ELECTION SCENARIO In the theater of politics, street plays become the face and the script of ideology. As the election campaign intensifies, various parties and the election commission are using the medium of theatre to ensure maximum support, audience and voter turnout. The stage for drama and dialogue is ready.
Charlie, 42, (uses only his first name). He is busy memorising his dialogues for a roadside play that his troupe has been enacting this poll season.
At the DDA park on Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Marg in the New Delhi Lok Sabha constituency, Charlie and his group of friends from the Chirag Theatre Group have been rehearsing for a show they would be putting up ahead of a poll campaign by the Bharatiya Janata Party candidate Harsha Vardhan in Chandni Chowk. They are belting out lines from their skit for a month, joining the poll campaign of BJP candidates from the seven Lok Sabha seats in Delhi. Poll time only means money for them. “I have been performing these acts for 15 years now. Our group has been active in the theatre circuit in Delhi. The polls season is a good time for us to show our talent through a skit that carries a message. It also helps us earn quick bucks,” says Charlie.
The Chirag Theatre Group has been “hired on contract” by BJP to perform street plays across the city.
Charile, who passed out of Kirori Mal College 15 years ago got involved in theatre through the Dramatics Society of his college.
“Almost all theatre artistes, especially youth, consider election time as earn-while-you-learn time. On an average, we get `2,000 per street play and in a day, we manage to do seven shows,” says Adil.
In the last 10 days of campaigning for the polls on April 10, the group expects to make a few lakh of rupees as earnings from political parties this time around. Apart from BJP, its rivals —AAP and Congress — too have roped in hundreds of such artistes from across the country and theatre colleges for campaigning.
“We have selected around 150 such artists from across the country, including National School of Drama and various other drama colleges to perform street plays,” BJP national general secretary Vani Tripathi told The Sunday Standard.
She explained that street plays, one of the traditional method of campaigning, would be used a lot in the election this time around.
“It will kick-start from April 1 in Delhi and six groups would perform five skits, each running for eighteen minutes,” adds Tripathi.
The artists have also been asked to interact with people for 10 minutes after the show. Similarly, AAP has started holding street plays and is aggressively promoting its candidates. “Through the street plays, artistes are informing people about the party and its agenda, and there are several groups holding political satires at various locations,” AAP’s national spokesperson Deepak Vajpayee says.
Interestingly, Asmita Theatre Group, which was associated with anti-corruption movement and AAP leader Arvind Kejriwal, has claimed that they have not been promoting AAP or any political parties this election season. “From the anti-corruption movement to Nirbhaya protests, we have always been upfront and performed several street plays.
But we don’t perform for political parties,” Asmita’s director Arvind Gaur said. Congress too is not behind. Streets plays have been scheduled for the last phase of campaigning ahead of the elections. “The plays are about the various development projects carried by the Congress government,” Congress MP Sandeep Dikshit says.
The election commission has also roped in theatre groups to perform street plays under the voter awareness programme. The election commission is reaching out to the people so that they can exercise their vote and play an active role in deciding the fate of the seven high-profile Parliamentary seats in the forthcoming election.
“We want voters to come in hordes and participate in the biggest electoral process. We do not want people from any region to be left behind or feel alienated," Delhi Chief Electoral Officer Vijay Dev informs.
The move is aimed at increasing the voting percentage in the capital and to ensure that people from other regions living in the capital are not left out, he adds.
Tollywood singers have been roped in to send the message across Delhi's localities inhabited by people from Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu.
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