I know that home sweet home minister P Chidambaram is considered by far too many people than I have fingers in my neighbourhood to be the embodiment of pure evil. I too, have taken potshots at him in the past and not just for cathartic reasons that make me feel like a good person. But the Sith Lord in his veshti is dead right this time.

At a media briefing on the UPA’s achievement’s on Tuesday the former (and future?) finance minister pointed out that our middle class is one helluva whinging, whiney lot. And the middle class, right on cue, are whining about been called whiners again.

At the cost of giving off Marie Antoinette-like fumes, Chidambaram loudly wondered why India’s urban middle class “can buy a bottle of mineral water for Rs 15 and ice cream for Rs 20” (personally, I love the Mother Dairy butterscotch cone that comes at Rs 30 a pop) and yet makes “so much noise about price rise”. He was focusing on the usual rattling of pitchforks by our city-slicker villagers over the steady rise in the price of food products and fuel.

In political terms, Chidambaram’s ‘if-icecream-why-not-potatoes?’ statement is what Japanese writer Yukio Mishima would have called seppuku. For such comments do amount to ritual disembowelment in these days when politics – of the UPA, of the NDA and of every other variety of capital letterings – has turned the aam admi into a virginal figure to be feted for ceremonial worship. That the same lot are led on the conveyor belt of perpetual elections to the sacrificial altar of having to make do with an absentee Mother Goddess State is India’s worst-kept Brahminical secret, of course.

But the ever-garlanded aam aadmi adorned and adored on the satsang stage – the object of worship of the government, of the opposition and, most delightfully of all, of the aam admi himself – isn’t the middle class whingers that Chidambaram is talking about. He means the middle-class and above folks like you and me.

The aam admi is the Everyman from the sub-middle class, not necessarily wallowing in poverty but lining up in cities or in villages to collect water, with children who are first generation high school-goers, working regular low-income jobs with low security. They are essentially the unorganised service sector that forms your (middle-class and beyond) link to the world of the sub-middle class (drivers, maids, local veggie-sellers, mistris, etc).

Price rise does affect this sub-middle class the most. But their usual response to a government-engineered squeeze is a stoic attempt to earn more – usually by working longer hours or taking on additional jobs or, with the right opportunities existing, by switching to more lucrative jobs requiring different skill sets (something unthinkable for their parents). Their anger – the sub-middle class and those in poverty don’t have the luxury of whining unless someone whines for them – is more directed towards the abdication of the State that leaves them tired in body and soul.

The problem that Chidambaram faces from the ice-cream-lickers lies in the fact that the term ‘middle class’ is used not only for RK Laxman’s tiffin-carrier lunch-eating, post-retirement Common Man whose values are still sub-middle class – despite being a Times Of India reader – but also for his grand-daughter, the ever-adaptive Amul girl, who earns more, spends more and is not startled by all the change that happens every day around her. She’s not rich, but she certainly can afford a regular ice cream and would, when at least travelling, pick up mineral water instead of filling water from home.

And it is this bunch that can afford a rise in petrol and food prices that hate petrol and food prices the most. It is the very thought of things getting more expensive that rile them/us the most.

Former West Bengal chief minister and CPI(M) leader Jyoti Basu, an aristocratic leader of the subalterns if there was one, tells us in his memoir, Jotho Dur Money Porey (As Far As I Remember), of how in July 1953, the then British Tram Company, with the approval of the Congress government, decided to increase tram fares by one paise in Calcutta. Trams in Calcutta were then used by the middle class as well as the sub-middle class. A ticket for travelling on the first class carriage in the front, with fans and cushioned seats, would cost one or two paise more than that for second-class travel (no fans and hard wooden seats).

To make second-class travel closer to the first class experience by the inclusion of fans, the one paise hike had been announced. Basu would write much later with utter candour how the Left parties launched a major and indefinite agitation against the price hike that lasted for a month. “The British Tram Company had made enough profits but had not done anything to improve the amenities for the commuters,” writes Basu. “The call that went out (from the oppositional Left parties) to the people was simple: ‘Do not pay the new fares but ride the trams anyway.’… When the commuters refused to pay the new fares, the conductors simply did not give them the tickets. It was a perfect two-way traffic.”

You don’t have to be a capitalist pig to realise that the only terminus Calcutta’s trams were headed for since then was utilitarian death. It’s a glass of stiff irony on the rocks that it was earlier this month, that for the first time in 112 years of its existence that whatever number of trams are around in Calcutta will ply with only one tram class and one fare. And the Mamata Banerjee government has raised the base second-class fare by a whopping 50 paise – from Rs 3.50 to Rs 4 – in stealth without anyone going utterly berserk about the hike.

Chidambaram – or his government – doesn’t have the advantage of slipping in a price hike when no one’s looking (or, for that matter, gone off buying food or fuel the way people in Calcutta have dropped off the tram). His only chance at being understood is if ice-cream and mineral water companies decide to form a cartel and jack up prices so high – which as private cooperatives and companies they can jolly well do – that they become more far more expensive than fuel and every foodstuff going.

Then, and only then, will the poor dearie, Indian middle class not get apoplectic when being forced to shell out some more shekels to make the rest of India, starting with the sub-middle class, be able to one day afford things, Mother Dairy butterscotch cone included.

Image Source: [http://www.flickr.com/photos/mynameisharsha/4901759286/]