The Work of Silence: How Leadership Stories Hold Attention in Times of Protest

Contemporary debates on political leadership in the digital age tend to emphasise visibility, responsiveness, and continuous engagement. Far less attention has been given to how leadership authority is exercised through selective quiet, even as leaders remain highly present across media environments. This paper examines rhetorical silence as a discursively constructed leadership practice, focusing on how silence is actively performed through storytelling, stage-setting, and narrative design during moments of civic tension. The study analyses Mann Ki Baat (Talk from the Heart), the Indian Prime Minister’s monthly broadcast address, a personalised leadership format disseminated through radio, television, and digital platforms. It focuses on four episodes aired between October 2020 and January 2021, a period marked by the nationwide farmers’ protest against new agricultural laws. Despite the protest’s prominence in public debate, these broadcasts sustained a stable narrative orientation centred on cultural continuity, grassroots initiatives, national resilience, and collective optimism. The paper investigates how this absence of explicit reference was not merely maintained, but discursively produced through narrative form. Methodologically, the study combines close rhetorical analysis with computational narrative-arc analysis using LIWC-22. Rhetorical analysis examines how leadership appeals—ethos, pathos, logos, kairos, and symbolic framing—were organised to cultivate credibility and emotional steadiness. Narrative-arc analysis traces patterns of staging, plot progression, and cognitive tension across the four broadcasts, allowing systematic comparison of how storytelling elements structured attention over time. Together, these methods show how silence was embedded within the architecture of narrative itself. The findings demonstrate that silence in Mann Ki Baat emerged through intensive stage-setting. High levels of narrative staging anchored each address in shared values, historical references, and moral exemplars, creating a dense contextual frame that guided audience interpretation. This emphasis on stage-setting reduced the need for plot disruption or tension escalation, allowing contentious issues to remain outside the narrative horizon without fracturing coherence. Silence thus became a discursive accomplishment, produced through storytelling choices that foregrounded continuity, reassurance, and forward orientation. By conceptualising silence as a constructed feature of leadership narration, the paper contributes to scholarship on digital political leadership, elite communication, and democratic governance. It extends research on personalisation and agenda-setting by showing how leaders exercise attentional control through narrative design rather than issue engagement alone. Situated in a Global South democracy, the study offers a framework for analysing how contemporary leaders perform legitimacy and manage uncertainty through storytelling practices that render silence meaningful within digitally mediated public communication.