'Slow Poisoning': Kharge Slams Centre Over Relentless Fuel Price Hikes

Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge has launched a sharp attack on the Narendra Modi government over a fresh wave of fuel price increases, framing the relentless, incremental hikes as a form of slow poisoning of the common man's budget — each individual rise small enough to escape outrage on any single day, but cumulatively devastating.

The latest salvo came after petrol and diesel prices were raised for the fourth time in less than a fortnight. Rates went up by Rs 3 per litre each on May 15, followed by another 90-paise increase on May 19, before the most recent revision tipped the count over. "The Daily Assault of FUEL LOOT is not over yet!" Kharge wrote in a post on X, casting the pattern not as routine market adjustment but as a deliberate, recurring extraction from ordinary households.

The numbers behind the charge

Kharge's central accusation is financial. He claimed that over the past 12 years, the government has collected — or, in his framing, "looted" — roughly Rs 42 lakh crore through fuel, a figure he broke down to nearly Rs 1,000 per day for the period. Every hike, he argued, is another blow to household budgets that ripples outward across the entire economy, from transportation to food to everyday essentials. From farmers to MSMEs, he said, every strata of society ends up bearing the brunt.

He also pointed to who, in his view, is on the receiving end of the windfall. Following the most recent hike, the shares of state-run oil marketing companies climbed — HPCL by 5.8 per cent, BPCL by 4.44 per cent and IOC by 3.90 per cent. "Profit over People is BJP's DNA!" Kharge wrote, asking pointedly who exactly was benefiting from what he called a daily robbery.

The crude oil paradox

The most analytically pointed part of his attack rests on a comparison of then and now. On May 26 — exactly twelve years after Modi assumed office — Kharge cited figures attributed to an official Press Information Bureau statement. In May 2014, he noted, Indian-basket crude stood at around USD 108 per barrel, and petrol retailed at Rs 71.51 a litre with diesel at Rs 56.71. Today, crude is trading below USD 99 a barrel, yet petrol has climbed to Rs 102.12 and diesel to Rs 95.20.

Put differently, he argued, crude has become cheaper while petrol has grown roughly 42.8 per cent more expensive and diesel about 67.9 per cent costlier. Kharge summed it up with a Hindi idiom — "Hath kangan ko arsi kya, padhe likhe ko farsi kya" — the rough equivalent of "the evidence speaks for itself." His question was deliberately simple: when the global input has gotten cheaper, why has the price at the pump gone up, and why is there no relief for the public?

The other side of the pump

The government's defence of fuel pricing has been consistent across the years, and it is worth setting alongside the opposition's charge. Ministers have repeatedly argued that taxes on petrol and diesel fund welfare and infrastructure — everything from free foodgrain to subsidised cooking gas to public health spending — and that the revenue underwrites schemes the same households ultimately benefit from.

There is also a structural point. Retail fuel prices in India are not set by a single political decision but revised by oil marketing companies, in principle tracking a rolling average of international benchmark prices and the rupee-dollar exchange rate. A weaker rupee can offset cheaper crude. On top of that sits a layer of state-level value-added tax, which is why a litre of petrol costs noticeably more in one state than another. The Centre has, so far, declined the opposition's standing demand to cut excise duty to ease the burden — a refusal that keeps the political temperature high.

A familiar battleground

For Congress, fuel has long been fertile political ground. The party has built protests, parliamentary disruptions and entire campaigns around the price of petrol and diesel, and the "common man versus profiteering government" framing is one it returns to whenever pump prices spike. The strength of the argument has always lain in its immediacy — fuel cost is one of the few macroeconomic numbers that every voter checks for themselves, every week, at the same petrol pump.

That is precisely what makes the "slow poisoning" metaphor potent. A single 90-paise hike rarely makes the front page. Four hikes in twelve days, stacked on top of a decade of accumulated increases, tell a different story — one of a burden that compounds quietly until it is impossible to ignore.

The bottom line

Strip away the rhetoric on both sides and the core tension is real: global crude has softened, but Indian pump prices have not followed it down, because the gap is absorbed by taxation, currency movement and company margins. The government calls this prudent fiscal management that funds public goods. The opposition calls it profiteering dressed up as policy.

With no rollback on the table and fuel rates still inching upward, the issue is unlikely to leave the headlines — or the household budget — anytime soon.