CHEAP GAS.(The Talk of the Town)(Inder Parmar protests prices of Getty-Lukoil)

Late this spring, as gas prices reached record highs and the Bush and Kerry campaigns jostled over which candidate was more pump-friendly, a Queens man named Inder Parmar began selling gas at about thirty cents below the market rate. By his reckoning, the big oil companies charge too much. "They should not be ripping off the American public like they are," he explained one day at his gas station, in Long Island City. "They are taking advantage of people's anxiety about the war."

Parmar, who immigrated to the United States from India twenty-five years ago, has spent the past couple of years acting as a kind of one-man insurrectionary force against Big petroleum, a Punjabi combo of Robin Hood, Thomas Paine, and Al Goldstein. He is forty-four and has a fleshy, boyish face and a penchant for corny cashier humor--for example, he likes to ask gray-bearded bikers for i.d. before selling them beer. As he spoke, a steady line of vehicles, mostly taxis and town cars, pulled up to the pumps out front. Parmar drove a taxi for five years before he went into the gas business, in 1989, and his station offers the sort of amenities that cabbies like: cheap gas, free coffee, unlocked bathrooms. It is also covered with signs. One reads "Regular Gas $1.89 Vote for Kerry." Another says:

Getty-Lukoil, "Russian Tycoon", Supported by President Bush & Putin, The Sweatshops of America

Armed with these slogans, a fax machine behind the deli counter, and a well-stoked sense of outrage, Parmar has been waging a guerrilla campaign against Getty, from whom he has been leasing his station. Getty franchise signs still mark the premises, but he has covered them with blue plastic tarps. His falling out with the company dates to 2002, after Getty was acquired by the Russian oil conglomerate Lukoil, and for Parmar the feud has the sting of a love affair gone sour. In the early years, his relations with his landlord were amiable enough, but, once Lukoil took over Getty, he says, his rent was raised, which squeezed his operating margin to the point where it was nearly impossible for him to earn a living. "They make sixty cents a gallon," Parmar claimed. "They give their dealers only three or four cents a gallon."

In June of last year, Parmar formed a lobbying association of fellow Getty-station operators--many of them from India, Pakistan, and the Middle East--who felt aggrieved under the new regime. The group convened over curry at a Flushing banquet hall and delegated their newly appointed ...