Nobody's Vote
Anand logs every tankful with a pencil in a diary just like his father kept before him, so he is the one man at the pump who knows his mileage has quietly collapsed. The fuel changed. Nobody told him, nobody asked him, and nobody who did it will answer him. He is the taxpayer with no political home.
MIDDLE CLASSECONOMYPOLICYPOLITICSPOLITICAL ECONOMYDEMOCRACYINDIAGOVERNANCEELECTIONSETHANOLENERGYE20
Anand fills his own tank. He could send the office driver, there is one, but on a Sunday morning, he loves to take the car out himself, before the heat comes up, and he likes to stand there while it fills, enjoying the strong scent of petrol like many of us, watching the numbers turn on the pump.
He drives a Honda City he bought in 2016 and has never missed a service on. There is a diary in the glovebox, a thin school notebook gone soft at the corners, and every time he fills the tank, he writes down the date, the litres, and the odometer reading. He works out the mileage in the margin, using a small blunt Nataraj pencil. His father maintained exactly this type of diary for a Bajaj scooter for thirty years, and Anand does not even remember when he decided to carry on the habit. He just has it.
So he is the one man at that pump who knows, as a fact and not a feeling, that his car has been getting worse.
A year ago, the notebook said a little over fourteen in the city. Now, on a good week, it shows nine, and on a bad one, less. He changed the air filter, thinking it was that. It wasn't. He checked the tyre pressures, kept a lighter foot for a month, and filled only from the same two pumps near his house. The number sat where it was, five kilometres a litre below where it used to live, and would not come back up.
It took him a while to work out that the fuel had changed, and that no one had told him.
The petrol going into his tank is not the petrol he learnt to drive on. It is a fifth ethanol now, an alcohol made mostly from sugarcane and, increasingly, from maize. E20, a small sticker on the dispenser says, if it says anything at all. Ethanol carries less energy than petrol, litre for litre, so a full tank takes you less far. On a new car built for the blend, the loss is small enough to argue about. On a nine-year-old car, there is nothing to argue about. It is in the notebook, in pencil, five kilometres a litre, gone.
Nobody asked Anand. There was no letter, no notice he could not miss, no moment when someone said, "From next month, your fuel changes, and here is what it will do to your car." The blend arrived the way the weather arrives. One year his tank carried him a certain distance, and the next year it carried him a good deal less far, and the difference is his to keep, without any relief in the price he pays.
That is the part he circles back to. His mileage moved down. The price did not. In fact, it kept climbing.
He is not a foolish man, and he has read enough to know why the ethanol is there, and most of the reasons are good ones. The country buys almost all its oil from abroad and pays for it in dollars it would rather hold on to. Every litre of ethanol blended in is a litre of crude not bought, and across a whole country, that adds up to a genuinely large number, real money, real security, fewer tankers through the Strait of Hormuz. The alcohol comes from farmers, or from what farmers grow, and a cane grower with a guaranteed buyer is a man who sleeps a little better. There is even an argument, a contested one, about cleaner air.
Anand can hold all of that. He would call himself a reasonable man, and he is one. If someone from the government had sat across the table from him and said, look, Anand, we need you to carry a small loss so the country imports less oil and the cane farmer gets his buyer, he thinks he might have said yes, just like he did by giving up his cooking gas subsidy. He is patriotic in the ordinary, unshowy way of people who pay their taxes and stand for the anthem and mean it.
But nobody sat across from him. That is the whole of it. The decision was taken, the blend went into the ground tanks, the saving went off somewhere up the line, and the cost came quietly to rest in his fuel tank, and at no stage in that chain was he a person to be spoken to. He was a surface for the policy to settle on.
And the savings never reached him either. Ethanol is cheaper than the petrol it displaces. The oil companies blend it and save. The country imports less and saves. Somewhere in there is a margin, and none of it comes back to Anand as a smaller number on the pump. He carries the cost of the change and sees none of its benefits in his own hands. And the car itself has begun to ask for more than it used to. A perished fuel line, a sensor that sulks, more Sundays lost to the service station than in all the years before, and the mechanic, wiping his hands, saying the word ethanol now without being asked.
I have spent years watching who gets listened to in this country and who does not, and what Anand's notebook points to is the question I keep coming back to. Why him? Why is it so safe to move a cost onto him, and close to unthinkable to move one onto almost anyone else?
Because Anand is not a bloc, he is just a man with a car and an opinion, and there are many millions like him, and that is exactly the weakness: they are millions of separate men, not one body. The cane farmer is a bloc. He has a union, a season, a mandi, a lobby, a district that voted a certain way last time and might vote another way next time, and a minister who can count him on his fingers. The woman with the monthly transfer is a bloc, courted, counted, named inside a scheme. Anand belongs to nothing that votes together. He is just a row in a survey, not a vote bank, and no government has ever fallen because the men who log their mileage in a notebook were annoyed.
He has a voice, of course. He has more voice than he has ever had in history. He can open his phone tonight and find ten thousand men exactly like him, angry about the same thing, passing around the same graph about calorific value, tagging the same ministries, and by morning it might be trending. And nothing will happen. This is the quiet joke of the furious middle-class man online, and I say it as someone who has watched rooms decide what to ignore: he mistakes volume for weight. He can make a hashtag move. He cannot make a seat move. The people whose job it is to read these things read the trend, sleep over it, and go back to counting the voters who move together. The noise is loud and weightless, and everyone in the business knows it, and Anand half-knows it too, which is why the anger in him has begun to go stale rather than sharp.
And on the one occasion the noise did climb high enough to be heard, the men who built the policy did not reach for the notebook. They reached for the microphone. The mileage drop was negligible, they explained, a per cent or two at most, and any figure larger than that was misinformation spread by people who did not understand their own engines or how mileage has to be calculated, or by agenda-driven paid trolls funded by anti-national forces who can't fathom India's progress. The programme was a triumph, its target met years ahead of schedule, a gift to the farmer and a stroke struck for the nation, and the citizen going on about his fuel bill was, at best, a man who needed the achievement explained to him a little more slowly. Then they went back to the ribbon and the round crore of rupees that had been saved. Nobody drove Anand's car. Nobody opened his diary. The figure they called misinformation was sitting inside it, in pencil, filled in fortnight after fortnight by a man who has never in his life exaggerated anything.
The real trouble is that he has no political home. One side looks at him and sees a man with a car and an air conditioner grumbling while the poor go without, and feels no need to defend him. The other side looks at him and sees a vote it already owns, because where is he going to go, and feels no need to court him. He is safe to overlook from one direction and safe to take for granted from the other. Nobody has to win him. So nobody spends anything on him, and the small costs, the quiet ones, the ones that will never make a woman weep on the evening news, get laid on him first, because he is the one who will not make anybody pay for laying them there.
And the maddening part, the part he cannot even properly rage about, is that the policy is mostly right. The oil should be imported less. The cane grower should have his buyer. Anand could carry the loss, even at this size, without his life bending out of shape, and some part of him knows it, which is why he feels faintly ashamed of minding at all. But that shame is the trick of the thing. The question was never whether he could afford it. It was whether anyone thought his affording it needed asking, and nobody did. A man being able to bear a cost is not the same as a government being right to lay it on him without a word. What is small here is not the money. It is him.
The tank is full. The pump clicks off on a round figure because Anand always asks for a round figure; it keeps the notebook tidy. He writes down the date, the litres, the odometer reading. He will do the mileage later, at home, in pencil, and it will come out lower than last year, and there will be nothing in the notebook, or anywhere else he can reach, to do about it.
He gets in, and the car starts the first time, the way it always has, and he drives home through the Sunday quiet. He does not go online about it today. He has been online about it before.