choppers. I grant this, though I will find it hilarious to tell a poor man, “wealth, my friend, is a spectrum.” Is poverty a spectrum? There can be a spectrum of data, but is the state of being poor a spectrum?

In politics, identity is never a spectrum. Political identity is often binary; flawed but binary. Male, female. White, black. Rich, poor. There was a time when the Indian middle-class behaved like the poor (many of us went to ration shops, we went to the same schools and watched the same film as the poor in the same theatre and probably voted for the same political party, Congress); but today we behave more like the rich. A person always knows the precise answer to this question: In your nation, are you rich or poor?

There is a view that the rich of India subsidise the poor. But, as the former chief economic adviser Arvind Subramanian pointed out in the economic survey in 2015, India’s subsidies benefit the rich more because they are in a position to consume more of the cheap power, utility, and food. Also, the lifestyle of the middle-class is subsidised by the low wages of the poor. Being middle-class in a poor country is to be rich at a heavy discount. And to be rich in the most visible way to the poor. They are more likely to personally witness our weddings than those of the Ambanis.

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