By Ashish Singh
In the lanes of India’s small towns and the boulevards of its larger cities, one sees a curious spectacle. A new generation of young men and women proclaim themselves as the inheritors of political destiny. Their faces shine on posters pasted on crumbling walls, their gestures are rehearsed in front of mobile phone cameras, their speeches are tailored to catch the rhythm of applause. Yet beneath the glitter and ambition lies an emptiness, a lack of genuine commitment to the laborious work of public service.
Philosophy reminds us that politics was once understood as the pursuit of the good life, a collective inquiry into justice and virtue. Aristotle in his Politics wrote that man is a political animal, not because he seeks power for its own sake but because he cannot achieve his highest potential outside the community. What one witnesses today in these aspiring leaders is a distortion of that idea. They are political animals only in the sense of performance. They network with ministers and police officials, wear their connections as badges of honour, and display these symbols before their peers as proof of future greatness. The polis, the people, become mere background props.
The work they do is largely symbolic. A tree is planted but forgotten the next day. Blankets are distributed, but only after the camera has captured the benevolent gesture. Food is given to the poor, though only so long as a photograph can immortalise the act. Here we see Plato’s warning in the Republic come alive: when the shadows on the wall are mistaken for reality, the pursuit of appearances overwhelms the pursuit of truth. For these youths, politics is the shadow play, a theatre of gestures designed to elicit patronage, likes, and recognition.
Their strategies reveal a new grammar of political aspiration. Followers are no longer companions in struggle but political currency, counted and displayed like coins in a ledger. Group photos with senior leaders are treated as electoral capital, proof that access will one day translate into power. Networking dinners and late-night gatherings become their modern yajnas—rituals performed not for transcendence but for proximity, with the guest list replacing sacred mantras and the promise of patronage substituting divine blessing. What once was a matter of ideological debate or civic sacrifice is now reimagined as a ritual of networking.
In smaller cities, the theatre is cruder yet revealing. A selfie with a local strongman or the faintest handshake with a district official becomes currency. With that photograph, the aspiring politician announces to the neighbourhood that he or she has entered the circle of influence. But when asked about concrete policies or the burdens of governance, the answers are vague. The refrain is that the blessings of the people will suffice, yet the people’s blessings are invoked only as a tool to strengthen networks.
In metropolitan spaces, the performance is more refined but equally hollow. Social media replaces the dusty walls of towns, and branding replaces groundwork. Instagram lives and slickly produced reels become evidence of “engagement”. These young aspirants treat politics as a personal brand, to be curated and packaged like a consumer product. What once required years of ideological struggle or public mobilisation is now collapsed into a thirty-second clip. The philosopher Hannah Arendt warned that, when politics becomes spectacle, action risks dissolving into mere performance, and responsibility into mere appearance.
The tragedy is not merely the superficiality of these acts but the slow erosion of trust they produce. The public, weary of established leaders, looks at these new faces with some hope, only to discover that the rhetoric is recycled, the ambition personal, the gestures cosmetic. The promise of renewal dissolves into repetition. Citizens become extras in the political theatre, called upon to clap, to form the background of photographs, to cheer in rallies. They are rarely partners in shaping policy, let alone beneficiaries of authentic change.
Nietzsche might call this the will to power stripped of creativity, a pursuit of influence without the courage of responsibility. These youths embody a hunger for recognition rather than a desire for transformation. Their politics is not a philosophy of service but a ritual of self-promotion.
The question that remains is whether this cycle can ever be broken. Will these performers, when they ascend to positions of power, learn to look beyond the camera lens and the language of gestures? Or will politics continue to degenerate into an endless play of symbols where the audience is entertained but never transformed?
Real politics, as the philosophers remind us, requires more than presence on a stage. It requires courage to speak unpopular truths, patience to address complex realities, and humility to accept that power is only justified when exercised for the many rather than the few. Until such virtues return to the practice of politics, the new generation of aspirants may succeed in becoming office holders, but they will fail in becoming statesmen.
(Ashish Singh is a social and political scientist.)
