A New Class War

THE upper classes were in fact all along in full control of the official apparat even in the immediate post- independence decades when socialism was supposed to be functioning in the country. Even the burgeoning public sector did the bidding of elite forums; the regulatory instruments wielded by the state mostly served their basic interests. A certain furtiveness nonetheless marked the perambulations of the rich at least till the 1980s: the poor had to be approached every now and then to exercise the suffrage in favour of the affluent set; the jargon of socialism had accordingly a market demand. In that ambience, the comfortably placed necessarily felt apologetic about their state of being. Nor were they in a position to make a sustained display of their wealth through a splurge in luxury consumption; import controls were a big nuisance.