To nurse an injured man only to have your media team release a video of it is little more than politicians using the poor as part of set design
Hema Malini
After Hema Malini had filed her nomination for office from Mathura, the BJP politician dropped images of her campaign run on social media - the 70-year-old's Twitter handle is, well, age defyingly @dreamgirlhema.
In a crisp gold and white sari she appeared to be harvesting crops with impoverished, perspiring villagers in the fields. No wonder social media tore into her bombastic, exorbitant arrival via helicopter into Uttar Pradesh where not only did she refuse to alight the car assigned to her on her arrival, she also insisted on a jeep to take her around. Her absurd campaign tricks - riding a tractor or logging firewood on her head - came under fire for their allusions to false modesty. After all, Malini is not a real, working farmer who struggles with bank loans, depleting water tables and an unreliable monsoon - since 2013, over 13,000 farmers have committed suicide each year.
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And Malini is certainly not an agrarian worker, like the woman she posed bearing kindling - according to a report from the Brookings Institution 70.6 million Indians continue to live in 'extreme poverty'. If Malini wanted as much to vaguely register on the authenticity graph then she should conduct her ablutions in the open, like so many members of her constituency. According to WaterAid India, 44 per cent of India still defecates in the open (government statistics are significantly lower).
But she might be getting her cues from her seniors. In his appropriation of the appellation 'chowkidaar', Narendra Modi implies that his party and its ministers will keep tabs on corruption, prevent the movement of black money in our economy, and so forth. But the usage of the title is forced, artificial, juvenile and misleading - and attractive to the sort of superstitious electorate that believes demonetisation had been 'a good thing even if it did not work'.
Modi emerges from a private plane, dons bespoke monogrammed suits and ritual fasts - no one would remind him that not a single guard in India would willingly forgo a meal unless they had the private consolation of knowing their larder was not really empty. Push comes to shove, private jet chowikdaars can always order in silver salvers of dhokla. If the reverse were to happen - if the chowkidars of India took on titles of ministers and diplomats it would simply not pass muster with the political consciousness that remains stoically class adherent - let's face it, #MeinbhiPM is not going to trend anytime soon. In a passionate bid to appear 'regular' - his old chaiwallah rhetoric - Narendra Modi, the anti-dynast, proves that worse than the congenital dispensations of dynasty are the blinding forces of absolute power. It is precisely this psychological blinding that allows Malini to pose with a village worker, like fashion magazines once used tribals as decorative mannequins for handbag spreads.
Malini's theatrics found a visual counterpoint in a video of Congress President Rahul Gandhi and his sister, Priyanka, accompanying an injured journalist to an ambulance. The Gandhi siblings enjoyed an optic win of getting down and dirty with the masses as well as seen to be personally attending to a crisis. Gandhi's grandmother, Indira Gandhi had won her own election campaign on the premise of Garibi Hatao. While this promise remains unfulfilled four decades after it had been originally made, our politicians continue to keep the poor as part of an elaborate set design. Gandhi was seen dabbing an injured man's forehead in Delhi a few days ago; this 'aid worker' video was released not by a bystander but a member of his team. In short: hang on to the garib, never mind the garibi.
Between 1998 and 2000, American writer Barbara Ehrenreich went undercover and worked at Wal-Mart, as a waitress, and as a maid. In the resultant book Nickel and Dimed she documented her gruelling struggle of serving at low wage jobs in three different cities. This first person account was criticised by some who believed that Ehrenreich could easily retreat to her job and home, while this was simply not a possibility for the people her book claimed to represent. But Ehrenreich was impersonating the poor in order to reveal their poverty (and not mock it or to advance her office). Critiquing her work as exploitative is unfair as it assumes that to extend sympathy one must belong to the same socio-economic structure as the sympathised. This is patently not the case, for even injustices we do not know fully understand, we can empathise with entirely.
How is Barbara Ehrenreich's illuminating book endeavour different from Hema Malini's insensitive campaign gig or Rahul Gandhi's 'good guy' interventions? A literary social experiment that allows readers to experience the profound, debilitating struggle of another life - the anxiety of being measured up only as labour; the panic of being circled out as easily replaceable - serves the integrity of her book's intention (which had been to spell out the economic disparities in America). But politicians such as Hema Malini violently insult the indigent with fraudulent campaign promises and offend India's middle class consciousness with theatrics devised for media attention. As we go to the polls, politicians satirising the poor, like performance art for press, like a bunch of discount Asian Marie Antoinettes, will be called out as utterly phony - and grossly, unforgivably inhumane.
The writer's latest book is The Rabbit and the Squirrel: A Love Story About Friendship
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