Rhetoric and content

The two are unequally bestowed on Narendra Modi and Rahul Gandhi, and that is why both the leaders are struggling

Storytellers need two things. One, they need the ability to communicate. This means control of the platform — the language, the metaphors, the lyricism, the precision, the humour and so on. The Greeks thought rhetoric an important enough asset to require investment and so did the Romans. There is a 12-volume first century text by Quintilian training people on this because it was the foundation of political leadership.

Second, and more importantly, communicators need material. Writing or public speaking (for these are in essence the same thing) requires content. Absent this it is not possible to speak meaningfully.

Material is 95 per cent of writing and speaking. What we call writer’s block is actually thinker’s block: It is the absence of content, not the absence of rhetoric or linguistic ability.
 

There are teens who are genius musicians (W A Mozart, U Srinivas) and teens who are genius mathematicians (Ampere and Ramanujan). There are no teen geniuses who are writers. There is a reason for this and it is that writing and storytelling require material and not mere talent. You cannot communicate at depth with a stranger except on the basis of shared experience and empathy and for that one must know the world and appreciate its contents.

Illustration by Binay Sinha

Observing the current election campaign, it is clear as always that the prime minister has the first thing in spades. He is very good at being able to reduce something complex into an aphorism or a slogan. He can pull out of his quiver puns and rhymes at will and he also has a superb editorial sense of when to pick up what subject. He is entertaining for most people, and those who find his style trying and hackneyed are, or seem to be, very few.

What he is lacking in at the moment is the second thing, content. A government that was elected on promise of delivery would be expected to go to the hustings with a show of what it has delivered. That we are not seeing. The debate in crucial election states has moved away from development and good days to the sort of nastiness that is alarming. If there is a reason why we are being informed today that Jawaharlal Nehru did not know the minds of farmers, and that the Radcliffe Line could have been rejected over Kartarpur, it is because of the absence of content.

The converse of the prime minister’s predicament is true for the Congress president. He has content: How did that ~1.5 million bonus for you become Rs 300 billion for an Ambani? The agrarian crisis seen in mass marches, the unemployment crisis showing up in demands for reservations, the mess in the CBI and the RBI. These are the sorts of things that require very little to be converted into a successful and effective campaign alleging underperformance if not incompetence.

Unfortunately for him and his supporters, the Congress president does not appear to have the rhetorical ability to do this conversion. He is not comfortable at public speaking and he has little ability to connect. 

The conditions on the ground are advantageous for him. But all the content in the world is useless if it cannot be served up effectively, and the truth is that in this current campaign it is not being. There is no reason to see why this should be any different six months from now when we go into the general election. This will come as grim tidings for those expecting change in May, 2019. 

Narendra Modi carries with him a credibility that no other politician has. This must be accepted by the neutral observer. The finance ministry’s former chief economic adviser has described his economic masterstroke demonetisation as draconian, and it was. But the same Arvind Subramanian is forced to consider why this did not bring unpopularity. Even a disaster deliberately wrought on the population is seen as a sign of purpose and intent — the signalling of credibility. 

One of the most unusual and beautiful things about our democracy is the diversity of the electorate. Nobody really can fathom it. America’s polling firms require a sample size of less than a thousand individuals to determine with great precision the popularity of presidents and the results of presidential elections. There is no chance that this can happen in India. 

In these conditions very few have ever achieved an overarching popularity, as Mr Modi has and that is to his credit. This comes from two aspects. The first is obviously from the personality of the man himself and what he says and what he does. The other must come from the opposition. Where there is weakness, and it cannot be disputed that the government is currently lacking in substantial content, the advantage must be pressed home. It isn’t.

In a pivotal period of our constitutional history, we have one of the most talented demagogues in the world (I would rate Mr Modi as highly as I do Donald Trump) ranged against an average speaker with a middling intellect. And it is not for a lack of material that Mr Gandhi is not succeeding.