Among the few WhatsApp groups I am a member of, the most voluminous by miles belongs to my classmates from schooldays. It is the same group from which I consider getting out every few days and it is the same group which keeps me glued to some of the most riveting debates at the cost of familial harmony. So what is this group?

A group of roughly 50 members out of a batch of 100 (apparently WhatsApp rules don’t allow more than that), its members come from Bihar (even today a symbol of acute poverty and ‘backwardness’), where the school was then located and now are spread all over the world. Paradoxically, less than 10 of them now live in Bihar.

While they came from largely lower middle class background of the 1980s, almost all of them now have made it so well that they boast of at least a car, some of them multiple SUVs, frequent holiday trips, many of them international.

While some of them are bureaucrats, senior police officers, most of them are now part of the private sector success story, right from IT services to traditional industrial sector, banking, law, journalism, etc. Almost none (barring one recent entrant) come from academic background. Almost all of them are Hindu, majority of them belonging to the so-called upper castes and exclusively males.

And this is the most bitter and angry group I encounter in my everyday life. They are extremely angry about the larger play of things around; they are angry about India’s slow pace of achieving the status of Singapore or USA and they think Modi isn’t getting enough help on this count. They are angry about the quality of flyovers built during Nitish Kumar’s regime in Bihar; they are, of course, least bothered about the data showing Bihar topping the list of putting girls inside the schools in the past one decade.

They are also angry about the supposed media complicity in Modi-maligning conspiracy; they are angry about writers returning their awards protesting the recent spate of incidents, including killings of writers and activists, targeting of Muslims. They believe in the conspiracy theory of Islamists attempting to take over this world and they believe that all Muslims may not be terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims.

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They are dismissive of historians and sociologists raising public concern around the capture of academic institutions by Hindutva factions. They shy away from caste questions, despite occasional provocations. They also get angry if someone raises the issues of rising prices of pulses and onions. They display explicit contempt for any nuanced debate, which they dismiss as intellectualism.

For them, the nuanced debate is only that which supports the economic policies of the present regime or about the winning prospects of BJP in one more election in a state. Some of them even troll you personally just like on twitter debates if you dare raise a finger against their endless propaganda.

That seems to be largely my experience so far and yet, when I reflect closely after one more high decibel cantankerous debate, I do realise it’s largely a group of 8-10 people who are extremely vocal, led by a couple of hardcore RSS variety who dominate these conversations while there’s another bunch of about 8-10 who occasionally pipe up in support of these arguments.

Then, there are a few, barely 4-5 who occasionally dare to criticise Modi and his antics. That leaves another 20-25, i.e., roughly half of the group who stay away from these conversations largely, engaging only when getting nostalgic about the few girls there were in a class of over 100 boys. And so, I remain hopeful.

But with an estimated middle class of 200-300 million in a population of over 1.3 billion, is this a fair sample size to gauge the mindset of what is India’s middle class, the mainstay of the current political dispensation? It may be evident to some of us that they are among the select few who have benefited immensely from the economic liberalisation brought about by the previous Congress plus regimes and that at least they should complain much less in a country where roughly one third of the population is still living in extremely harsh circumstances.

In a country which still has the dubious distinction of second highest maternal mortality numbers, housing world’s largest number of illiterates, and over one third of the world’s poor, surely, they should be grateful that not just them, but their children are getting the best. And yet, fragility of this recent success becomes evident when you realise that the base of this growth story is essentially linked to the narrow base of the growth story of India itself.

While in a post-Mandal era of the 1990s, which saw the emergence of the other backward castes assuring itself the share in the government jobs, opening of the market gave the insecure upper caste middle class a great opportunity to re-establish its hegemonic superiority through the private sector. The growth of this sector was also based on a narrow, high skill base led by the IT and services industry while agriculture and even manufacturing continued to languish.

There has been, therefore, a concomitant synergy between India’s growth and the growth of this upper caste, Hindu male bastion. So far so good. The trouble came after more than a decade of this success story, one when the poor began to assert their right to have a share in this pie, resulting in UPA regimes creating safety valves through various social sector reforms, e.g., employment scheme, right to education, safeguarding of interests of tribals through forest Rights Acts, etc.

Second, from within this very entrenched social class, more and more women began to assert their space, their rights in different spheres of public life. And the last straw in a way was the economic meltdown 3-4 years ago which led to a rollback of profits this class had become privy to. Hence, the anger.

In contrast, the Nehruvian brand of secularism was never entrenched deep enough through our public schooling systems, nor did it lead to any major questioning of the established patriarchal values sanctioned by religion. Ironically, some of that came under sharper scanner only with the onset of the market and its associated movements, migrations, exposure to other cultures, etc.

The two decades of success of this class have also led to a wish to directly seize the power in its hands. From a scenario a decade ago, where they hardly bothered to go out and vote, the recent surges in their participation in not just national but also provincial elections is just one indicator of this.

The growing politicisation of this class at least in its own interest began with anti-corruption movements, women’s safety issues in recent years eventually resulting in the rise of Aam Admi Party, which came on the twin plank of anti-corruption and greater decentralisation of power. But AAP’s growing alignment with the working class, forced this class to go back to its parent party, i.e., BJP, which could keep its economic and ‘cultural’ privileges intact, even at the cost of its dream for a direct political leadership.

And yet, the issue of governance, years of experience of everyday corruption (many though, fancy and value the high level corruption engineered by the corporate houses as aspirational), and the larger idea of a development shared by all also keeps this class from being a completely homogenous lot.

Against each so-called mainstream tv channel or print media shouting slogans in favour of Modi-magic, you have a new social website, a new activist group coming from this very class challenging the trolls, whether in the cyber space or in the streets. You also have new champions of gender politics, of inclusion and tolerance.

I reaffirm, I remain hopeful.