Beyond image management
If it wants to fix its image, the Centre must start addressing the real issues
For any government, public communication is an important tool — to outline policies and actions, keep citizens informed, and provide its side of the story in public conversations. In a democracy, political parties running a government have an added incentive to aggressively communicate — for this is tied to shaping the public narrative and determining electoral outcomes. And, therefore, it is not wrong for any government to have internal deliberations on how best to engage with citizens. All regimes do it, and some are more successful than others.
But the focus on controlling the narrative should neither be excessive nor distract the government from what should be its core job. In the middle of the most severe emergency India has ever seen, around 300 officials of the central government, as reported by this newspaper on Wednesday, were pulled in for a workshop on effective communication. The aim was to help create a “positive image” of the government, “manage perceptions through effectively highlighting positive stories and achievements”, and portray the government as “sensitive, bold, quick, responsive, hardworking etc”. The meeting may have been routine, but its singular focus was on projecting the right narrative — something also reflected in the constitution of a group of ministers last year at a time when India was battling the first wave and Chinese incursions (the story about this committee and its suggestions was first broken by this newspaper).
The easiest and best way to fix a message is to fix the product. And at the moment, the lived experiences of Indian citizens — desperately pleading for oxygen cylinders and hospital beds, or struggling to get vaccinated — is so much at variance with official claims that the message won’t work. This also ends up putting the government in a box. Public communication during a pandemic must focus only on healthrelated issues, not how to make the government look good. It isn’t just the Centre; some states are equally focused on the narrative. This is not the time for narrative management. Accelerate the vaccine drive, get the second wave of the pandemic under some control, and perceptions will automatically improve.