E-Paper
Aam aadmi
For no longer being taken for granted. For changing how politics is done. For making his concerns India’s concerns. For wanting change and getting it, he’s our man.
He was never not in the picture. Which is not the same thing as saying that he was always in the picture.
Like much else that’s consciously left half-baked, the Aam Aadmi — literally, the common man but far from being the middle-class tea-from-a-cup-sipping, newspaper-reading Common Man of R.K. Laxman — has been many things for many people. For the politician doubling as a social engineer, he was an inverted deity created in his own image. For the rest of us, he was a jumble of people who were People Not Like Us who existed in photographs of polling booth queues every election, and fodder for op-ed page writers, development economists and politicians at rallies all keen to show that they understand ‘Real India’.
The Aam Aadmi was a concept. That is, till 2009.
In an India that had the bulk of its people getting lost in the forest of caste identities and its politics getting stuck in a majority-minority rut, the Aam Aadmi suddenly stood up and demanded to be counted. The Congress-led UPA, in its second incarnation, did the counting and was rewarded by India's largest bloc of voters: the aspirational underprivileged.
Programmes like the National Rural Employment Guarantee scheme and farmer loan waivers were taken seriously by those who mattered. The Aam Aadmi wasn’t a concern for the powers that be only during elections; he was part of the India Picture in between elections too.
The Aam Aadmi is our Man of the Year because his concerns have become India’s concerns — whether they are rising food prices that hurt him the most, Maoist violence in which he is the prime target, justice that he is forever denied, and underdevelopment of which he is the victim.
The Aam Aadmi is our Man of the Year also because he’s stopped taking things for granted and now demands our attention. And, in 2009, he definitely got it.
The year the aam aadmi left the left behind
Remember those hectic days before July 2008? News from the capital’s political moshpit was pretty much divvied up between the CPI(M)’s Prakash Karat and the CPI's D. Raja. While the BJP was still officially the main Opposition party at the Centre, the UPA’s communist supporters from outside were the real Opposition making the government forever quake under their finger-wag. Even Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called this powerful lobby comprising 59 MPs his “conscience keeper”.
They found their voice and their power by being accepted as the only ‘true custodians’ of the Aam Aadmi’s faith. If every other political party, according to the Left, wanted to drive the Aam Aadmi’s nose into the ground by cutting deals with capitalist-corporate fat cats, the communists, we were constantly told, were the only ones to look out for India’s teeming dispossessed and underclass.
But while the Left raged on, they didn’t provide much real solace to the Aam Aadmi. It was the Congress that was coming up with actual schemes to alleviate his condition.
Somewhere between July 2008 when the Left withdrew support to the UPA and May 2009 when the Lok Sabha results came out, something important happened: the Aam Aadmi began to stop believing in the Left. He decided to give the Congress-led UPA II a chance to prove its credentials.
