Parsing Out the Populist Style: A Text Analysis of Political Mimesis in Narendra Modi Speeches

The emerging consensus on minimal understandings of populism, defined as the ideological or strategic pitting of the people against the elites, relies on the possibility of measuring and comparing political antagonisms worldwide. While parsimony is desirable, these approaches offer little insight into how anti-elitism translates into successful representative claims. By engaging with the question ‘why populism works?’ in media-savvy democratic societies, I build on a contrastive text analysis method to extract evidence of the populist style in the speeches of seven Indian Prime Ministers since independence. While outlining the distinctiveness of Narendra Modi’s discourses, I identify populism as an inherently imitative performance in which the leader mimics the culturally-popular modality, personifying it through claiming charismatic attributes. I quantify evidence of this seductive mimetic rapport through operationalizing occurrences of what Pierre Ostiguy calls the populists’ public flaunting of the low. By examining the distribution of 13 clusters of words proxying populist mimesis and its exposure through charismatic claims, I argue that its political efficacy is grounded in the affectual shortening of the distance between the ruler and the ruled. In the Indian context, the text-as-data study shows that the populist genre serves the majoritarian political agenda of market-oriented Hindu nationalism.