STAKING CLAIMS
An angry gesture! Concern for the ‘Aam Aadmi’!
Hard-hitting words! Tearing into the opponents!
This is what makes the primary elements of Rahul Gandhi’s
speeches, delivered hot on location.
Largely not customized! Mostly the context missing! Almost
similar sounding examples and epithets! Flood of claims signifying and
cornering achievements in the name of the grand old party of India
All in the magnificently big context of the mountainous
anti-incumbency of his party led national government!
It unwinds all.
And when it couples with Rahul’s abysmal record (till now)
as the ‘politician with a difference’, it makes his speeches sound even more routine,
just as flurry of words without substance.
And staking claims for achievements like mobile phones or
computer revolution in the name of the glorious history of the Congress party
is equally counterproductive.
Now no one is going to buy these statements. As
said earlier, these are
basically consumer-driven industrial policies and have to be followed and
promoted by every government.
Like the retail FDI decision, every such decision to introduce a
new technology for commercial purposes and the new format of businesses is
taken in the global environment. It is not about who let the television
technology come to India
Such decisions are driven by the incumbent internal and
external factors. The decision to allow the multi-brand retail FDI is the
telling example in hand. The slowdown of domestic and global economy and the
pressure of countries like the US
And claiming benefits of such decisions, the outcomes of which
are so huge, spread over a long period of time, dissected and diversified, to a
single party or a single or group of persons, is another thing that one should
avoid while writing speeches (India may be a half-baked democracy but certainly
it is not a North Korea or China) – no singing paeans please.
The maximum one can go for in contextualizing the validity
of such decisions by packaging and customizing the speech keeping in mind the
target audience.
And all this reflects on the type of the politics Rahul
has been practicing (and not what he had raised the hopes about)!
Coming back to his speeches in
the light of all this, it has been an observation that the elements of the
speech that Rahul begins a campaign with dominate verbatim throughout the
campaign.
The problem is not with the elements. It is about being
them verbatim. Another factor is the transfer of some of those elements from
one campaign to the other without the necessary circumstantial changes. Also
the other major problem is the narrow choice of the examples to exemplify. Some
other relevant issues are:
Rahul’s speeches are not localized.
The content of the speeches is not customized.
Speeches are high on rhetoric but low on substance.
There have been poor research to back the allegations made
in the speeches and we have seen misfires.
To continue..
©/IPR: Santosh Chaubey - http://severallyalone.blogspot.com/
