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But the capitalist outlook is still so new to India that no mainstream leader is quite ready to renounce socialism for the C word. Even Gandhi, who godfathered the middle-class surge, fears the fallout when less fortunate voters go to the polls later this month for parliamentary elections. For the past six months, he has turned his attention to promoting vast poverty relief and local rule schemes. Still, Gandhi's advisers say that if the Prime Minister is returned to power, he will push forward with deregulation and other reforms. If Gandhi is defeated, his successor may have little choice but to do the same. Says Surjit Bhalla, an economist with the Policy Group, a New Delhi think tank: "After what has happened in the past five years in the global economy, Indian policymakers have finally realized that socialism has failed to deliver the goods."
Indian leftists counter that Gandhi is leaving India's vast numbers of poor people in the lurch. They argue that government resources are being diverted to help the well-off minority, who in turn are frittering away vital funds on luxury goods. Rajni Kothari, a widely respected social scientist, is worried that the middle class is dangerously insensitive to the desperately poor. Says he: "There is a disturbing decline in compassion, in charity, in pity."
The consumer big bang was detonated in 1982 with the advent of color TV, but really took off in 1984 when Doordarshan, the monopoly state television company, began allowing advertisers to sponsor shows. Over the next five years, the advertising revenues at Doordarshan jumped more than tenfold. Top- rated shows exposed tens of millions of slum dwellers and villagers, as well as civil servants and professionals, to the blandishments of housewives, models and children. A surge in foreign travel and the arrival of the video revolution further whetted appetites for consumer goods.
As a result, domestic manufacturing is soaring. From 1982 to 1988, color television production jumped from 70,000 units a year to 1.3 million, while the output of black-and-white sets increased almost eightfold, to 4.4 million. Refrigerator and car production has also mushroomed, softening Indian resistance to borrowing. That means boom times ahead for a fledgling consumer finance business that, according to J. Rao, Citibank's chief executive officer in India, has skyrocketed from zero to $1 billion in just three years.
The rush to buy is rooted in the new middle class's love of ostentation. Many Indians consider those Punjabis who are most at home in Delhi to be particularly brash entrepreneurs and deride the type as the "puppy," for "prosperous urban Punjabi who is young." But where the consumer itch is involved, even ordinary Indians are not above one-upmanship. Onida, a television manufacturer, runs a national ad campaign with the slogan, "Neighbor's envy, owner's pride."