A couple of years ago, during the Bharat Jodo Yatra, I wrote a column titled ‘The Laal Singh Chaddha moment in Indian politics’. It argued that Rahul Gandhi had brought something back into Indian politics that had almost disappeared: the body.
By walking, he restored the political fact that leadership is not only a matter of speeches, manifestos, cabals or social-media algorithms. It is also a matter of sweating, sleeping in unfamiliar places, being touched by strangers. In doing so, Rahul Gandhi appeared to cross the very mythical barrier between the individual and the crowd.
Every great political leader must, at some point, undergo a strange loss of self. They cease to be merely a person and become what the crowd needs them to represent. They become liminal. Then, if they survive politically, they must become separate again—not as private citizens, but as individuals who can no longer fully belong to the force that made them.
In Crowds and Power (1960), Elias Canetti says that crowds arise from a deep human fear of being touched. Ordinary life is organised around distance: rank, property, manners, offices and social roles all protect the individual from unwanted contact. To join a crowd is to temporarily surrender that protection. People willingly press together, strangers become equal, and the usual boundaries of class, identity and hierarchy dissolve.
Canetti called this release a “discharge”. It is why crowds can feel euphoric even when they are angry, destructive or politically incoherent. The crowd offers an escape from isolation. It allows people to stop being separate selves and become part of something larger.
Social media understands this instinct perfectly. It is a crowd without bodies, a crowd that can assemble in seconds and disperse without its members ever having met eye to eye. Its cruelty is its reason for existence. It destroys individuals because individuals represent the very separateness the digital crowd resents. The anonymous pile-on, the viral humiliation, the demand that someone be expelled from public life—these are modern forms of Canetti’s discharge.
But the crowd is not only an instrument of destruction. It is also the raw material from which political leadership emerges.
The leaders of the Independence movement understood this. Mahatma Gandhi walked among crowds, travelled third-class, courted arrest and exposed his body to hunger, prison and violence. His politics was an effort to become indistinguishable from the people he represented. He aspired to be the crowd.
Nathuram Godse’s bullets were the terminal reminder to Gandhi that he was not the crowd. The assassin insisted that Gandhi was an individual, with a name, a body and a life that could be ended. Only death could draw that distinction.
Rahul Gandhi, Neha Bora and Abhijeet Dipke are still, in Canetti’s sense, crowds. They have not yet fully separated from the collective forces they represent. If they survive their crowds, they may become leaders. When they do, they will become individuals—and that is how the process works.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi is the opposite. He has survived his crowd. He is a leader precisely because he has crossed to the other side of it and become its antithesis.
A crowd dies if it has no aim. Modi no longer stands with the crowd because he believes he was its aim, and that the crowd has achieved its goal. He would like the crowd to disperse. He has survived his crowd. He will never be able to do what Rahul Gandhi, Bora or Dipke are doing now, because he has reached the far shore of the crowd.
Modi’s politics has perfected the art of distance. He is at his most personal when he addresses a million people. The leader is no longer merely among the people; he is above them, beyond them, and somehow the reason the nation exists. He is god-like. Consider the sword and the crown he so often wears. He believes no one else can be entrusted with the mission. This is why he will not name a successor.
Jantar Mantar has been an unlikely confluence of disparate forces. The Congress represented by Rahul Gandhi, the relatively radical All India Students’ Association embodied by Bora, and the seemingly apolitical Cockroach Janta Party represented by Dipke have come together to demand the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar. They hold him responsible for what they describe as manipulation connected to special intensive revisions of electoral rolls.
Gyanesh Kumar became CEC on February 19, 2025, succeeding Rajiv Kumar. He had already been an election commissioner during the 2024 Lok Sabha election. He and Sukhbir Singh Sandhu had been appointed in March 2024, shortly before the general election.
The present controversy does not, by itself, establish great wrongdoing in the 2024 election. But elections after that date are in question. Now, Gyanesh Kumar’s appointment was made at the behest of the Prime Minister and Home Minister. And neither of them is likely to be keen to dissolve back into the crowd. Their attire, public personas and entire political style insist on separateness.
Canetti’s leader does not merely lead the crowd; he seeks to outlive it. He turns its hopes into his mission, its sacrifices into his legitimacy, and its possible disappearance into proof that he alone was necessary. The Jantar Mantar protests were experiments in how the crowd evolves into individuals.
There is a birth of a kind here. And death.
C P Surendran | Author whose latest volume of poetry is Window with a Train Attached
(Views are personal)
(cpsurendran@gmail.com)