There may be something slightly amusing in the fact that a Bharatiya Janata Party member of Parliament, Sumitra Mahajan, should be heading the parliamentary standing committee on the maintenance and welfare of parents and senior citizens bill, 2007. The BJP has always been rather big on “Indian culture”; it constantly evokes this non-existent homogeneity as an alibi for its particular brand of politics. After all that, it cannot be great fun to head a committee geared towards formulating a law to compel young people to look after their elders. Respect for elders would imaginably be considered one of the verities of “Indian culture”. But it is a good exercise in realism: culture is not a self-sufficient, unchanging hand-me-down from an abstract ideal, it is a set of behaviours and expressions that responds to changing conditions and changing stimuli. Certain basic arrangements in Indian society have been changing for a long time, as, for example, the breakdown of the joint family and the growing predominance of the nuclear family. Add to that the sudden opening of doors to the world and the noticeable change in economic profile, especially of the middle class, and the need for reminding young people to look after the old becomes explicable.

This is not to condone either cruelty or selfishness, but to emphasize the need to study the deep, sometimes invisible, destabilization that takes place in the values of a rapidly transforming society. A law may help, if only as a reminder, and the bill’s suggestions about the government’s responsibility — group insurance and old age pension — point the way towards arrangements in many societies in the West. If the law does go through, though, it must be seen as a law for the middle classes. Such laws have no meaning for the poor. In the complicated dynamics among culture, economics, and raw need, who, in the poorest rural households, should be considered the more helpless — the starving parents who are left behind or the desperate children who migrate?