Three instances of walking grabbed attention in the recent past. First, when farmers marched under the leadership of All India Kisan Sabha in Maharashtra in 2018; second, when they marched from different parts of the country towards the Delhi border in 2020; and lastly, Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Yatra in 2022. In all three cases, leaders and masses walked hundreds and thousands of miles across the length and breadth of the country. Let us understand the way walking gets employed as a political instrument with contemporary examples.We walk everyday and our socio-economic and cultural context determines the nature of our walking – from a worker walking to their workplace, trying to make ends meet, to the relatively better off population walking to take care of their life-style diseases. They do not grab our attention the way the farmers or Rahul did. Attention was due to the political noise it was making. Walking as a political project had ceased to be part of political imagination except in cases of parties organising marches in a few states. That is why the Maharashtra farmers’ march and Bharat Jodo Yatra stand out.In the current political climate, walking as a political project is new, abnormal and under-explored. Primary reason being the political illusion of ‘reaching’ people online understood as ‘knowing’ people and the society in actuality. Images posted on online forums and the likes collected – representing their pains, angst and anxieties – killed the significance of physical connection. Secondly, the dominant politics constructs a self-image that being physically distant from people implies being more powerful. The more inaccessible the leader is, the more powerful he is assumed to be. Hence, the political leadership develops a host of paraphernalia to limit access. There is celebration of being distant from the masses in physical form.Walking as a political tool It was not always like this. Irrespective of political agreements and disagreements within the Congress leadership, we saw how Nehru had no qualms mixing with the masses, Indira Gandhi lessened it, and then Rajiv Gandhi was killed as he was nonchalant about physical meetings. Thereafter, there was a lull within the party as the leaders began to physically distance themselves from the masses. This happened simultaneously with the disappearance of mass mobilisation as a tool of politics within the party.Nehru emerged from a history of anti-colonial struggle and mobilisations which defined his relationship of physical contact with masses. This historical characterisation of subsequent Gandhi family leaders was much less in comparison and hence, their physical relationship with the masses decreased. The party emerging as a powerful political force post-independence was a result of mass mobilisation with the Nehru-Gandhi family at its centre. That memory of connection with the masses lingered on for a few decades. The disconnect with the masses happened as the necessity of addressing newly emerging political necessities were ignored. Also read: Has the Bharat Jodo Yatra Achieved What It Set Out to Do?As political agency of the marginalised caste groups began knocking at the doors of established political forces, parties such as the Congress, due to the entrenched Brahmanical interests, lagged in responding to the issues at an organisational level. One reason was that they paid less attention to the evolving turmoil in the social and economic order on the ground as the political nostalgia of the freedom struggle and the Nehruvian years were thought sufficient for electoral gains. Challenges appeared in different regions from the emerging movements and identitarian assertion on the ground. And the Congress party did not have an organisational structure with an inclusive, non-patronising framework. This began weakening the political strength of the Congress.When Rahul arrived on the scene, the disjunct between the actuality and projections in the virtual sphere had already created an illusion unheard of. This disjunct hid the actuality – the exploitation, marginalisation, deprivation, violence, hunger and death as experienced by people on the ground. Absence of a robust cadre-based organisation, which right-wing politics has, implied that the leadership had to give a call. After a long time, Rahul has decided to plunge himself in the political format that congress leaders of pre-independence India practiced. He is trying to imbibe the mode of being a mass leader which is unlike any other political leader at the moment. His recent political activities have been efforts at establishing that democracy (even in its liberal format) is about the relationship between political parties, the masses and the state as their representatives. He is reimagining an idea of state-people relationship as an alternative to whatever has transpired in the past few decades. This relationship is more than mere voting but it is about listening to the masses, understanding their feelings first hand and expressing solidarity with them.Spectacularity as a substitute of conversationalityWe have a history replete with people who walked and learned the lessons of life and politics – from Gautam Buddha, Guru Nanak to Mahatma Gandhi and Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan among many others. That history has been delegitimised by the contemporary politicians who attend five meetings on the same day in different parts of the country using sponsored modes of transport. Walking as a mode of politics has been virtually ignored. Walking brings freedom; it liberates one from all that is ongoing, it separates you from the narcissism and the comforts of the echo-chamber, prompts you to think afresh and provides fodder to reflect anew. In this sense, walking is also about meeting people and being alone and contemplating, all at the same time. By walking one surrender’s one’s own identity and meets people from different quarters of life where the privileges bestowed by your identity do not infringe upon your life.The hegemonic forces have created an illusory reality through virtual presence. Across organisations chief ministers have their faces everywhere – from toilets, sewage cleaning machines, newspapers, hoardings to buses and rickshaws. Prime Minister Narendra Modi on a G20 poster. Photo: Shukla SawantThis phenomenon picked up as political leadership decided to fill the minds of people with their own personal images. The photograph of the leader represents the politics rather than the content of politics. Therefore, the emphasis is to construct the image. This further contributes to distancing of politics from the masses and an inflated sense of self in political leaders seeing themselves everywhere. In such a situation, detachment becomes a necessity to think clearly. Detachment from the virtual world The political habitat comprises paraphernalia of different kinds – from cameras surrounding you at all times to a possibly sanitised space. This constrains the physical and, therefore, mental movement of the politician. When Gandhi and Nehru and the farmers walked, they were unconstrained. Today the politicians walk on cleanly lined carpers at temples and even in remote places in the Himalayas. They are welcomed by a set of people they already know and who speak predetermined dialogues. Masses are cordoned off to inaccessibly far off places in a public meeting and even those who shower petals are recruited and trained. It’s a world of lies and illusion.In the recent past, mainstream political leaders have seldom walked across the length and breadth of their own electoral constituency, let alone the rest of the country. Riding on the technical crutches of social media they don’t even meet their voters. There are people who haven’t met either municipality, assembly or parliamentary candidates of their area. The distance between the leader and the masses has been increasing, filled through intermediaries of technology.There has been an impersonalisation of politics, democracy being redefined. Prime ministers, chief ministers do roadshows. The roadshows are instruments of spectacularity. In a time when masses are being served a larger than life image of politicians, the roadshows are mere attempts at shortcutting the processes of democracy – a glimpse of who they elect instead of a conversation or touch. This process alienates masses from politics and takes away the dialogic relationship between the masses and politicians. In the long run this results in a disconnect of political forces with the real issues, needs and aspirations of the masses.In a sanitised stage the political persona is bereft of human interface. It gets alienated from the public, from the realities of its constituents. To take care of the consequent chasm between the political persona and the masses, spectacularisation of political relationships is employed. Politics is transformed into a spectacle and so is the body and the self of the politician. This gets expressed through images – still as well as moving. Hence, the full control over agencies that transmit images is intended and undertaken. French philosopher Guy Debord tells us that “the images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream in which the unity of that life can no longer be recovered. Fragmented views of reality regroup themselves into a new unity as a separate pseudo-world that can only be looked at. The specialisation of images of the world evolves into a world of autonomised images where even the deceivers are deceived. The spectacle is a concrete inversion of life, an autonomous movement of the non-living”. Increasing absence of control over social media, generally employed to take care of the above mentioned chasm, often gets employed against the producers of those memes and messages themselves. Only a political counter-narrative that brings people in flesh and blood to the centre of politics can deal with this spectacularisation. There can be different kinds of counter-narratives depending on how the material conditions are understood and the kind of politics that is imagined to transform those material conditions. Rahul’s recent initiatives can be seen as a move in that direction. Walking to what end?What does Rahul seek to attain through his marches and through walks within villages and in fields? No doubt, it can be debated that these actions are embedded in the consumptive framework of a certain kind, as it gets edited and then presented to viewers while simultaneously providing an unedited, raw version as well. The act of walking through villages, on non-sanitised, non-carpeted streets, roads and temple paths is counter-positioning of an alternative politics to the current narrative of sanitised, carpeted and well-scripted mingling with masses. How far will this narrative embed all this in the politico-economic and materiality of societies is a separate question.When Rahul spends time with different kinds of people, he extricates himself out of the superficiality of the discourse woven by the social media and interacts with the actual people in flesh and blood, reflecting on their conditions and conversations he had with them. This walk liberates one from the repetition of images generated within the confines of the city and the ecosystem created by the hegemonic powers. That ecosystem of constantly thinking that tweeting-means-meeting-people is breached, new images get built, which might produce a completely different political persona and a politics.In this situation, the significance of undoing the sanitised sphere of politics becomes significant. It acquires the status of a counter-agenda, as a necessity that claims to disturb the autocracy of the sanitised and spectacularised space that the right-wing neoliberal politics creates.Ravi Kumar teaches Sociology at South Asian University. Views expressed in this article are personal.
