Christophe Jaffrelot is senior research fellow at CERI-Sciences Po/CNRS, Paris, professor of Indian Politics and Sociology at King's India Institute, London, and non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He offers valuable insights on South Asian politics, particularly the methods and motivations of the Hindu right in India.
Rhetoric in the name of poor has assumed Orwellian proportions this poll season
To describe these kinds of speeches, George Orwell had coined a useful word: Newspeak. The most famous instances of Newspeak in 1984 is, “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” But there is another citation from Orwell that needs to be quoted too: “If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought”.
Populists always claim that they work for the poor. The cause of the poor was already at the heart of Indira Gandhi’s rhetoric in the 1970s, when in answer to those who were chanting “Indira hatao!”, she came back with the slogan “Garibi hatao!”.
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