Opinion Aam aadmi who?
Come election season, each party addresses a different man on the street.
Come election season, each party addresses a different man on the street.
The aam aadmi, or the common man, has been the cynosure of all political eyes lately. Even if we disregard the question of the missing aam aurat, who exactly is the aam aadmi? Last week, BSP chief Mayawati stoutly declared who he is not. At her Lucknow rally, she warned the AAP against calling the Dalit “aam aadmi”. Yet the man on the street, whom all political parties claim to address, is a protean creature. In the political vocabulary, the aam aadmi has become a roomy metaphor for the dispossessed and the aspirational, the resentful and the hopeful, all at once.
The Congress was perhaps the first to tap the rich possibilities of Brand Aam Aadmi. For the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, the party amended its earlier slogan “Congress ka haath garib ke saath” to “Congress ka haath aam aadmi ke saath”, signalling its acknowledgement of a less helpless, more aspirational voter. This constituency was even more sharply and specifically defined by Rahul Gandhi in his AICC speech this Friday, where he spoke of the about 70 crore striving Indians who are below the middle class but above the poverty line. In contrast, the AAP, as it tries to wrest the term and the slogan from the Congress, keeps its aam aadmi more nebulous. It claims to speak for all the disempowered citizens whom the system leaves out, never mind that the party’s much talked of power and water subsidies actually reach those who are already accounted for, or people with piped water and electricity connections.
For the most part, in between polls, “the people”, in whose name schemes and policies are launched and political claims unleashed, remain a shapeless abstraction, a nameless and faceless entity. But election season forces each party to lay claim to its chosen constituencies and make its pitch accordingly. That is when the many shapes of the aam aadmi are revealed.
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