Performing Counter-Narratives Under Populism: Dialogic Meaning-Making in India's Election Campaign

• In Event: State Interventions and Cultural Production/Resistance

Abstract

What constrains electorally dominant populist performances? This paper examines India’s 2024 national election campaign to show how counter-narratives emerge through dialogic meaning-making between political actors and their publics. Moving beyond monologic models of performative success in cultural pragmatics, I theorize electoral campaigns as “dialogical social performances” in which competing leaders continually recalibrate their scripts in response to one another and to audience feedback.

The argument draws on a comparative multi-sited ethnography of sixteen campaign rallies across five states, supplemented by interviews with rally participants. Treating rallies as civic rituals rather than mere spectacles, the analysis provides a Geertzian thick description of how mise-en-scène, symbolic production, supporting actors, and embodied audience reactions shape moments of fusion and defusion. I show that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) populist leader, PM Narendra Modi’s hegemonic performance, anchored in religious symbolism, development narratives, communal binaries, and a disciplined cadre, generated affective unity but still failed to renew symbolic attachment among key publics. In contrast, the leader of the opposition, Rahul Gandhi’s campaign, developed an effective counter-performance through iterative encounters with audiences, using humor, constitutional iconography, solidarity, and social-justice scripting to enable new forms of psychological identification and cultural extension.

The dialogical interaction between these performances transformed the campaign into a contested field in which communal polarization, development narratives, social welfare promises, and the politics of representation were continually reinterpreted. Counter-performances were co-produced during the campaign through audience evaluations that reshaped political scripts in real time.

The paper extends cultural pragmatics and audience-centered scholarship and, through that, demonstrates how limits to populist dominance can emerge at the level of performance, where democratic meaning is negotiated through ritualized encounters between leaders and citizens.

Author

• Shivani Choudhary, Yale University