
A subaltern stasis was
developing towards the second half of the Sixties. Then, as now, wealth was
shunted up. While the government’s economic policies produced limited growth,
the political structures prevented fair distribution of even that growth.
The poor were reeling
under rising prices and prime minister Indira Gandhi knew it. She was also
aware of the Naxalite movement spreading across the country and the Left’s
ideological support. Her own situation was uncertain with the Congress
splitting in 1969. She became the leader of one group.
Mass leader that she
was and a mastermind at splitting the difference, she was clear that the crisis
could be overcome only by uplifting the poor. That was not easy as the
entrenched classes and castes at local and state levels pushed back against
her. In the 1971 election, her opposition came up with the slogan “Indira
Hatao,” (Remove Indira). She latched onto that.
With a simple but
brilliant rearrangement, Indira Gandhi refurbished it with “Garibi Hatao”
(Remove Poverty). Indeed, the complete text read, “Weh kehte hain Indira
Hatao. Indiraji kehti hain Garibi Hatao.” (They say Remove Indira, Indiraji
says Remove Poverty.) It left the choice to the voter.
The slogan resonated
with people from all walks of life, especially the weak and poor, helped her
talk around and over moribund interests, effectively bypassing them, and
conveyed her simple concern for the people.
A slogan, according to the Oxford Dictionary, is
“a short and striking phrase used in advertising,” and “a motto associated with
a political party or movement or other group.” The American Heritage Dictionary
describes it as “a phrase expressing the aims or nature of an enterprise,
organisation, or candidate; a motto.” The word slogan comes from Gaelic term sluaghghairm—slaugh
(battle)+ghairm (cry or shout)—used by Scottish or Irish clans. It was
intended to shake the confidence of the opposing army by sheer lung power and
to fire up their own side. It seems to have been used, in a metaphorical sense,
in a political way in 1704.
Slogans are not meant to inform but to mobilise and engage the many. They are not ciphers, and reflect what a candidate or party is about. Successful ones have the alchemy of capturing the candidate, the mood of the people, and promise.
Election slogans have
been with us for a long time. They are an indispensable part of political
communication and art and rhetoric (and often propaganda). They convey a
feeling or an idea in a simply, easily memorised way, are catchy and persuade
the listener, are easy to recall and roll off the tongue, sing in the ear. They
most often call for action, rally troops to vote for the politician and the
minions who do their reciting. At their
best, they secure tent followers, ignite some hope in some floating and neutral
folk, and even build out to policy, as the Fifth Five Year Plan (1974-79) in
India showcased. Although the political
tumult in later years aborted the Plan, the Congress came back to power, and
launched the Sixth Five Year Plan, (1980-85) with the thrust of its slogan
“Garibi Hatao”. Born of a particular context, it remains one of the most
popular ones in India’s politics, despite its sketchy accomplishment as policy.
At worst, slogans just fade away.
Slogans are not meant
to inform but to mobilise and engage the many. They are not ciphers, and
reflect what a candidate or party is about. Successful ones have the alchemy of
capturing the candidate, the mood of the people, and promise.
They could even be
cultish, beyond redemption, sound narcissist and megalomaniacal at the same
time. To be fair, unless you’re a bit of both, you would not want to see yourself
on every flex board and in every advertisement, hear your name uttered every
time, going about setting things right—notionally, of course, and not
actually—especially in a country as desperate as ours.
As context changes, so
do slogans and persons. Before Indira Gandhi, Lal Bahadur Shastri inspired the
country with the slogan “Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan.”
India was at war with Pakistan in 1965. People were suffering with
shortages of food. In the worst of times, Shastri came up with the best of
slogans in India. It won the Congress the 1967 elections, and the slogan lasts
forever. The best of slogans never really go away.
Their resonance might
fade for some time but it more often than not resurfaces when it finds a
cultural resonance. Slogans often turn up in iterations, as in Vajpayee’s
retooling Shastri’s quote into “Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan, Jai Vigyan” after the
Pokhran nuclear test in 1998.
Slogans and persons
resonate best when they encapsulate and embody a particular context. Great
personalities, to paraphrase Sri Aurobindo, embody the zeitgeist—“the defining
spirit or mood of a particular period of history as shown by the ideas and
beliefs of the time”—and endure for long.
Sports, advertising,
and pop culture products and symbols use slogans to carve a niche in the mind
of the customer, player and fan. The American marketing author and professor
Philip Kotler defines brand positioning as “the act of designing the company’s
offering and image to occupy a distinctive place in the mind of the target market”. It
also shows how a particular brand is different from its competitors. To occupy
a niche, brands come up with slogans that often tap into the human desire for a
better life, a hope fulfilled by having the product, status gained a few notches
above the presently perceived miserable perch.
As such, companies or
brands may make the purpose, the expectation in explicit terms or in a
subliminal way. In America, Barack Obama’s slogans in 2008 “Yes we can” and
“Change we can believe in” captured the mood of the country so well that
they’re inspiring even outside their political context. Coming on the back of
George Bush’s administration, whose very touch lit fires everywhere around the
world, Obama’s slogans offered solace and hope, explicitly stating that it was
not out of reach, couched in the words “Change we can believe in.”
One of most direct
expressions for action comes from Nike’s “Just do it,” one of the greatest hits
in advertising history. It has, since 1988, inspired athletes and people in
armchairs. It is also exhortative in that it asks us to shed inhibitions and to
stop living in our own heads. Wear the shoes and run. As simple as that. As
invigorating as that. As freeing as that. Just do it.
Not all slogans are
direct, though. Some are even paradoxical at the outset. But they click with
people. In the book, Every Bite a Delight: And Other Slogans, a
collection of 5,000 memorable sayings from advertisements, public service and
political campaigns, by authors Laurence Urdang and others, it is mentioned
that the most revered and controversial quote in American sport—“Winning Isn’t
Everything. It’s the Only Thing”—is notorious. The book says the slogan’s
“assertion about the importance of winning has been touted as a basic tenet of
the American sports creed” and, at the same time, singled out as encapsulating
what is wrong with competitive sport, and those words, nevertheless, “grace the
walls of locker rooms, ignite pre-game pep talks and echo from the rafters of
banquet halls.”
It’s not that all
slogans are written in stone. In India’s collective memory, Jawaharlal Nehru’s
“Hindi-Chini Bhai-Bhai” remains painful. Border disputes with China eventually
led to war in 1962, and the slogan, if evoked, still rankles people.
Funny, rhyming,
alliterative slogans and rejoinders register with people. In the 2014
elections, BJP’s slogans “Abki Bar, Modi Sarkar” and “Congress-mukt Bharat”
paved the way for the party’s victory. They also pointed to the existential
drift and dread that came around the second term of Manmohan Singh. They,
however, got punctured when Rahul Gandhi later retorted with “Suit-Boot
Sarkar.”
Whatever we may feel
about Trump’s shenanigans, his slogan “Make America great again” tapped into
Americans’ perennial angst about their country being on the wrong track. (It’s
another matter that they eventually elected Trump.) His similar catch
phrases—“Build that wall,” “Lock her up,” “Drain the swamp,”—had terrific
resonance, encapsulating the rage, blooming misanthropy, and promise of some
cleansing. They carried simple, actionable verbs whereas Hillary Clinton’s
“Stronger together” was so weak that it was said that Bill Clinton fumbled it
in one of his speeches. In addition, Trump’s slogans are pithy, specific and
can be chanted and one chant could feed off the earlier one and build on it. At
the same time, Bernie Sander’s “Feel the Bern” took him a long distance during
the primaries. It’s not necessary that a slogan should be built on something
specific. The French who have high tolerance for abstraction (and also like
their perfumes,) had “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” that rang a bell across
the world.
The science of
resonance is tricky. You don’t know how a slogan, reflecting some fact, bombs.
Seeking re-election in 2004, on the back of a performing economy, BJP launched
“India Shining” campaign. It was met with Congress-led opposition’s “Aam Aadmi
Ko Kya Mila?” and BJP lost it.
Regional parties have
it hard. A backward region in a state may respond to a party’s slogan in a
different way than a better-off region. The slogan of a battle cry could work
better for people who’re at the receiving end of injustice and excruciating
inequality, while for people who are better off status quoist slogans could
work better. Classes and castes and demographics respond to slogans in
different ways. Diverse as India is, slogans in Hindi, may have little effect
in the south. The idiom may fall flat when translated into other languages.
Region-wise, Mamata
Banerjee’s catchphrase in 2011—“Ma, Maati, Manush”—unseated years of Communist
rule. It’s a wonder that communists who talk the talk of the common man, rake
up issues of everyday concerns regularly, who seem to be attuned to the strain
of life of most Indians are practically absent in the Hindi belt, and meow
their existence in other parts, even all the while discussing the constant
bugbear of capitalism. Is it that they are not able to wrap their heads around
a few words or in a catchphrase? Nobody knows.
In this year’s
election, BJP projects Modi as the doer in its slogan “Modi hai, mumkin hai.”
The Congress, with its “Ab Hoga Nyay,” seeks voters to lean towards it.
With an increasing
number of digital platforms, the last half of the decade saw wide avenues for
parties to engage with voters. A slogan that works well on the ground may not
work well in the digital world. Parties have given the go-by to a single slogan
they can ride on. Now they field multiple slogans, in new coinings and retorts.
The slogan is not a
final thing. All that a political candidate or party needs is your vote. It’s a
moot question how he or she gets you there. Are there differences in brains
that make you choose one over the other? Yes, say researchers from the
University of South Carolina. As a part of the emerging science of political
neuroscience, they studied the mirror neuron system of self-identified
Republicans and Democrats in the U.S. Mirror neurons light up when we empathise.
In a May 2017
interview with Fountain Ink, Urvakhsh M. Mehta, clinician-scientist and
Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the National Institute of Mental Health
and Neuroscience, (Nimhans), Bangaluru, explained that the mirror neuron system
operates everywhere, “From learning languages to empathising with others, from
understanding actions to imitative play, we all, including infants, use our
mirroring brain in our daily lives.”
The researchers report
that “choosing a candidate may depend largely on our biological make-up.” They
add that is “because the brains of self-identified Democrats and Republicans
are hard-wired differently and may be naturally inclined to hold varying, if
not opposing, perceptions and values.”
This study posits “a
strong link with broad social connectedness with Democrats, and a strong link
with tight social connectedness with Republicans.” Although the study was in an
American context, it’s not clear if it provides any hints in India or anywhere
else. However, it is possible to see a future where political messaging could be
directly targeted at voters, basing it on their biology.
Increasingly,
neuroscience is being deployed in advertising, in many other allied fields,
including political campaigns. In what advertisers call “consumer
neuroscience,” tools such as electroencephalogram (EEG), functional magnetic
resonance imaging (fMRI), and Steady State Topography (SST) to gain insights
about the workings of the brain. The science of neuromarketing as to how
messaging helps a brand or candidate is still sketchy. It has its own adherents
and opponents, with the former confident of planting a message in your
subconscious and the latter believing that the inner world of thought doesn’t
yet lend itself to subtle psychological manipulation. It’s an open secret that
retail store chains, investment banks, and whatsoever you engage with are
collecting information on the audience and analysing it, so that they can
access you at the personal level.
Profiles created from
online footprints are used regularly to influence customers and their preferences.
Most organisations, including political ones, have what is called predictive
analytics that predict future. Data mining, modelling, and other techniques
help analysts to predict the future and unknown events. In political parlance,
it could mean where a sympathiser or an opponent is, on what mechanisms could
be used to turn him or her around.
Memes take on a life
of their own, flourish online. Stick a person with a meme, and it survives, as
happened in the case Rahul Gandhi being called “Pappu.” In-jokes, in text or
image, create ripples, and die a fast death or survive longer.
It is possible that
slogan-building, helped by analytics, will reach people tailor-fit at their
personal or group level in the coming years more and more. Neuroscience or not,
one tagline captures us Indians best in our attitude: chalta hai. That’s
how language works. It gets itself said. So here is the tagline for our own
selves: who knows anything about anything.
A thing about democracy remains. As the journalist, satirist, essayist, and scholar, H. L. Mencken, put it, “democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance".