Pakoda is the new chai. The political metaphor for 2019
The Congress has learnt some of the tricks of the trade that Modi used to demolish the party
Pakoda is the new chai. If being a tea vendor’s son was Narendra Modi’s biographical challenge to clubby elitism in 2014, batterfried besan is on its way to becoming the political metaphor for 2019. Pakoda politics has gone from simmer to boil after the Prime Minister (in response to a question on jobs) said that a man selling fritters on the street and taking home ₹200 a day must also be regarded as gainfully employed.
If Chai Pe Charcha was the BJP’s version of Know Your Neta in 2014; get set for Pakoda Aur Pradhanmantri-styled earthy people-topeople interactions in the build up to the next election. With one difference; this time the Opposition may try and appropriate the BJP’s political symbolism.
In 2014, the BJP could not have asked for a better gift than Mani Shankar Aiyar’s derisive comment about Modi as ‘chaiwallah’. The snobbery only reinforced Modi’s positioning as the unvarnished outsider to a corroded and entitled Delhi echo chamber. The BJP argues that former finance minister P Chidambaram has already delivered the ‘Mani Moment’ of the campaign by classifying the humble pakoda seller as technically jobless and for tauntingly asking the government if, next, it would call begging a form of employment.
In his inaugural Parliament speech, BJP president Amit Shah seized the ‘pakoda’ moment to emphasise the BJP as the party that gave dignity to the ordinary, hard working and aspirational Indian. The BJP points to the 100 million people who have been given loans to set up businesses, including 30 million who have been given loans by banks for the first time. Chidambaram has been cast in the role of the disconnected elitist who disparaged the industrious, self-respecting Indian.
But 2019 may be different from 2014 — and its subsequent state elections — in one fundamental way; a suddenly re-energised Congress has learnt some of the tricks of the trade that Modi used to demolish the party.
For one, the party has understood that politics — much like news media — has become all about drama over detail and signalling over substance. If a few years ago it watched agog as Modi, the Master of the Message grabbed the headlines, now it has internalised that lesson. The once-distant Rahul Gandhi, who used to have contempt for mainstream media, has today worked out the power of the photo-op, the advantage of snide and provocative humour and the handy use of identifiable, if oversimplified pictograms and emblems.
And so it is, with the lowly pakoda. The Opposition has shown an appetite for using Modi’s own playbook to cook up a storm. There is data of course that helps. In 2017, a report by the government’s think-tank, Niti Aayog, focused on the challenges of not unemployment, but underemployment — wherein “workforce are employed but they are overwhelmingly stuck in low productivity, low wage jobs.”
According to the fifth Annual Employment-Unemployment Survey in 2015-16, 85% of India’s workers earn up to or under just ₹10,000 a month. And then of course there is last year’s hard hit to the informal sector after demonetisation. But if all of this is too complex an argument to digest in election season, the menu has an easier option; ‘pakoda protests’ where names of BJP leaders have replaced the humdrum paneer and gobhi are being organised, tongue firmly-incheek. For a while they were merely playing breathless catch-up; but the ‘pakoda wars’ shows the Opposition may have learnt the victor’s old battle strategies.
If Modi’s acumen for technology gave him and the BJP the first-mover advantage on social media; the Congress has upped its digital game. If Modi was able to load his political gun with single-word bullets — ‘chaiwallah’, ‘neech’, ‘shehzada’ — the Opposition is learning to fire back with the same ammunition. If the BJP was able to mock the Congress for its religious and cultural deracination, the Congress is publicly attempting a re-embrace of Hinduism. If the BJP first understood the potency of identity politics, regional Congressmen like Karnataka’s chief minister K Siddaramaiah have countered it by crafting their own assertive train of sub-nationalism.
In some ways, the pakoda has become the perfect allegory for the next electoral faceoff. Will Modi self-reference it to underline his own humble beginnings in contrast to Gandhi’s? And can that recipe work again? Or does it symbolise an India Shining stumble of the sort Atal Bihari Vajpayee made when he called for an early election?
Either way, be warned — before you fry pakodas, you have to keep your oil on high heat. Election season is here and its ugly vitriol will most likely scald all sides.