Shoot Me With A Slogun

If politics is in our blood, the slogan is the pulse. Its rhythms aren’t partisan : they create a community of words.

- Sunil Menon

IN 2014, after Narendra Modi had run off with his juggernaut of a victory, casting rival political actors into a kind of existential dread and plunging non-believers into stupefied silence, there was a joke that tried to lighten the gloom in some quarters. It’s a beguiling little sketch. On a grassy knoll somewhere in communist heaven, Charu Majumdar turns to Kanu Sanyal and Jangal Santhal and says ruefully, “Comrades, we missed a trick back in the Sixties. All we had to say was…Agli Baari naxalbari!” This comic inversion—with its wry echoes of the old crowd-rouser ‘Amar bari/Tomar bari/Naxalbari, Naxalbari’ (My house, your house, naxalbari’)—tells us something. Slogans speak, but sometimes they also seem to listen. Because they inhabit a shared territory. Of language and its mysterious ways. You and I may be on the opposite sides of a fence, but that fence runs across the same planet of words. And no repeal of a treaty, no Brexit, no Iron Curtain, no political splintering can ever fully debar words. They fly in and out like Siberian cranes, never trapped by the changing political maps down below. Because of them, we will always exist in a transaction of thoughts—for words have a Schengen visa.

It seems tricky to make a case for ‘ideas sans frontieres’ in times of bitter political divides, when we stand at the cusp of elections where words are mostly being hurled at each other like rocks. Also, when election slogans span a strange gamut—from an encapsulation of a people’s deepest political feelings to the anodyne lure of an advertisement catchline, a marketing tool (see