1389- Just Watch That Watchword!

(TOI-29:03:2014) 

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With elections looming on the horizon, the air is thick with party slogans. But like misguided missiles such verbal rocketry can, and often does, veer off course and boomerang on those who designed it with the aim of targeting voters.

The chant of ‘Har, har, Modi’, was composed by the supporters of the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate in Varanasi.Its political opponents grabbed the opportunity to lampoon the BJP line and morph it to ‘Haar, haar Modi’ (‘Lose, lose Modi’).

When Lalu Prasad came out from behind bars – where he’d been put due to the fodder scam –Whereupon the opposition came up with the cautionary rhyme based on the RJD symbol of the Lantern: ‘Phoot gaya Laltain, beh gaya tel, bak-bak mat karo, phir jaoge jail’ (‘The Lantern is broken, the oil is spilt, don’t talk too much, you’ll go back to jail’).

While an acolyte of Indira Gandhi coined the triumphal accolade of ‘India is Indira, and Indira is India‘, her son and successor was less fortunate.His speech, in less than accomplished Hindi, in which he exhorted his audience to turn the country into a manufacturing hub where ‘hum koh yeh bhi banana hai, aur woh bhi banana hai’ (‘We have to make this, as well as make that’), prompted the conjecture whether he was trying to turn India into a ‘banana republic’.

The Congress slogan ‘Haath par chhaap doh’, ‘Put your stamp on the Hand’, might well have lost the party the elections in 1989 when some voters obligingly put their stamp of approval on their own hands in polling booths, instead of on the Hand symbol on the ballot paper. As the old saying almost goes, a vote in the hand is worth zero in the ballot box.
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