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At one point in his interview with Curly Tales, Rahul Gandhi realizes that he can’t be too blunt about his dislike of matar (pea) and kathol (jackfruit). He is quick to add a touch of tolerance: “But I will eat if I have to,” somehow signaling that even these unpreferred dishes should not be left out of the Bharat Jodo Yatra (BJY) experience. His appearance on the travel and food show hosted by the YouTuber is the latest in a series of his supposedly non-political, if not apolitical, interactions. In doing so, Rahul has tried to stay away from what is called “political talk” in the increasingly scattered and fuzzy world of the news media.
The existence and creation of a mass politician is also related to the politics of the non-political. This means that your dining table and other aspects of your personal space compete for projection with the polemics of predictable political positions. In most cases, political party leaders in India choose a mix of the two rather than treating them as competing options. And so, slice-of-life downloads of leaders in the public sphere have opened up new feel-good genres and agents of the know-your-leader relationship. “You have strange notions of publicity,” Jawaharlal Nehru was to say tersely to Kuhswant Singh, Press Officer (PRO) at the Indian High Commission in London. This was preceded by British newspapers who managed to publish photographs of India’s first Prime Minister and Lady Mountbatten having a quiet dinner in a Greek restaurant in Soho.
Although this would still be a discreet and guarded fortification for any media to infiltrate. It is unlikely that senior leaders today would be less outraged by such an invasion of privacy, but surely their idea of publicity has much more patience and benefit for the private.
One of the early drivers of political branding as a sort of curated “personal” self on social media involved Prime Minister Narendra Modi as the most prominent practitioner. However, the extent to which the personal intersects with the political messages and how the digital autobiography of parts fits into the persona and longer campaign for these leaders is debatable. This brought some new elements for both the chaotic media space and the political class to contend with in the short and long term.
First, the verbose and pixelated glimpse into the “personal side” of political leadership, as sporadically seen in the press or on television screens, has now found more immediate agents in the digital realm. It reconfigures the idea of publicity and image building when millions of phone screens use user-generated platforms. This suggests that over the past two decades, “You”, the subject and creator of such platforms, has become the center of online consumption. It also gave politicians a chance to bypass conventional media groups as well as digital media platforms.
One can, for example, see Rahul Gandhi relying on the Youtuber’s reach and his sprawling social media influence to answer non-political questions. Since the yatra itself is a long political dialogue played out under the glare of social media, Rahul realizes that taking on the usual political interviews runs the risk of turning the narrative into far-fetched platitudes. Instead, he’s tried to replace the tedium of the predictable with glimpses of immediate food on the plate. In some ways, it came up as an idea to perform in the middle of a reality show while on his BJY. In a different genre and on a more conventional platform, PM Modi chose to embark on a wild adventure with Bear Grylls on the Discovery Channel in 2019. This was barely a few months after India learned of his preference for eating mangoes in a televised tete-a- tete with actor Akshay Kumar.
Second, the political class has realized that it possesses the curiosity value usually associated with Bollywood celebrities. The “must know” factor about top leaders – their food preferences and the way they live in general – is no less than that of top movie and sports stars. Apart from being a public figure with an entirely different pursuit and convictions driven by public interest, the Indian politician today also feels their value as a celebrity interesting enough to be milked for eyeballs and column space.
Political stalwarts and their public relations management departments are now more alert to tap into this segment if the political projection can push through. More importantly, the political subtext in such interactions should not be missed, even if the conversation exudes the air of a casual stroll down private lanes. Narrating some of his nasty boarding school teachers, for example, Rahul Gandhi couldn’t help but wonder if they behaved that way because of his family’s pro-poor policies. The political signs of pro-poor ancestry could be seen in the memories of his school life.
Third, like most celebrities of the digital age, mainstream leaders have found even more reasons to show how they are more like you and me. Unfolding private lives under the glare of cameras and prying interviewers turned the aura of celebrity upside down. In the larger mass media period, which spanned almost the entire 20th century, people gravitated toward celebrities because they didn’t look like them. But as user-driven platforms upended media consumption patterns, celebrities were more eager to show how they really are just like you and me. In a democratic set-up, politicians have always had incentives to appear close, social media has now turned that incentive into a campaign imperative.
This places some clear demands on the non-political side of a politician’s personality, a significant part of the political class now recognizes this.
Even if the political value of non-political performance can vary greatly for different participants in the electoral battle, it gains popularity in the hard work of personal campaigns, which are aimed at cultivated charisma. In the process, it also finds new agents that are better suited for apolitical messages, bypassing media that identify with the news media. In unlocking their potential as a class of political celebrities, the personal will increasingly intersect with the wider arc of long political campaigns.
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