Rahul Gandhi recently offered Parliament a taxonomy of political stupidity which, despite the inevitable hysteria over vocabulary, contained a more interesting observation than most speeches delivered in that building.

There was, he suggested, the person who does not know, the person who thinks he knows everything, and then there is the andhbhakt -- the person so devoted to the latter that he begins treating him as something approaching divine. It was an amusing formulation, but also an accidentally universal one. For Rahul Gandhi was describing a species that exists in considerably greater abundance than just within the BJP.

The andhbhakt is not a political party member. It is a psychological condition. And social media has turned it into a growth industry.

The modern political leader is no longer merely a politician. He is a product, a logo, a moving wallpaper of the national imagination. His face is reproduced endlessly, his gestures analysed frame by frame, his sentences clipped into ammunition, and every appearance accompanied by an army of digital interpreters explaining what he really meant, why he was right, and why anyone who thinks otherwise is either stupid, malicious or secretly working for the other side.

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The politician becomes larger than life because the electorate has become smaller in its expectations. We no longer seem particularly interested in whether a politician is right. We just want to know whether he is ours. And so the great binary has arrived. You are either for Narendra Modi or against him; you are either for Rahul Gandhi or against him. You are either a nationalist or an anti-national, secular or communal, progressive or reactionary. There is apparently no longer any socially acceptable territory in which one can say, "Actually, he is right about this and completely wrong about that." That sentence has become almost obscene because it suggests independence. And independence is dangerous to a political tribe because it cannot be reliably predicted, monetised or mobilised.

Social media has discovered........

© Mathrubhumi English