Populist language is wordplay by prejudice. All politicians complicate or obfuscate an argument using a specific label to strip away the inconvenient nuances of disagreement and distort their impact. Epithets like Pappu, feku or dimagi Naxals and colonial mindset are not a current Indian phenom. The Greeks started the label game centuries ago.
Demagogue: Word Plato and Aristotle used for politicians who manipulated the people instead of governing wisely. Oligarch: Powerful shorthand for an enemy political faction, now attributed to Putin’s acolytes. Misomousos (hater of the Muses): Uncultured individual or a person hostile to intellectual life. Hostis publicus (public enemy): A Roman ruler’s personal enemy projected as the enemy of the state. Proditor: Traitor to Rome. Perduellis: Enemy engaged in hostile action against Rome. Optimates and Populares: Optimates are defenders of the established Roman order while the populares claimed to speak for the people. Caesarism: Powerful leader who derives legitimacy from personal authority and popular support, rather than one subject to institutional restraints. Heretic: Religious non-believer outside the legitimate moral community. Apostate: One who abandons the faith and must be ostracised. Infidel: Religious outsider. Traitor: From the Latin traditor—“one who hands over.” Seditious: Someone who incites rebellion or disorder. Enemy of the people (ennemi du peuple): Under the French Revolution, used to describe individuals (usually aristocrats condemned to the guillotine) who are not just wrong but are anti-people. Later, Stalin used it to justify repression. Bolshevik: Generic Russian term for communist revolutionaries. Counter-revolutionary: Someone whose politics threatened the revolution. Kulak: Prosperous Russian peasant transformed into a political class enemy. Reactionary: Person opposed to revolutionary change. Radical: Someone seeking fundamental reform but is a social menace. Bourgeois, Capitalist: People the state sees as economic threats to the Revolution. Fifth Column: Spain’s Franco’s imagined enemies within the system. Un-American: It turned political suspicion into a test of national belonging. Subversive: A wonderfully flexible word that encompasses anyone supposedly undermining the existing order. Counter-revolutionary, capitalist roader: People whose ideological disagreement are considered deviants from the Chinese Communist party line. Five Black Categories were unfortunate landlords, rich peasants, counter-revolutionaries, bad elements and rightists who inherited status, political behaviour, and moral worth. Reactionary, anti-party, factionalist and anti-revolutionary: North Korean labels that leave little chance for physical survival. New people and base people: Cambodians suspected as hostile to tyrant Pol Pot. Remainer and Brexiteer: British phrases to say something about a person before that person thought about anything else. Anti-national, urban Naxal, tukde-tukde gang, andolan jivi, Khan Market gang, bhakt, godi media, presstitute, sickular: Modi opponents and supporters.
None of these labels carry genuine weight. But their use is to reduce ideologically disagreeable individuals to the ‘anti-nation’ category. The BJP uses ‘anti-national’ to classify Indians who question government policy as ‘patriotically deficient.’ Urban Naxal is a large ideological satchel stacked with activists, intellectuals, academics, students, and other inconvenients. Tukde-tukde gang gather ideological antagonists in a conspiratorial collective. Khan Market gang adds class and geography to characterise a privileged English-speaking establishment. Sickular suggests diseased secularism. The Opposition isn’t idle in the label department; Godi media describes aggressive pro-BJP journalists; presstitute contemptuously reduces them into government toadies; ‘bhakt’ and ‘andhbhakt’, originally religious phrases now signify political loyalty metastasised into devotional attachment. The interesting asymmetry in the vocabulary of political belonging is that regime supporters are gifted labels that confer membership: patriot, nationalist, comrade, cadre, volunteer, true believer, supporter. The opposing vocabulary is traitor, heretic, anti-national, extremist, subversive, fascist, terrorist-sympathiser. Political labels manufacture a tribe; a patriot acquires meaning because there is an anti-national yardstick and the revolutionary needs the counter-revolutionary. People are easier to mobilise when they are offered not merely a cause but a cast of characters, complete with heroes, villains, and suitably memorable names. Labels supply advance conclusions, which is why labels are useful to power.
The journalist may publish the story, the student may make the speech, and the intellectual may write the essay. But once the appropriate label is attached, readers and viewers have already been subconsciously instructed about the scrutinising voice’s credibility. The label then escapes the moment that created it and acquires the authority of history. Even with perfectly justified ones, the burden of proof is on the accused, not with the accuser. So, the citizen is brainwashed to ignore the arguments of his regime’s opponents, the contradictions and inconvenient truths; all which he encounters is a morally graded category packed with an appropriate emotional response. That is the real power of the political label. It does not merely tell us what someone is called, but tells us, often before we have heard them, what to think of them. Generations later, the labels remain on record as absurd markers of populist grandstanding long after everybody has forgotten who invented them and why.