"Why does it seem that more men from a particular class/es look at me whilst I'm on the street?"
Perhaps because there are more people from lower classes negotiating with public spaces. Affluence increasingly brings with it a conscious 'opting out' from public life, a "secession of the successful" to borrow from J K Galbraith; out of public transport into cars (although there are large ocurrences of car-owners engaging in street harassment, by slowing down, pulling over, insistently offering rides and so on), out of open bazaars into upmarket malls, off the streets and away from neighbourhood hangouts such as outside the cigarette shop, or at street corners. The larger prevalence of men from a lower class occupying public spaces would naturally increase the number of them subsequently engaging in a certain type of behaviour.
Often we find that street sexual harassment in India adopts certain "typical" patterns modelled on cues received from popular culture; Bollywood, music videos, song lyrics, advertisements and so on. While it seems likely that basing behaviour, however loosely, on popular culture is a universal norm, in India this trend becomes unique because popular culture acts as a handle, perhaps even a crutch, for cross-class and cross-caste interaction which, in terms of sexual relations, is still largely taboo and unusual. Thus the tuneful whistle of a suggestive Bollywood number, or a lewd one-liner sourced from the latest blockbuster - these attempts at attracting attention receive an almost social sanction being, as they are, borrowed from a source which has already enjoyed mass appeal thus lending it some legitimacy. The dependence to a large extent on handles of popular culture can perhaps be attributed to the lack of any other cues for how to behave when crossing class and other historic divides when encountering the opposite sex.
Globalisation and liberalisation have brought many "Western" values and commodities to Indian shores, furthering the already vast chasm between those who can afford the lifestyle they accompany and those who are left static. Thus members of lower classes living in urban, burgeoning metropolis' are thus confronted with the presence of women from upper castes who might never have occupied such public spaces (streets, parks, movie halls) so defiantly before. They are dressed in a way they might not have been before, they behave more confidently (swollen with the confidence of their own income, earned through their own high power jobs, by virtue of their highly specialised skills) than they might have before and they are certainly out in larger numbers than ever before. Thus, coupled with the presence of much larger numbers of women from urban upper middle classes is also their new-found attitude and demeanour - making them a sort of double whammy for men from lower classes who need to locate some sort of path through which to negotiate with them. Unable to find one, through historic deficit or otherwise, they turn to the Universal Sanctioner, Age Old Teacher, the ever-prevalent popular culture.
