It Takes Enormous Acumen to Make a Sham Political Narrative Work

Doesn’t matter if the storyteller is an accused on bail, low on intellectual credibility, immature in behaviour and clown-like in public-conduct, RaGa could still pose to be doing ‘good’ without being ‘good.’

RaGa used a slogan, “chowkidaar chor hai,” and kept repeating it ad nauseum until the pitch and the frequency of his utterances started re-engineering narratives and characters to remove perceived inconsistencies, discomfort, distaste and the inappropriateness, focusing attention on sometimes highly imperfect humanity, making the audience beginning to believe that there ought to be some truth in the allegations, punching a massive hole in NaMo’s credibility.

The alignment RaGa created in the financial secrecy of the Rafael deal and the financial despair of Anil Ambani Group was fine bedrock to re-engineer the narratives and characters of NaMo and RaGa to make them more ‘correct, balanced, even, fair and ultimately inoffensive’ (sic) to the perception of “possibility of corruption.”

Bad is good, especially in storytelling. Most interesting stories in the world have God against Satan; Ram against Raavan; Yudhishtir against Duryodhan; Good against Bad. Bad provides friction. Discomfort and imperfection make for more interesting narratives. RaGa pitched himself as the ‘Bad’ against a ‘Good’ NaMo. People love a good “baddie.” Remember the Robin Hood stories. In fact, our waking dislike of goody-goodies mostly outweighs our dislike of baddies.

Then RaGa got down to ironing out the creases of our imperfect humanity, our need to swear and cuss, our sometimes sleepwalk stereotyping; our baseness, old prejudices and new loathing; our lazy referencing, erasing all of that made no sense to many.

The baddie was our best bit in an election discourse which was devoid of any themes or issues. The mad, bad and dangerous to know RaGa was the greatest unrealised character in the whole idea. In fact, in true megalomaniac, socio-psychopathic, fully paid up, narcissistic fashion, it was turning out to be all about him. RaGa was the flame that the moths would fly to. RaGa in all his camp, scratchy, self-obsessed, slightly savant, childish, distracted, brutal and nihilistic ugliness was the most beautiful thing that we had in this election.

But that is where RaGa, whom some call as “Pappu” turned out to be a real “Pappu.” He was smart in building the false narrative but he could not sustain it to its conclusion. His falsehood came to the fore through his goof-up with the Supreme Court. The moment he tried to infer that the virtuous court was an endorser of his narrative, the narrative fell apart. If there was a chance to recover, his “Pappu” interview with the NDTV and India-Today killed it. Having confessed of his game plan to destroy the popularity of “Good,” the traction, which his narrative was getting, also blew apart.

We need the baddie to be the best character because, in most traditional storytelling, the baddie is usually us, at our ugly worst, unvarnished and heavily flawed; and the heroes are us, as we could be. The baddie is the measure by which we mark our hope, our optimism of what we could be and the journey to it. In all storytelling, the “Bad” is never an idiot; rather wise and intelligent; but these interviews pitched “Pappu” as real “Pappu- devoid of any wisdom.” 

Game over. Propaganda will fizzle out. “Baddie-the wise” is a winner not “Baddie-the Pappu.”

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