Zohran Mamdani. The name is everywhere. For all those who are fortunately content with the drama of local politics, this is not any railway station platform announcement. Mamdani isn’t a Rajdhani Express sequel. He is the newly elected Mayor of New York. True that it’s a world away from our regular panchayat elections, but his campaign is worth mentioning in a writing on art, primarily because of the visual identity that contributed to his success.
Mamdani was clever enough to understand the power of design and colours in communicating his core message in an instant. At the outset of his political campaign, he enlisted Aneesh Bhoopathy, a visual artist, to help him build voters’ trust with the right branding. Bhoopathy, along with inputs from his team and Mamdani’s wife, decided to use colours that people encountered every day, on the streets of New York. And thus, taxicab yellow, bodega awnings and Mamdani’s name written in a hand-lettered style were employed to bring on the nostalgia; a yearning for what was supposedly lost. The campaign poster that was widely circulated also relied on the human touch, with its bold and clear visual messages. And it worked!
Long before technology could create grand identities with computer graphics, there were artists who sketched out logos that defined the nation’s destiny with their pen and paper. After India’s independence, when a democratic way of governance came into being, the major challenge to the Election Commission was the illiteracy of a majority of the Indian population. It was understood then that the candidates would have to heavily rely on symbols to successfully pull off this massive exercise. So from the beginning of the 1950s, officials of the Election Commission on whom this task fell, relied, in turn, on the skills of one man, MS Sethi, who, with his HB pencils, drew out party symbols.
Hired by the ballot committee in 1950, Sethi drew out the symbols after discussions with the officials, with care being taken to ensure that they would be easily recognised by the average voter. The obvious choices in the early years were illustrations of rural India, like the ox and the plough. In the 60s, tractors appeared alongside the cattle. Over the years, objects of daily use like the broom, the gas cylinder, and the pressure cooker joined the list. For more than 40 years, Sethi’s logos for Indian political parties stood as testimony to the evolution of daily life in an Indian household. There are always around 100 free symbols with the Election Commission at any given time, for parties and independent candidates to choose from, and most of them originated from pencils in the hands of Sethi.
Rickshaws and harmoniums co-existing with air conditioners and dish antennas is what constitutes the spirit of our nation. The man who understood the pulse of the country and gave us the symbols that spell hope every time we vote for a glorious tomorrow, maybe no more. He may have bid his final farewell unsung and unrecognised, but his unsigned art will continue to seal the destinies of every politician in India for generations to come.