National Highway

Tehelka, 9 May

Mohammed Nasim Khan has come to Chandni Chowk all the way from east Delhi on a hot Saturday afternoon to buy toys that his employer will sell for a profit. To relieve the heat he stops for a glass of lassi. “One good thing about the UPA government? What are you saying?” In its three years, the Manmohan Singh government has done nothing that managed to impress Mohammed Nasim Khan. Why? “Well, you tell me, has anything become cheaper? Have the prices of anything fallen by a paisa? They’ve all gone up,” he says. “All this talk of aam aadmi is jhooth. Lies.”

In the next elections, Khan says he would vote for the Bharatiya Janata Party. “Just to try it out,” he says. “After all the Indian Muslim was born only to keep trying.” Khan is disenchanted with the Congress party. He feels that it appeases the Muslims, but its rule only makes daily life difficult for them. It’s not just inflation but also his father’s pension that never seems to materialise.

On the other side of the thela is Ram Babu, an immigrant Dalit from Lucknow and a one-man lassi factory. While he can drink all the lassi as he wants to, looking for food every evening is not very pleasant. “In the footpath hotel where I eat,” he explains like a street economist, “the meal costs me 50 percent more than what it used to six months ago.” Wheat, says Babu, cost Rs 7 a kg last year. It costs Rs 12 now.

Meet the Congress party’s aam aadmi, exalted to VIP status just three years ago and used as a potent weapon against the India Shining delusions of the ruling National Democratic Alliance. India Shining became India’s most berated slogan, seemingly discrediting economic reforms along the way, and one thought the aam aadmi was back in the centrestage. But three years on, even the Congress seems jittery about not having kept its promise. For an electorate that does not understand the consequences of the rise and fall of the gdp, the only tool of measurement is the price of onions.

“Manmohan Singh is probably a nice man,” says Ram Babu as he offers you a glass of lassi with a layer of malai, “but he is an individual after all. The Congress party is what it is and its rule is what it always is.” Ram Babu used to vote for the Congress till 1990 and then started voting for the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP). Babu may not have voting rights in Delhi, and he may not even have his job because the Supreme Court would soon not let him make lassi on the Chandni Chowk pavements, but he does know that the BSP made significant inroads in the recent municipal elections in Delhi.

All that the aam aadmi wants is a significant improvement in his daily life. Beyond that, he may not even know what Mani Shankar Aiyar has said about him and his sarkar. Like Nem Singh, who makes a living selling pakoras and returns to the heartland during the harvesting season. Nem Singh doesn’t know who the Railway Minister is or whether he has turned the Railways’ balance-sheet around. His travel on trains is just the same. But he does know that the money his family earns from farming in Western UP is decreasing every year, and his pakoras in Delhi don’t earn him enough to bring his family to Delhi. Between the two, the village and the big city, the agrarian and the urban, he has to make a choice sometime soon, and he doesn’t see how government policies are helping him do that.

Sitting at the India Coffee House, once an adda of the archetypal Congressman, NC Mookherjee knows a lot more than Nem Singh. “Fact is,” he says, “the BJP handled the economy much better. It seems the UPA is deliberately creating a commodities crisis.”

“Koi sahayata nahin hai, there’s no assistance from the government,” says Qadir Ahmed Shah, selling fruits at the Okhla Mandi. Rising prices of fruits and vegetables affect the sellers too, and those who haven’t yet been included in the inclusive growth of the UPA government still look up to the mai-baap state for succour.

Ram Shankar from Gorakhpur works as a labourer at a construction site in Gurgaon. He says the price of every agricultural input has gone up in his region. “Bijli, paani, diesel sab mehnga ho gaya.”

In Seelampur, where two people were killed in protests against the Supreme Court-ordered sealings, shop owner Phool Singh says the government could have taken a stronger stand on sealings.

Sibanath Pegu, a security guard at the Central Park in Connaught Place, votes for a party of the tribals back home in Assam. “Tarun Gogoi and the Congress are not a party of the poor,” he explains. Pegu’s boss Ram Singh, a Dalit who is looking forward to voting for the BSP in the next elections in Delhi, says that the Congress will have to do a lot to change its image from a party of lies and deceit. “After so many years of being cheated by the Congress, you are asking me if I will still vote for them!”

“The problem with Manmohan Singh,” says Jagesh Kumar, a BJP voter from Bihar who works as a security guard at a Gurgaon mall, “is that he is too much into economics. He doesn’t take care of political issues.” Kumar maintains a diary of commentary on all political issues and thinks the dilly-dallying on hanging Mohammad Afzal Guru is going to be the hot potato in the next general elections.

In the 2004 general elections, advertisements put out by the Congress had loudly asked: “Aam Aadmi ko kya mila?” By 2009, the aam aadmi could be asking the Congress the same question.