The political language of the street has not merely entered Parliament. Parliament has increasingly adopted the logic of the street, where the object is not necessarily to persuade an opponent but to rally one’s own side, provoke the other and produce a reaction that can travel, say political observers.
The latest controversy surrounding Rahul Gandhi’s 'mimicry of Modi and Amit Shah' is about more than a single speech. Performance, which has become a weapon of contemporary Opposition politics, has a long and distinctly bipartisan history. But the argument that one side is merely responding in the language of the other points towards a larger and more troubling question. Is political coarseness now simply the inevitable grammar of electoral combat?
Old timers in India would remember a time when political disagreement in the country could be fierce, uncompromising and deeply ideological, without descending into personal vilification. Leaders could savage an opponent’s record, dismantle a governing doctrine and question a ministry’s competence without reducing democratic argument to a playground exchange of insults. Parliament, at least in the founding imagination of the young republic, was meant to be an arena of serious persuasion, where words carried the weight of argument rather than the fleeting currency of viral outrage.
That ideal has not simply frayed. It has been steadily dismantled and replaced by a hyperactive political spectacle in which the parliamentary chamber increasingly serves as an acoustic backdrop to the digital street.
The latest controversy surrounding Rahul Gandhi’s political performances, most notably his theatrical mimicry of Prime Minister (PM) Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah, is therefore about rather more than a single speech, press conference or moment of provocation.
When Gandhi stood before party workers and mimicked the PM’s gestures, mannerisms and vocal cadences, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) responded swiftly. The Indian National Congress (INC) leader was accused of using “vulgar and crude” language and dismissed as behaving more like a “failed stand-up comedian” than a serious contender for national leadership. Defence Minister Rajnath Singh described the deterioration of political discourse as “worrisome and shameful” in the world’s largest democracy.
Gandhi’s defenders, unsurprisingly, saw the performance rather differently. Addressing the party’s national convention, he presented his aggressive rhetoric as an expression of popular resistance. Ordinary Indians, he suggested, were beginning to find their voice against an overbearing state. The establishment was unsettled, in this telling, precisely because an unmediated expression of public anger was beginning to puncture its carefully polished image of authority.
The Indian republic began with a generation of leaders who worried deeply about parliament’s ability to educate a new nation in the habits of democratic government. File photo
Ironically, the theatrical mimicry that has become a weapon of contemporary Opposition politics has a long and distinctly bipartisan history. Amit Shah himself once mimicked Rahul Gandhi’s mannerisms at an election rally in Bidar, Karnataka (February 26th, 2018), reproducing his hand gestures and delivery to draw laughter from the crowd. The purpose was much the same: to deride and reduce a serious political opponent to a caricature.
Even when it comes to making personal attacks on the opponent, Prime Minister Modi has been accused of referring to Sonia Gandhi as “Jersey Cow” during his days as Gujarat chief minister (in the early 2000s) and Rahul Gandhi as “hybrid bachhda” (hybrid calf, because of his mixed parentage).
But the argument that one side is merely responding in the language of the other points towards a larger and more troubling question. Is political coarseness now simply the inevitable grammar of electoral combat?
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Dr Akshay Kulkarni, author of The New India: We All Deserve, draws a useful distinction. “There is a difference between combative and coarse,” says the political observer. Earlier generations could fight bitterly, he argues, but their register remained fundamentally argumentative rather than abusive. “What we are witnessing now is the collapse of that distinction,” he laments. “The rally has walked into the well of the House and the House has stopped noticing.”
That is perhaps the most succinct description of the transformation. The political language of the street has not merely entered parliament. Parliament has increasingly adopted the logic of the street, where the object is not necessarily to persuade an opponent but to rally one’s own side, provoke the other and produce a reaction that can travel.
There is an understandable temptation to romanticise the early decades of the republic. Yet historical accuracy requires some caution. “India’s political discourse was never an uninterrupted tea party,” says Raghav Mohanty, a former professor based in Cuttack. The octogenarian who taught political science for more than 40 years recalls how the Lok Sabha witnessed heckling, personal taunts, dramatic walkouts and bitter exchanges. “Regional politics, particularly in the Hindi heartland and the South, have long relied on satire, street invective and theatrical exaggeration as instruments of mass mobilisation.”
And yet, he admits, there was also a powerful institutional convention. “A political leader was expected to elevate the crowd rather than merely reproduce its basest vocabulary,” he observes, recalling India’s first PM. “Jawaharlal Nehru embodied that expectation. He treated parliamentary procedure with something approaching religious devotion and regarded legislative debate as an important instrument in the civic education of a newly independent country.”
Later generations produced their own formidable parliamentary combatants, he recalls. Ram Manohar Lohia could be intellectually devastating in his attacks on Congress dominance. Atal Bihari Vajpayee could use poetic cadence to dismantle a government’s foreign policy. George Fernandes brought the combative rhetoric of the trade union movement to the treasury benches. “Their ideological differences were often profound. Their political battles could be merciless. Yet there remained an unwritten distinction between attacking an opponent’s political philosophy and dehumanising the opponent personally,” says Mohanty.
For Kulkarni, the transformation began sometime in the 1990s, when “television turned politics into performance”. Then, social media turned that performance into a numbers game. The crucial change was not simply that politicians acquired new platforms. The incentives of those platforms altered the language itself. “Outrage travels faster than argument,” Kulkarni says. “So, outrage got manufactured!” He points out how the 24-hour news cycle further narrowed the field. Fifteen seconds of provocation could travel further than 15 minutes of argument. “Once that became clear, politicians and their strategists had an obvious incentive to produce material designed for replay.”
Scholar Sahana Udupa, who has studied online speech and abusive political rhetoric in India, describes this phenomenon as “abuse as performance”.
The phrase captures something important. Political insult today is rarely simply an eruption of spontaneous anger. It can be a calculated and ritualised form of political participation designed to exploit the incentive structures of digital platforms.
This evolution, however, cannot simply be written off as a story of moral decline. Indian democracy was simultaneously undergoing a necessary process of social democratisation as political power began to move beyond the English-speaking elite that had dominated the Nehruvian consensus.
As regional parties rose to national prominence through the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, political language naturally became more idiomatic, more abrasive and more closely rooted in the lived vocabulary of ordinary citizens.
The Dravidian movement in Tamil Nadu offered one of the clearest examples. CN Annadurai and M Karunanidhi combined classical literature, street satire and cinematic melodrama, using popular theatre as a vehicle for anti-caste mobilisation. In Maharashtra, Bal Thackeray discarded many of the conventions of high political speech, turning the raw, crude language of the Bombay street into a potent political instrument that spoke directly to urban anxieties.
In Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, the Mandal era brought another transformation. Leaders such as Lalu Prasad Yadav and Mulayam Singh Yadav demonstrated how political speech could acquire the irreverent rhythm of the village square. Rustic humour and sharp social criticism became tools with which entrenched upper-caste political dominance could be challenged.
“Even India’s most literate state has been no stranger to this,” says Mohanty, who recalls how Kerala’s MLAs traded vile abuses and blows (March 13, 2015), reducing the legislature to a wrestling pit.
Linguistic democratisation was, overall in many respects, liberating. The trouble began when political systems started confusing democratic authenticity with aggression and when vulgarity itself became a badge of popular connection.
One example is a recent exchange in the Andhra Pradesh legislative council, where a debate earlier this month escalated into intense confrontation. State agriculture minister Kinjarapu Atchannaidu, addressing YSR Congress Party council floor leader Botcha Satyanarayana, referred to him as a daddamma (inept person). In retaliation, Botcha lashed out with body-shaming remarks, retorting, "It is not enough for a person to grow like an ox or a breeding bull; one’s brain must also grow." The exchange resulted in the adjournment of the House.
“The contemporary Indian politician no longer merely represents the constituency of the street. Increasingly, he or she performs for it inside the legislature,” says Mohanty. He laments how this has blurred the important democratic distinction between the agitator and the legislator. “The agitator’s function is to provoke, disrupt and mobilise anger. The legislator’s constitutional responsibility is to convert public pressure into debate, policy and law.”
Parliament has consequently undergone a curious transformation. “Protests in the Well, coordinated chanting, placards, physical interruptions and personal exchanges are no longer regarded simply as unfortunate disruptions to parliamentary communication. They have themselves become a form of political communication,” he points out.
The rules of parliament still give the Speaker the authority to expunge defamatory, indecent or unparliamentary remarks. But rules cannot manufacture restraint when the political economy of the modern media offers enormous rewards for provocation. There is another uncomfortable factor. Restraint itself has ceased to look politically rewarding.
“When one side crosses a line and wins an election anyway, restraint starts to look, to political strategists, like a losing strategy,” Kulkarni says. “That is a market failure of democracy, not a law of nature.”
Writing about this debasement as far back as 2017, political economist C Rammanohar Reddy had observed that sharp wit and repartee, once central to parliamentary debate, were being displaced by coarse and abusive language. He laid out a straightforward structural reason for this. “In an age in which the sharpest catchphrase and most sensational sound bite are prized, abuse travels more efficiently than wit.”
Reddy described the phenomenon as the “new normal”. Nearly a decade later, the diagnosis looks less like a passing phase than a structural feature of Indian public life.
Any serious assessment of this linguistic coarsening must also acknowledge that no single party has a monopoly on provocation.
The BJP has developed an especially sophisticated communications apparatus capable of reducing complicated national questions to emotionally charged binaries: nationalist versus anti-national (the PM’s coinage of the term ‘dimagi naxal’ in his Independence Day speech this month is only the latest example), development versus obstruction, strong leadership versus weak and corrupt dynasties.
But Opposition and regional parties have adopted much the same transactional grammar.
“No abusive language... This is how it is used in Marathi. This is how it is used in Maharashtra. This is our regular language,” says Sanjay Raut of the Shiv Sena (UBT) defending the use of explicit language against political defectors on the grounds of regional authenticity.
In West Bengal, former chief minister Mamata Banerjee too has repeatedly demonstrated how political speech can turn regional identity into an ideological battleground. The phrase “linguistic terrorism”, used during confrontations with the central government, illustrates how routine administrative disputes can be elevated into existential moral conflicts.
In Bihar, former chief minister Nitish Kumar spent decades cultivating an image of administrative sobriety and bureaucratic restraint. Yet in 2023 he stunned the country when he used unusually graphic language inside the state assembly while discussing female literacy and population control.
The episode illustrated the gravitational pull of a political culture that increasingly rewards shock over understatement, even when the politician in question has built a career on restraint.
There is another reason not to dismiss the older vocabulary of politics as mere nostalgia.
Kulkarni points to Nehru’s Independence Day speeches from the Red Fort, delivered over 17 years, as an example of a political leader deliberately separating the national platform from the partisan arena. “Whatever the arguments inside Parliament,” he says, “the Red Fort was treated as a place to speak to the country rather than settle scores with political opponents.”
The example is instructive because it concerns not simply personal manners but the meaning attached to political office.
And then there is Manmohan Singh, who Kulkarni calls “the most under-appreciated example of political grace this country has ever produced.” Singh was mocked, mimicked and caricatured throughout his decade in office. Yet, Kulkarni argues, he rarely answered personal attacks in kind and repeatedly appealed for dignity and decorum in Parliament.
It is an important counterpoint to the argument that politicians simply have to speak in the language the electorate wants to hear. “They do not merely mirror the electorate,” Kulkarni argues. “They train it.” Every time a leader presents contempt as an acceptable political instrument and is rewarded for doing so, the public threshold for acceptable political conduct shifts a little further.
Every political actor can justify his or her own coarseness by pointing to an opponent’s equally provocative language. The familiar defence is simple: they started it.
Kulkarni rejects that logic. “If BJP leaders lower the register of public conversation, the appropriate response from the Opposition is not to lower it further,” he says. “It is to occupy the higher ground so visibly that the contrast itself becomes the argument.”
That is a more demanding form of political resistance. It also happens to be a more difficult one in the age of the viral clip.
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The Indian republic began with a generation of leaders who worried deeply about parliament’s ability to educate a new nation in the habits of democratic government.
“That direction of influence,” Mohanty insists, “has now been reversed.” Parliament increasingly looks to the street for its vocabulary, while the street looks to social media for validation, he observes. “Rahul Gandhi and his Opposition allies have every democratic right to challenge Narendra Modi and Amit Shah relentlessly on policy, governance and statecraft. And the BJP has every right to defend its record and attack the Congress’ political history with equal vigour.”
Experts worry that for political parties, estraint itself has ceased to look politically rewarding. File photo
The real danger is how labels such as “anti-national”, “urban naxal”, “tukde-tukde gang” and now “dimagi naxal” turn political disagreement into a loyalty test: who belongs to the nation and who deserves to be cast out. Once politics becomes a contest to brand, shame and cancel the other side, argument takes a back seat to abuse. And when rivals gleefully steal and weaponise the same labels, the joke writes itself. Politics is no longer about winning minds. It is about owning the insult, hijacking the language and going viral.
The most unsettling part of this transformation is not simply that India’s politicians have become louder, more abrasive and more performative. “It is that, through their shared dependence on algorithmic outrage, they are increasingly becoming mirrors of one another,” Mohanty sighs.
According to him, increasingly the system has completely and totally abdicated governance to focus all its energies on staying in election mode 24x7x365. “When constitutional leaders of a republic begin to sound like permanent street agitators, the tragedy is not merely that politics has lost its manners.”
It is that the citizenry finds its voice increasingly silenced. As din replaces democracy!
