LANGUAGE IN INDIA

LINGUISTIC MANIPULATION IN POLITICAL ADVERTISING
A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.

ELECTIONS AND POLITICAL ADVERTISING

Elections in India offer ample opportunity to political parties and their leaders to put into effect the persuasive power of language. Over the years, ‘the skill of persuasion and reasoning’ has become a legitimate political practice in Indian politics. Political advertising in Indian election campaigns has been noticeably dominated by the exploitation of persuasive language.

In their hunt for electoral support, the competing political representatives of political parties engage intensely in mechanized and manipulated forms of language to identify and share the worldview of the electorate. However, there is an implicit meaning-system working within this manipulated and exploited communicative order as manifested in the language of political advertising.

PERSUASION IS THE OVERRIDING GOAL

Linguists maintain that any proposition can be expressed in a variety of ways, and that in any given situation one of these ways will be the most effective in swaying an audience. Hence, when persuasion is the overriding goal of political advertising, the persuasive perspective of such advertising suggests that the manner in which a statement is expressed may be more important than its content. The promise of persuasive communication is that there exists a system for identifying the most effective form of expression in any given case.

THE THREE PREMISES OF POLITICAL ADVERTISING

Thus, a persuasive approach to the language of political advertising will rest on three premises:

1. that linguistic manipulation can be expected to have important consequences for how the language of political advertising is processed;
2. that these consequences can in turn be derived from properties of linguistic manipulation; and
3. that these formal properties are systematically interrelated.

Laloo Prasad Yadav, the chief of Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) who is known for his wit and crass or down to earch humor, asked the RJD supporters at an election meeting in Chapra (Bihar), ‘Lathi utthavan, tel pilaavan, Bhaajpa bhaghaavan’ (Take your lathis, oil them well, and chase the BJP out).

In this slogan, Laloo Prasad Yadav diverged from established linguistic norm and general expectation. However, his supporters did not reject the slogan as nonsensical or faulty; rather it was recognized as a humorous and witty expression. The slogan generated what the semiotician Barthes would call a "pleasure of the text" -- the reward that comes from processing a clever arrangement of signs.

LINGUISTIC BOUNDARIES

On the other hand, when Lalu Prasad Yadav’s party coined the expression “ Gharib Raila” (for a political rally of poor), the Hindi-speaking audience was not amused because it crossed the limit on the amount and kind of deviation. The coinage of the new expression“raila” was supposed to mirror its larger size. The coinage was based on the common linguistic pattern of Hindi-Urdu; Thailli ‘a smaller bag,’ thaila a larger bag; daigchi ‘a smaller pot,’ daigcha ‘a larger pot. It shows how linguistic manipulation provides a means for making the familiar strange.

Deviation in language of political advertising then, is a matter of creating what consumer researchers might call incongruity. A key contribution of communication studies is to explain how certain kinds of text structure, can produce incongruity in the language of political advertising.

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A. R. Fatihi

Attitudes Toward Hindi | A Survey of Language Preferences in Education in India | News Translation and the Concept of Equivalence - A Discourse Analysis Perspective | Who Is the Indigenous Sri Lankan? | An Overview of Orwell's Animal Farm | Speaking Versus Communicating in Business English | Linguistic Manipulation in Political Advertising | Some Limitations of Corpus-based Language Study | Hegemony, C-Semiologically | The Evolution of Language Policy in the Constituent Assembly of India | HOME PAGE | CONTACT EDITOR