The big dilemma of rallies: Are they relevant in this day of tweets and 24 hour news?

NEW DELHI: Rallies are political spectacles, the thronging crowd responding to the leader. The frisson of elections only adds to that extraordinary contact between the public and the politician. But are rallies still relevant in this day of tweets and 24x7 news? Great meetings are no longer the barometers of public opinion they once used to be, say political pundits. Political messaging is now more subterranean, dependent on mass and social media and the organisational tentacles of a party.

In fact, the heave-ho required to set up a successful rally – carting crowds to the venue, arranging star speakers – is often seen as a burden. And yet the rally’s popularity as a tool for propaganda persists – and in this frantic political season, it has only flourished. Gujarat CM Narendra Modi – in a series of rallies, from Delhi to Patna to venues in the South and West – has brought back the show-of-strength aspect of political gatherings. “It is true that a crowd or a lack of it at political rallies does not reflect the situation on the ground.

The best example of this is the Left party rallies. They are past masters at organising crowds, but it rarely translates into electoral victory except in their old pockets of strength,” says Badri Narayan of the Gobind Ballabh Pant Social Sciences Institute in Allahabad.

“And yet rallies remain popular, simply because they demonstrate the strength of an organisation, its ability to get things done, to gather crowds, to put up a good show,” adding, “Politics as spectacle is an important part of a message of dominance, present even in evolved democracies like the US and UK, he says. Modi, who emphasises social media and reaching out to the young through technology, has been surprisingly gung-ho about the old-fashioned rally.

“As soon as he was appointed chairman of the campaign committee, it was decided that a series of rallies would be organised across the country for him to show himself as the candidate for prime minister,” says a top BJP leader. According to KN Govindacharya, former ideologue of the party and campaign chief of elections past, rallies add to the “hype” around the candidate.

“Not just Kitne aadmi the but kaun?” says BJP leader Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi. “If there are more people than what the organisers have accounted for, then it’s a good sign. Then the thing to notice is the chemistry between the speaker and the crowd. But Congress spokesperson Shakeel Ahmad dismisses such a crowd as any indicator of political support. “When you have support on the ground, it shows up in voting.

There is a difference between a spontaneous crowd and a rented one,” he says. Even so, empty stands can demoralise both party cadre and leader, which is why rallies of top leaders are planned and with a minimum guarantee of crowd.