Satire, Elections, and Democratic Politics in Digital India

Abstract

This article is concerned with understanding the role of satire as a crucial narrative and communicative form for thinking and caring about politics in contemporary India. In an era marked by the relentless corporate makeover of news media and a concomitant decline in public trust in journalism, satirical videos that took on Narendra Modi, Arvind Kejriwal, Rahul Gandhi, and other political figures during the 2014 election campaign season offered a strikingly different and immensely popular mode of engagement with the political. Moving past well-worn paradigms for understanding the relation between entertainment and politics, this article situates online satire within a vibrant field of everyday digital media production that marks contemporary Indian public culture. I show how satirical videos became part of an intricate, networked, yet comprehensible intertextual field that linked the 2014 elections to long-standing political issues and debates around caste, class, gender and sexuality, and religious nationalism.