Why does the Middle-Class despise politics?
When the Indian National Congress was first formed in 1885, it comprised the elite of India, mainly from the Presidency states of Bengal, Bombay and Madras. The leading lights of the INC then were highly educated, upper middle class, upper caste, and urban. They were, with notable exceptions of course, more British than Indian! Though these men first raised demands for legislative representation, and nurtured a nascent idea for an independent India, their organisation was no match for the might of the British. Their own support base was extremely limited to be an effective opposition to the British. Mahatma Gandhi changed all that, by making the movement a mass-based one, involving the workers in the factories and people in the villages. His ability to rouse the people led to the mass-based Freedom Struggle, capturing the imagination of Indians and forcing the British to leave. Yet, while he certainly made the movement more broad based it was still controlled by the privileged sections
