Who is the Aam Aadmi? A couple of years ago, my then four-year-old daughter asked me, “What are all these tiny shoes doing here?” She was pointing to the mountain of shoes in glass cases. There were nearly 80,000 pairs, including 8,000 that belonged to children. We were at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Poland, at the site of the deadliest concentration camp of Nazi Germany. I pretended not to hear her question and looked away. I did not tell her that it was people — common people like us, aam aadmi, if you will — who manned the camps; that it was common people who sent other people to gas chambers; that it was the people who elected Adolf Hitler to power. It was ordinary people who eliminated nearly one million of their countrymen in Rwanda. And gathered in Naroda Patiya to loot, rape and burn their own neighbours. The aam aadmi has risen. And we must celebrate that. But what do we mean by the aam aadmi? Does it include people who live in a 27-floor mansion surrounded by other people who live in slums? The task of defining what is common and ordinary confronts us. What classes and what standards of living are excluded from the definition of ‘common’? Even if we empirically account for that, there will still remain moral and ethical questions about what values commonness should imply. Because we have already seen what ordinary people are capable of doing to other ordinary people. We cannot wish away these questions by simply wearing the aam aadmi cap or chanting, “main bhi aam aadmi”. ‘The people’ cannot be a singular entity devoid of complexities and contradictions, or of class, gender, and ethnic divisions. If we do not recognise these divisions, and a democratic way to mediate these conflicts, democracy turns hollow. The rule by ‘the people’, as theorists Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argue, can become the rule of ‘the one’ over ‘the many’. This is the irony of the people as a collective turning authoritarian and dictatorial, capable of committing the worst atrocities....
Posted on: Sun, 26 Jan 2014 03:44:14 +0000
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