ISAS Working Papers

This paper is an update with new data to analyse the composition of the middle classes in India in the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century, building on an earlier paper that was based on 1998-99 data, to understand the political sociology of economic liberalisation in India; specifically, to analyse whether the middle class, on balance, would support economic liberalisation, or support some policies in the process while tending to resist others, and why.1 The hypothesis is that the middle class is not straightforwardly a support base for economic liberalisation as often assumed, but that the larger the public employee and subsidised farmer component of the middle class, however defined, the more resistant it will be to at least some facets of economic liberalisation such as privatisation and de-subsidisation.