Aam aadmi who?

There is a spectre haunting the Congress party, and it goes by the name of ‘aam aadmi’. Ever since the slogan, ‘Congress ka haath, aam aadmi ke saath’ coincided with the party’s famous Election 2004 victory, the Congress has been struggling to decide who this mythical creature really is.

The Congress is understandably very attached to its mascot, but the consequences of not defining the “aam aadmi” more precisely are now beginning to kick in. To make the scenario even more complex, there is the obvious party-government divide, with the party often berating the government on behalf of the ‘aam aadmi’. Governance under the UPA — sometimes chaotic and always confused — testifies to this sorry lack of clarity. The ‘aam admi’ is all things to all people — straddling the entire spectrum from the tomato soup drinkers of Mumbai’s Malabar Hill to the rice cultivators of Guntur. This puts policy-making at sixes and sevens. The management of fuel prices is a case in point. Those who speak for the “poor” within the Congress party — and they are a legion — have always resisted government moves to raise the price of cooking gas even when the prices of international petroleum products are skyrocketing. Yet, ultimately, it is the relatively prosperous city dweller who most benefits from such a decision, not the poorest and most marginalised. They, in fact, stand to lose a great deal from such economic profligacy in the long term.

The Congress Working Committee has just sternly berated the hapless Manmohan Singh government over rising prices and has instructed it to ensure that the “vulnerable sections of society” are not hit. Such pontificating would make sense if the CWC spared some effort to define who actually constitute this section (and please keep the soup drinkers of suburbia out), so that the government can actually target those who most need the help. Will the real ‘aam aadmi’ please stand up?