India's photoshopped politics sells false dreams
Politics today, many believe, is predominantly about perceptions now. That how good or bad a party or a candidate is, depends not so much on how good or bad they actually are, rather on how smartly and ostentatiously they are presented/ packaged through, what I would call, the "perception industry", of which media is a prominent part.
The electoral politics in India has always been about perceptions, albeit less visible before. Significantly, however, perception earlier had some merit, some substance and tangible real base. Lal Bhadur Shastri was perceived as honest and upright also because of his transparent public life; he had in fact resigned as railway minister following Ariyalur train accident in 1957. Gradually, as we know, train accidents became mere "technical" disasters and we lost that vintage sense of public morality amidst us.
Today, perhaps it would take just a few big, billboard pictures under floodlight with a catchy emotive appeal underlining it, to make a historysheeter look clean, glowing and benevolent. Unlike yesterday, today perception is instantly produced and easily manoeuvred, if you have money. A few planted stories of good deeds with the street urchins in a few prominent dailies and a few TV shows is all that it takes to make a murderer start looking more human.
Such is the power of perception industry.
There is distinct ascendance of the phenomenon of perception in our public life, from a mere factor to a burgeoning industry. How does one, in a gigantic and diverse country like India, form opinions either in favour or against this or that party or individual? My sense is that only a tiny segment usually gets to take an ideologically measured, reasoned and calculated decision when it comes to voting. This is not to say gullibility is entirely absent here.
That leaves a huge number of people up for grab by the enticing bandwagon of the perception industry. The ubiquity of the visual media in the nook and corner of the country has made this phenomenon of perception and its associated industries, the most powerful, and perhaps most decisive, in our democracy today.
Increased dominance of spin-doctors, professionals, media experts and of course a band of media-savvy, articulate and argumentative spokespersons in almost all the political outfits is emblematic of the rising significance of the perception industry. A cursory glance of the expenditure of various political parties on advertisement and media labs will bear testimony to this. Even a newbie and supposedly different AAP with its staggering budgetary allocation to advertisements and publicity point to the criticality of public perception phenomenon in politics today.
Bihar election, for instance, and its verdict though had its share of ideological underpinnings, but the brand that emerged truly victorious and which got a huge endorsement by the media was Prashant Kishor, the man Nitish Kumar was seen hugging and accompanying along as intimate shadow, post the election verdict. Interestingly, Prashant Kishor was the man who managed PM Modi's successful campaign in 2014. By 2015, he was managing and building Modi's nemesis.
Every political party today wants to associate with and hire him. If the news reports are to be believed, he is being invited by Captain Amrinder Singh from Punjab to Mamta Banerjee of West Bengal, for deliberation and prospective professional alliances before the state elections. One wonders what his own political ideology is. Or does he represent something larger, more serious and extraordinary amidst us, of the insularity of perception from ideology in our public life? Is it the beginning of an end of ideology in Indian political culture, where political parties will bid for supposedly ideology-neutral perception industry conglomerates?
Rise of perception industry in a democracy like India indicates decline in local, grassroot level, mass mobilisation channels such as trade unions, cooperatives and over all shrinking of the cultural space of political debates. It is reflective of increased individuation of our society and culture, culture that is being mediated largely through social media and the TV studio debates. Expectedly, changed environment suppresses local issues and drags the opinion space to a more abstract, a more global level, where beef and Pakistan become the main issues and the interests of the poor, marginal, hungry and deprived are put to backburner.
Grander meta-narratives at the centre stage suits the business of the perception industry more than dealing with thousands of or perhaps millions of messy micro issues. Secondly, meta-narratives have a pan-Indian reach and hence the slogans, catch lines, taglines and buzzwords that worked in one state can be applied at other places with a few alterations and in a lesser budget.
Understandably, the masses are made to believe that the local issues are less important than the larger meta-narratives like nationalism, religious identity and the diaspora. Legitimacy to and reliance on perception industry also implies increasing acceptance of the power of money, of all kinds, and undermining of the significance of grass root level political mobilisation strategies like nukkad naatak, local natya manch, natak mandali and other folk traditions, effectively used by various political parties in the past. These channels have made immense contribution in deepening our democracy.
Perception industry thus has the potential of reducing the people to mere pawns on the chessboard of larger politics.
That all the political parties, without exception, have fallen prey to this industry, is a clear sign of a tragic departure - towards a system which believes in spending more on the "representations" of its hungry citizens as shinning and feasting, rather than on elimination of poverty and malnutrition. Politics in India, or anywhere for that matter, should primarily be about people's empowerment and not for selling them false dreams.
Perception industry, sadly, does exactly that.