…To put it bluntly, you may have a cell phone in your pocket and a television in your bedroom and still think of stoning a bus as a legitimate form of political protest.

According to the McKinsey Global Institute, only about 5% of Indians, or about 55 million people, have a disposable annual income of between 200,000 rupees and 1,000,000 rupees. While wealth offers only a crude shorthand for values, these are the citizens least likely to condone Monday’s events, and most likely to know that destroying public property or harassing commuters to score a political point is alien to both the advanced democracies of the West and the newer ones of East Asia. This cohort, middle class by a global yardstick and not merely an Indian one, is also most likely to question the peculiar honor code of Indian politics, where a party stands to lose face, and with it influence, if it can’t marshal the street muscle to bring ordinary life to a halt.
…Nonetheless, those locked out of the political process also have themselves to blame for their predicament. With their resources, capacity for organization and access to the media, they (the middle class) ought to punch above their weight rather than below it. Instead, in the richer neighborhoods in Delhi, Bombay and Bangalore, and in the gated apartment complexes springing up in satellite towns such as Gurgaon, people have chosen to secede from Indian democracy rather than to fix it. Captive generators provide power. Private guards provide security. The kids study in private schools and visit private doctors. For the most part, politics belongs to a distant world, glimpsed on television news, gossiped about at parties and, at best, participated in only when national elections come around every five years.

In the long run, however, this apathy is untenable. For educated Indians to get the politicians they deserve they must not only vote in larger numbers, but also seek a way to enter active politics. The quixotic attempt last year by Meera Sanyal, a senior banker with the Dutch multinational ABN Amro, to run for a seat in parliament from South Bombay, ought to serve as a symbol of inspiration rather than of derision. (Ms. Sanyal lost her deposit, winning only about 11,000 votes out of 640,000). Before he tarnished his image by getting involved in a dodgy cricket scam, Shashi Tharoor, a former top official at the United Nations and a member of parliament from the southern state of Kerala, showed that Indian voters are willing to give an outsider a chance.