If we look at the most striking political and economic happenings in the past few days, it would undoubtedly be the allegations about large-scale electoral roll irregularities, posing an “existential threat” to India’s electoral democracy, and Trump’s tariff tantrum and “dead economy” jibe at India. Yet, most indicators such as voter turnout and GDP numbers would point to how both, our electoral democracy and economy, in fact appear to be thriving.
However, there is something deeper that seems to be withering and decaying like never before — the collective conscience of society driven by a new form of class apathy and indifference especially gripping the urban consumerist middle and upper classes who couldn’t care less about debates around phenomena such as rising inequalities, economic insecurities across the spectrum, social injustices or compromised elections. It is this apathy that poses a real threat to our democracy and economy from within.
This apathy is marked by a sharp shrinkage in the idea of the “public” — public sector jobs, public transport, public schools, public healthcare, public commons and spaces where real interactions across classes could take place, and shared ideas, interests and infrastructure could be advocated for. Even class contradictions could be seen, felt and expressed openly.
Today, the urban middle and upper classes not only ghettoise the urban poor and vouch for their evictions, they also self-arrest themselves inside gated condominiums and happily get trapped in their addictive app and algorithmic bubbles. These consumerist classes today demand the workers to arrive at their doorstep for service delivery before time but also demand that these workers must not be seen in shared spaces such as elevators, restaurants, or neighbourhoods.
In the industrial era, economic exploitation was starkly identifiable through factories, unions and worker neighbourhoods. Today’s labour is systemically dehumanised and devalued by design behind screens, ratings, and services. The delivery person, domestic worker or app-based driver exists in a transactional bubble — inevitable yet invisible, vital yet voiceless. Convenience is the new currency, and behind every seamless digital service lies a person navigating low pay, long hours, and absent social security.
According to a study by PAIGAM (People’s Association in Grassroots Actions and Movements) and University of Pennsylvania among 10,000 app-based workers across India, around 50% of platform workers reported some form of violence at work; over 30% workers reported working more than 14 hours a day; and around 48% were unable to take even a single day off at work — yet, most app-based cab drivers earn below ₹15000, while most delivery persons earn below ₹10,000 a month.
This era of platform capitalism is characterised by new forms of labour relations and a false sense of freedom and flexibility, and reproduces a new and peculiar form of class apathy, digital dystopia, and deepening divides. It has made labour monetisation, micromanagement, and hyper-surveillance more sophisticated, but also managed to atomise, alienate, and obscure them like never before.
This leads to a more depoliticised and disengaged citizenry, particularly the consumerist class — more attuned to flash sales than to parliamentary debates, more vocal about app glitches than about constitutional violations. When the Election Commission is accused of voter roll manipulation — potentially disenfranchising lakhs — it becomes just another trending hashtag, easily displaced by other trending reels.
Data control
Ironically, the consumerist middle class too, despite all its apathy, itself is not immune from extreme economic insecurities, atomisation and alienation under this regime. Just like the working class, this class too is being constantly monitored, surveilled and enumerated —each unit of their material consumption, each second of their digital consumption is being recorded and capitalised upon. The new capitalist class thrives not by manufacturing value, but by controlling data, interfaces, and infrastructure. In this model, both the consumer and the worker are inputs to be optimised. The consumerist middle class, while ostensibly powerful, is simply more efficiently mined for data and purchasing power, their attention sold to advertisers, their consumption used to drive investor confidence. Data, therefore, in this digital and platform era is not merely a question of privacy, but that of the generation of surplus value and profit for the new capitalist class.
The better-off digital workers working in the IT sector and MNCs who found remote and hybrid work cultures offering greater freedom and flexibility soon realised how their near constant digital availability has been leading to unimaginable overwork, causing mental fatigue, burnout, exhaustion and eroding focus, because they have been subjected to a new concept of the so-called “infinite work day”. These trends are in line with the corporate giants and their representatives advocating for increased working hours without breaks and weekly offs. These are legitimised in the new labour codes — allowing for various exemptions in unpaid overtime work and a gradual increase from an eight-hour work day to 12 hours in various State laws. Mass unemployment and retrenchment drives by reputed companies are forcing a chunk of this skilled and educated workforce from this very middle class to join the insecure platform economies as app-workers making this middle class even more downwardly mobile.
These markers of class apathy highlight the paradoxical position of the middle class — of their aspirational convergence with the capitalist class but their economic convergence with the working class towards whom they are most apathetic.
Huge disparities
Consider the following statistics: According to a recent study, the salaries of chief executives at India’s leading IT firms have skyrocketed by over 160% in the past five years, whereas entry-level employees have experienced only marginal pay growth of under 4% during the same time. Post-pandemic data reveal a dramatic shrinking of India’s middle class by 32 million people, as per the Pew Research Center (2021). During the same pandemic year of 2020, India added more billionaires than any other country after the U.S., even as over 75 million Indians fell into poverty. Inflation has outpaced wage growth with real per capita income growing only 2.5% annually between 2012 and 2023, while consumer inflation averaged over 5%, wiping out gains as per the NSO. Even salaried professionals have seen a decline in real wages: a study by the Institute for Human Development (IHD) noted a -1.8% fall in real wages for regular salaried urban workers between 2011-12 and 2017-18. Additionally, India’s gross domestic savings rate has fallen to 18.4% of GDP in 2022-23, down from over 32% a decade ago (RBI, 2024). Most strikingly, Oxfam’s 2024 Inequality Report shows that the richest 1% in India now control over 40% of the nation’s wealth, while the bottom half owns only about 3%. This concentration of wealth isn’t just an imbalance—it’s a breach of social compact.
India’s economy and polity are not dying but its collective conscience is. The marginalised and working class must reclaim spaces, state resources, struggles and solidarities but a lot depends on the middle class too. The urban elite must remember that the comfort of their detachment is built on the exhaustion of millions. The crisis of class apathy is not just a moral one — it is a threat to democratic imagination itself. It yearns for restoring the link between economic justice and political vigilance which comes from the middle class recognising the rural voter’s disenfranchisement as their own loss and the urban billionaire’s windfall as their own wage stagnation. Unless we close the empathy deficit between classes and establish democratic control over economic and social life, we will continue to drift towards a polity where growth is hollow, democracy is brittle, and conscience is absent.
Akriti Bhatia is a Post-Doctoral Fellow, Jawaharlal Nehru University; views expressed are personal
Published – August 13, 2025 12:22 am IST