Arvind Kejriwal is the
only major politician in India to sport Western wear in public. What does this
tell us about his politics?
A couple of days back, Arvind Kejriwal released a video
titled “Samvaad - Arvind Kejriwal's message for all Indians”. Not having enough
money to advertise on mass media (a fact that Kejriwal mentions in the video
himself to gain sympathy) the Aam Aadmi Party is depending heavily on social
media to make its case and this video is part of that. The message delivered is standard and Kejriwal
dishes out much of what the AAP has espoused since it started, mainly an end to
top-down democracy and the cleansing of politics, especially with respect to
corruption and criminalisation. What I found particularly interesting, though,
is the way Kejriwal had dressed up it. He was sitting on a chair, had a neat
side-parting, rimless glasses and a copstach moustache. Close ups of his face
tell us that his moochh is turning grey and his chin sports
an untidy, day-old stubble. He is dressed in a striped, pastel-coloured, formal
button-up shirt with crumpled grey dress trousers. Notably, his shirt is untucked.
He isn’t wearing shoes or, for that matter, any footwear, adding to the
informal-yet-sincere tone of the message.
Amongst major politicians in the country (and yes, he is a
“major” politician now), Kejriwal’s style of dressing is fairly unique. In
politics, where symbolism is crucial, it might be instructive to see why this
is so.
Most other politicians, in public, wear what the rural
populace in their area does. Thus, Mamata sports a sari (suitably cheap and
crumpled to suit her populism) and most male politicians in Tamil Nadu wear a veshti
paired up with a shirt. Mulayam Singh Yadav, from the heartland, wears what
could be called the national dress of India: the dhoti-kurta. The leaders of
India’s two biggest parties, though, differ in this respect from their regional
counterparts: they both wear kurta-pajamas. The kurta pajama is, in terms of sheer
numbers, not really a very popular combination across rural or, for that
matter, even urban India. It does, though, have a certain pan-country appeal
which suits the agenda of the Big Two.
This insistence on indigenous apparel is fairly unique to
India, even controlling for size. China is a larger country (although we’re
doing our best to close the gap) but its politicians prefer plain old suits. In
fact, at summits like the G-20, you’ll find that our prime minster is the only
one not wearing a Western suit.
In India, maybe more than most other countries, clothing has
always carried a significant amount of political symbolism. When modern
politics first started out in the country, though, the Anglicised “microscopic
minority” that practised it, stuck to Western clothing. Two major Indian
politicians at the turn of the 19th century, Dadabhai Naoroji and Pherozeshah
Mehta both have impressive statues in Bombay which have them dressed in
trousers, button-up shirt and an overcoat (fairly unsuitable wear for a city as
humid as Bombay, it might be noted). Ditto with Motilal Nehru, most pictures showing
him in a three-piece suit as would befit one of Allahabad’s most successful
lawyers.
The sartorial stuffiness of Indian politics was thrown out
almost completely, though, with the induction of one Mohandas Gandhi. Gandhi,
as a lawyer in South Africa had naturally worn Western clothing. On his return
to India in 1915, though, he adopted in full measure the dress of the Indian kisan.
Pictures from his first mass movement, the Champaran Satyagraha show him
dressed in a dhoti-kurta. Later, he would dress “down” even further, moving
about mostly bare-chested or with a shawl draped around his shoulders, in the
common manner of the country.
There was a method, of course, to this abrupt change. Gandhi
wanted to, for the first time in India, make politics mass-based. This included
the use of vernaculars (Pradesh Congress Committees would use the region’s
language), recruiting large numbers by reducing membership fees (to a piddling
2 annas) and the use of religious symbolism (mostly Hindu but also Muslim) in
order to speak to the masses in tropes they would grasp easily. Gandhi was, of
course, far from being a peasant and was an upper-caste, foreign-educated
lawyer. The clothing was, therefore, part of his political symbolism to reach
out to the Indian masses; assure them that he was one of them.
Gandhi’s influence, like in so much else, was pervasive in
the matter of clothing. So much so that the Gandhian “look” became a sort of
uniform for the Indian politician. Today, of course, this get-up might have
lost much of the meaning it had when it was first bought in almost a hundred
years back. In fact, unintendedly, the impact might even be an adverse one: wearing
a white khadi kurta, once a sign of swadeshi, is one of the key constituents in
how most urbanites stereotype a “corrupt neta” today.
This uniformity in political attire might be one of the
primary reasons as to why Kejriwal has broken with the tradition of Gandhian
dressing and taken to Western clothes instead. As a person whose primary
branding is that of an “anti-politician”, this is an obvious way to
differentiate himself from the competition. If every other neta is wearing
dhotis or pajamas, he dons trousers. If everyone else wears bandhgalas or kurtas,
he sports a button-up shirt. So sharply does he stick out, that his clothing
actually came in for special comment on the occasion of Republic Day with the
media clicking their tongues at this “casual dressing”.
While being different obviously has its advantages for an
outsider like Kejriwal, this symbolism goes even further, speaking directly to Kejriwal’s
core support base. As Srinivasan Ramani shows in this well-argued piece in the EPW, there are two characteristics of the AAP support base. One, is that
it is mostly urban: the AAP did much better in the core parts of Delhi city as
compared to the more semi-urban area in the north-west of the state. The other is
that, overwhelmingly, its support base is drawn from the poor, mainly jhuggies
and slums populated by people working in the informal sector (migrant labour, domestic
help, auto drivers etc.).
This makes the AAP unique because it is the only major party
which does not have a primarily rural support base. Of course, the urban poor
do not wear dhotis, kurtas, veshtis or mundus. They wear trousers and shirts
(often untucked). With his sartorial symbolism, Kejriwal, like Gandhi a century
before him, is seeking to connect directly with his supporters.
And while the word “symbolism” might have a slightly
disparaging, even “fake” ring to it, in mass politics that’s not really the
case. Communicating your message to millions of people is a terribly difficult
task and symbolism plays a crucial and legitimate part in
that.
In grasping this, Kejriwal seems to have shown remarkable
talent as is apparent given his success in the Delhi elections. That said, his performance
in the Lok Sabha elections, in terms of seats, might be far less impressive,
given his fragmented urban support base and the massive electorates for each
parliamentary constituency. The real story, though, would lie in the vote share
he manages to garner. According to the CNN-IBN-CSDS opinion poll, AAP’s
national vote share would hit 4% in the 2014 elections. A number that, when
compared to the 2009 election results, would put it at an impressive fifth
place.
After the euphoria of the Delhi win, a number of commentators
had stepped in and calmed things down by (correctly) pointing out that the
AAP’s performance, while impressive, was not unprecedented: parties like the Telugu
Desam Party and the Asom Gana Parishad had managed similar electoral debuts in
their states. If these predicted vote shares are accurate though, the AAP’s
debut in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections would be
unprecedented.
Of course, opinion poll predications are fairly
unpredictable things themselves. But at this stage, broadly speaking, Kejriwal’s
rise, does seem rather impressive, a small part of the credit of which could
maybe be attributed to his sense of fashion. To twist the old tagline of a
textile brand just a bit: there are many things which make the
complete politician. Clothes are just one of them.
First published on NewsYaps
First published on NewsYaps
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