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#NaMo: The Political Work of the Selfie in the 2014 Indian General Elections

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International Journal of Communication 9(2015), Feature 1686–1700 1932–8036/2015FEA0002

#NaMo: The Political Work of the Selfie

in the 2014 Indian General Elections

ANIRBAN K. BAISHYA1
University of Southern California, USA

Keywords: Narendra Modi, BJP, selfie, Twitter, election, affect, subsumption

A May 2014 issue of Open Magazine, an Indian weekly news digest, celebrated the victory of
Narendra Modi, the new Indian prime minister, with an iconic portrait with the caption “Triumph of the
Will” (see Figure 1). Given the pronounced right-wing leanings of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the
political party with which Modi is affiliated, the reference in the caption to the Leni Reifenstahl film of the
same name might have been more than just a mere play on words. Added to the oft-iterated implication
of the BJP ministry in the Gujarat riots of 2002 during Narendra Modi’s chief ministership, Open
Magazine’s low-angle portrait of the incumbent prime minister, together with the caption, seemed to
convey a deliberate construction of Modi as a man of iron will, whose government promised not to stray
from the “right” path (pun intended).

Figure 1. Open Magazine’s celebratory

cover image of Narendra Modi.

1
I would like to thank Nitin Govil, Amit Baishya, and Darshana Sreedhar for their valuable insights and
suggestions for this article.

Copyright © 2015 (Anirban K. Baishya, baishya@usc.edu). Licensed under the Creative Commons
Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives (by-nc-nd). Available at http://ijoc.org.
International Journal of Communication 9(2015) #NaMo 1687

However, it is not oversized, spectacular images such as these that won Modi the elections.
Rather, Narendra Modi’s electoral campaign was marked by a strong digital presence, with regular updates
being posted through a Twitter account. Selfies played an important part in this campaign, with the
politician posting pictures of himself with his party’s electoral symbol, with celebrities, and with family
members. Contrary to Open Magazine’s Bonapartean portrait of Narendra Modi, his own uploads seemed
to exude a very different aura. The more amateur look of Narendra Modi’s selfies, I suggest, conveyed the
sense of a more believable person rather than an inaccessible icon. This lent the electoral campaign a viral
affective charge that, if it did not win the election, at least proved to be integral to the construction of a
public imaginary around the personality of Narendra Modi. Like the Battle of Waterloo that the Duke of
Wellington purportedly claimed to have been won in the everyday spaces of the playing fields of Eton, the
2014 general elections in India might well have been claimed in the viral playing field of the Internet.

Do-It-Yourself Virality: The Selfie as a Delivery System

Although photographs have always played an important role in Indian electoral campaigns, Modi’s
use of selfies to connect with his support base was unprecedented. However, this was not the first
instance in which Modi effectively used technological means of dissemination for political leverage. In
2012, for instance, Modi’s campaign mobilized three-dimensional holography to project a 10-foot-tall
image of him delivering a speech across several BJP rallies and public meetings in the country. The use of
3-D holographic technology revealed a keen understanding of the impact of techno-spectacular media2
and the benefits of the ostensible “omnipresence” that they accorded.3 However, unlike the capital-
intensive holographic projections that were reported to have cost Rs. 5 crore (approximately $8 million)
per projection,4 Modi’s selfies were much less cost- and labor-intensive. Affordable and easy to produce,
selfies accorded Modi’s public self with something that the spectacular hologram could never achieve—a
touch of virality. The holographic projection required people to actually attend a rally to see it, whereas
Modi’s viral self proved to be a much more effective delivery system that could reach his audience in more
convenient and intimate interfaces—desktops, tablets, and mobile phones. The holographic projections
demanded a singular presence, but the selfies compressed time and space and allowed the recipients to
simultaneously inhabit two places. In corollary, Narendra Modi, the man in the selfies, could now infiltrate
the spaces of the everyday.

2
I am indebted to Guy Debord’s (2002) notion of the spectacle, where he claims: “The spectacle cannot
be understood as a mere deception produced by mass-media technologies. It is a worldview that has
actually been materialized” (p. 6). In essence, the spectacle of Narendra Modi produced by the campaign
was technologically enabled, but it externalized the iconicity associated with the cult of the personality
that BJP’s electoral campaign banked upon so heavily.
3
In fact, a section in Narendra Modi’s official website is dedicated to explaining the technology behind 3-D
holography. There is an almost didactic function attached to this inclusion, because it helped project
Modi’s image as a man who is in sync with the technological developments that can lead to progress and
development. See http://www.narendramodi.in/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/3D-Technology.pdf.
4
See http://ibnlive.in.com/news/narendra-modis-3d-campaign-irks-opposition-congress-to-move-
ec/306374-37-170.html.
1688 Anirban K. Baishya International Journal of Communication 9(2015)

In fact, selfies offered a unique two-way connection between the prime ministerial candidate and
his supporters. On his website, for instance, Modi claims that social media was integral to his campaign,
acting as a “direct means of information” that he and his party “gained tremendously from.”5 Not only was
Modi posting his own selfies, he was encouraging his supporters to do the same, citing the selfies of his
supporters shared over social media as proof of a positive political culture. Although such claims of
optimism deserve critical dissection, one thing is certain: Social media and the possibilities of viral
circulation had been actively recognized and tapped as potent political tools. The medium of the selfie
allowed a do-it-yourself form of virality, ensuring that the “NaMo” (short for Narendra Modi) syndrome
never went out of circulation. But what exactly was the message that was circulating through the use of
selfies? To answer that question, we need to turn to the form of the selfie itself.

The Affect of the Everyday: The Form and Function of the Modi Selfies

Whereas images such as the Open Magazine cover and the holographic behemoth revel in the
aesthetics of the spectacular, the selfie grounds itself in the familiar, the routinized, and the everyday. In
fact, the elimination of the spectacular in the selfie lends it a peculiar sense of authenticity. Shot by the
user with a handheld cellphone camera, this first-person point of view of the self is ostensibly amateur, for
the corporeal self is never detached from the recording medium. The selfie is also amateur in the
common-sense meaning of the word amateur that stands in opposition to the word professional. The very
idea that digital technology—and, in particular, the cell-phone camera—allows for a certain level of
democratization of imaging technology that was previously the domain of professional photographers
points to the kind of access to technology that connects the selfie to the notion of the everyday.

An argument can be made—and has been made—about selfies being as old as self-portraiture
(see Eler, 2013). The crucial point to note, however, is that the digital selfie is not a matter of mere
technological advancement over older forms of recording the self through oil paintings or even celluloid
photography—the selfie is not merely modern technology, it is a different technic altogether.6 The drive to
visually record the self might have similar precedents, but the self produced by a selfie and a traditional
self-portrait are not the same. The connection of the hand to the cell phone at the moment of recording
makes the selfie a sort of externalized inward look, and the point of view of the selfie is not necessarily
the external gaze of the painter’s eye as he steps out of his body to see and render his own form, but that
of the hand that has been extended the power of sight. Thus, in a strange way, the so-called amateur look
of the selfie also becomes an index of the real—the point of view of the selfie seems authentic, because it
is as if the human body is looking at itself. Amateur, therefore, becomes synonymous with the everyday
and the evidentiary in the case of the selfie, and an embedded presence in time and space accompanies

5
See http://www.narendramodi.in/a-victory-for-the-people-a-victory-for-india-and-the-triumph-of-the-
ballot/.
6
I use the term technic in the sense that Bernard Steigler (1998) uses it in Technics and Time (1998). He
describes technics as the “pursuit of life by other means than life” (p. 17). Steigler is pointing out that
technologies are not merely material forms that shape the world outside us, but are affectively ingrained
in us as normalized habits. I borrow Steigler’s definition to point out that selfies and selfie-taking, like
many other forms of digital culture, are not merely outside us but also within us.
International Journal of Communication 9(2015) #NaMo 1689

selfie imagery. This, then, is the affective charge of the selfie—a sense of liveness, an ostensible reality
conveyed visually, frozen in bytes and ever ready to be shared.

It is this affective form of the selfie that was mobilized in Narendra Modi’s electoral campaign.
The Modi selfies literally produced another body that was Narendra Modi. Mirroring Ernst Kantorowicz’s
(1957) exegesis of the inherent duality of the office and the person of the king in medieval Europe, the
Modi selfies seemed to emphasize that the office of the prime minister was marked by a similar dualism.
However, because the selfies operated within the realm of the routinized and the everyday, they
paradoxically seemed to visually fuse the body natural and the body politic. Thus, the prime ministerial
candidate that was Narendra Modi seemed inseparable from Narendra Modi, the everyman. The amateur
and everyday form of the selfie, then, complemented the ideology of the BJP and its emphatic projection
of Narendra Modi as a man of austerity, routine, and practice. Consider, for instance, the emphasis on
Modi’s official website on slogans such as “We need action, not acts” and on Modi’s career as a political
activist of the street, “immersed in nation building from a very young age”, which essentially pits this
image against the dynastic operation seen in political parties such as Congress (see Admin, 2014a,
2014b). This idea of a self-made man has been integral to Modi’s public persona and has been part of a
larger public relations machinery that includes a comic book titled Bal Narendra: Childhood Stories of
Narendra Modi, which narrates episodes from Modi’s childhood, emphasizing his drive for moral action and
extolling notions of self-dependence, selflessness, and bravery.7

The selfies extended and reemphasized this rhetoric of Narendra Modi as a man of action by
taking advantage of the seemingly inherent, evidentiary, and immediate nature of their form. The idea of
the self-made man seems to have become fused with the idea of the “selfie-made” man; the question of
Modi’s own agency as he clicks his own pictures rather than waiting for a photographer to reach out to the
masses becomes fused with the rationale of “actions, not acts.” This rationale, in fact, has been one of the
ways in which Narendra Modi’s popularity among his support base has been ensured, with the rhetoric of
development being one of the major trump cards that the BJP has played in these elections.8 In a sense,
the immediate and everyday nature of the selfie was integral to BJP and Narendra Modi’s ideological
advertising—even a sort of viral marketing campaign, with more than 4 million followers on Twitter and
more than 17 million likes on the official Facebook page.

The Viral Candidate: Debates and Discussions Around the Modi Selfies

For all its intended benefits, Narendra Modi’s selfie-snapping landed him in controversy on April
30, 2014, when he clicked a selfie while holding a cutout of a lotus (his party symbol) at a polling booth

7
See Basu (2014), where the author describes the comic book as a “How to be like Young Modi Leaflet,”
pointing out its didactic function.
8
Gujarat has been touted as a state with a high level of industrial and commercial development. The
Bharatiya Janata Party has often claimed this to be a sign of the success of Narendra Modi’s chief
ministership, while detractors have often rightly pointed out that the façade of economic success is not an
indicator of social equality that is often overlooked in development indices. For a good critique of this
rhetoric, read Nonica Datta’s (2013) “The Language of Narendra Modi.”
1690 Anirban K. Baishya International Journal of Communication 9(2015)

just minutes after having cast his vote in the city of Ahmedabad, the capital of the state of Gujarat (see
Figure 2).

Figure 2. Narendra Modi's controversial post-poll selfie tweet.

In a highly televised affair, Modi had also addressed a nearby gathering of voters while holding
the party symbol. A First Information Report was filed against Modi for having flouted the provisions of the
1951 Representation of the People Act, whereby candidates are not allowed to hold meetings, campaign or
address voters in any way that might influence the suffrage process. The Election Commission, which is
the national body entrusted with ascertaining the smooth and fair conduct of the elections, alleged that
Narendra Modi had “intended and calculated to influence and affect the result of elections in the
constituencies going to polls . . . not only in Ahmadabad but also in all other constituencies in the State of
Gujarat and elsewhere in the country” (“Read: Election Commission’s notice,” 2014). Sections 126 (1) (a)
and 126 (1) (b) of the law under which Modi was charged, clearly state that no person can “convene, hold
or attend, join or address any public meeting or procession in connection with an election” or “display to
the public any election matter by means of cinematograph, television or other similar apparatus” for 48
hours after the conclusion of the polling process to ensure an unbiased and unmanipulated election.
Section 3 of the Act defines “election matter” as “any matter intended or calculated to influence or affect
the result of an election” (Representation of the People Act, 1951).

Although the law does not mention social media or selfies, it could be argued that the category
“other similar apparatus” could be updated to include them, especially since the BJP’s electoral symbol
was foregrounded so strongly in the images. Though the investigation never achieved any closure, it was
clear that the selfie was a force to be reckoned with, and it is easy to understand why it might have irked
the Election Commission and competing political parties such as the Congress and the Aam Admi Party.
International Journal of Communication 9(2015) #NaMo 1691

The content of the selfie featured Narendra Modi‘s face, unusually rounded due to distortion from the
closeness of the cell-phone camera’s wide-angle lens to the subject matter. This smiling image of the
politician, almost homely in his disposition as he holds up the lotus cut-out, while prominently displaying
the black ink stripe on the forefinger as a mark of having voted, is also an invitation to suffrage, as the
tweet was accompanied by the caption “Voted! Here is my selfie” (Modi, 2014b). This is particularly
significant, because the selfie now became a call to political action, wherein the invitation was not only to
partake in the democratic process but to make the right choice by voting for Narendra Modi.

The persuasive idea of making the right choice by electing Modi was also evident in another
selfie, this time featuring Modi with the author Chetan Bhagat. Bhagat, a vocal supporter of Modi’s
candidature and the purported development it would bring, (Srivastava, 2014)9 posted a selfie of the two
of them after a meeting on April 21 (see Figure 3). The selfie carried the caption “Met #namo. You know a
leader has the youth pulse when he can discuss job creation and is still up for a selfie!” (Bhagat, 2014a)
The image reiterated the rational values of the man of action that have been projected as Narendra Modi’s
unique selling point.

Figure 3. Narendra Modi’s selfie with Chetan Bhagat.

9
See http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report-modi-s-economic-agenda-is-good-for-india-will-generate-
jobs-for-youth-chetan-bhagat-1962212.
1692 Anirban K. Baishya International Journal of Communication 9(2015)

When Modi shared the same photograph on his Twitter account on the occasion of Bhagat’s
birthday, Bhagat tweeted, “When the front-running PM candidate of the world’s biggest democracy
remembers your birthday and posts a selfie, have to say, it feels nice” (Bhagat, 2014b). The tweet
reemphasized the aura of the everyman that has been central to Narendra Modi’s candidature. A selfie
that became viral after Modi was elected as prime minister again highlighted the idea of the accessible
everyman that Modi was being made out to be (see Figure 4). This one featured Narendra Modi seeking
“blessings from his mother,” Hiraben, after having won the elections (Modi, 2014d).

Figure 4. Narendra Modi with his mother, Hiraben.

Modi’s selfies with Chetan Bhagat and with his mother painted Modi’s public image as a man of
everyday, rational values for whom the mundane rituals of conversing and greeting and respect for
preordained structures of the normative family were of paramount importance. Along with the “Chai Pe
Charcha” (Conversation Over Tea) campaign in which Narendra Modi met and interacted with the public in
a modified version of the over-coffee talk-show format, selfies such as these repeated the rhetoric of
everydayness. The “rational” leader, after all, had to be a man of the everyday to be able to understand
the travails of the common man, or so the rhetoric implied. The language of the selfie, therefore, was a
International Journal of Communication 9(2015) #NaMo 1693

part of what Theodore Adorno (2002) has called “the jargon of authenticity” (p. 3). Adorno refers to the
rhetoric of the everyday and the banal that allows certain ideological constructs to be projected as
“authentic” experience that remains untouched by the seemingly corruptive influences of modernity. Such
jargons of authenticity promise an absolute and pure experience of life and the world, which is, ironically,
as artificially constructed as that which it promises a refuge from. Narendra Modi’s authenticity has been
repeatedly emphasized by the electoral campaign through various narrative modalities—that of talk show,
the comic book, and the selfie.10

In effect, what social media and selfies helped Narendra Modi and the BJP attain was a
consolidation of a political vantage point where the public image of the prime ministerial candidate could
circulate virally at an accelerated pace. In Virality: Contagion Theory in the Age of Networks, Tony
Sampson argues that the viral inhabits “a space in which affects are significantly passed on, via
suggestions made by others, more and more through networks” (2012, p. 5). Such was the nature of
#NaMo, the digital avatar of BJP’s electoral spearhead; #NaMo was a viral warhead that existed outside
the time of the real world, yet claimed to be from within it. From suggestion to suggestion, image to
image, #NaMo spread virally through an affectively charged electoral field, until #NaMo, the viral
candidate was made flesh as Narendra Modi, the prime minister.

Selfie Grande: Subsumption and the Political Labor of the Selfie

From legal controversy to political advertising, Narendra Modi’s digital presence and selfie
imagery have intensively permeated the Indian mediascape. For instance, Amul, the Indian dairy
cooperative that has conducted an ad campaign commenting on significant happenings through its
mascot, the “Amul Girl” for more than five decades, also came out with a promotional image after BJP’s
resounding win in the general elections. The Amul image carried the caption “Ab Ki Baar, Bhajap
Sweekar!” (This time, BJP is accepted), a clever play on BJP’s election slogan, “Ab Ki Baar, Modi Sarkaar”
(This time, Modi’s government) (see Figure 5).

10
Adorno’s analysis is pertinent to this case, because he warns against the potential for fascist absolutism
in such jargon. Adorno speaks of the “cult of authenticity” in which “the authority of the absolute is
overthrown by absolutized authority” (2002, p. 3). The potential of fascism is one of the strong critiques
leveled against the Hindu right wing, which has been repeatedly implicated in attempts to impose an
overarching pro-Hindu framework in India. For a more detailed analysis, see Vanaik (1997) and Natarajan
(2009).
1694 Anirban K. Baishya International Journal of Communication 9(2015)

Figure 5. Amul’s Modi ad with the Amul Girl shown

clicking a selfie with the prime minister (Mishra, 2014).11

The image shows the Amul Girl clicking a selfie with Narendra Modi as he holds bread and butter.
The cartoonish reference to the selfie might be humorous, but given Amul’s tradition of commenting on
significant political and news events, the advertisement testifies to the viral impact of the Modi selfies.
Perhaps Amul’s nod to the selfie syndrome points toward a far more important issue, for the image might
have worked even if the cell phone were to be omitted. If the selfie was important enough to be
referenced in the Amul advertisement, it was probably proof that taking a selfie could indeed be political
work.

This seems to complement Modi’s polling-booth call to action—“Voted! Here is my selfie.” In fact,
Modi’s polling-booth selfie was not an isolated element but rather a node in an intensive network of
exchanges. As mentioned earlier, Modi supporters were encouraged to take selfies and upload them onto
social media sites. On April 29, when posting his polling-booth selfie, Modi also tweeted “Selfie is in! Share
yours using #SelfieWithModi & see what happens” (Modi, 2014a). On Twitter, images and tweets with the
hashtag “#SelfieWithModi” began trending as Modi supporters started sharing post-poll selfies, often
foregrounding, or even solely featuring, the forefinger striped with black ink as evidence of having voted.
This was the other, paradoxical end of Modi’s selfie experiment, as Modi himself does not appear in them.
Rather, it is an invitation to be a part of a political phenomenon where the nomenclature “SelfieWithModi”

See http://www.india.com/whatever/when-amul-celebrated-ab-ki-baar-bhajap-sweekar-with-narendra-
11

modi-selfie-60274/
International Journal of Communication 9(2015) #NaMo 1695

belies the fact that Narendra Modi as a political personality remains largely inaccessible, at least in the
way the word with might seem to imply (see Figure 6).

Figure 6. Selfies uploaded by Modi supporters on Twitter (♔K°, 2014; Dev. 2014).12

If the black ink stripe was evidence of voting, the selfie became an index of not merely the vote
but of voting for Narendra Modi. The idea of the secrecy of the ballot is destabilized here, as the selfie
stands in as an evidentiary form whose production is not merely leisure or casual clicking but a kind of
informal political labor. Here, the selfie becomes redolent of what Steven Shaviro (2013) describes as the
total subsumption of life by labor in the neoliberal economy. For Shaviro, “Real subsumption leaves no
aspect of life uncolonized. It endeavors to capture, and to put to work, even those things that are
uneconomical” (2013, para. 10). As per this postulation, one is constantly laboring in the neoliberal
economy, with value being extracted even from “feelings and moods and subjective states” in the creation
of brands. The ostensibly casual selfie, then, is also laboriously produced—the “feelings, moods and
subjective states” of Modi supporters in this instance were totally subsumed into the creation of the NaMo
brand.

If the political potential of supporters’ selfies was indeed subsumed within the field of electoral
labor, there was another, more literal sense in which the selfie syndrome became subsumptive in the
Narendra Modi case. The selfies uploaded by supporters were compiled into a photomosaic portrait of
Narendra Modi. The statement on Narendra Modi’s website explains:

12
See https://twitter.com/SD_1664/status/461372228425093120/photo/1 and
https://twitter.com/Kaushal_75/status/461369441838567424/photo/1
1696 Anirban K. Baishya International Journal of Communication 9(2015)

Selfies have re-defined the way we share our feelings. Make sure your selfie is a part of
this historic victory mosaic, send your wishes with #congratsnamo. Find your selfie &
even locate your friends who have shared theirs. Together, be a part of this new
beginning & lay the foundations of a strong developed India. (Explore the Mosaic, n.d.,
para. 1).

The selfie is actively recognized as a form of political labor, but one that the BJP rhetoric claims
to be both “patriotic” and “historical.” Here, the selfie is not only accorded evidentiary value but is raised
to the status of the archival and the narratological. The narrative is that of the patriarchal nation-state and
that of the BJP’s teleological understanding of progress and development. According to this narrative
impulse, it would seem that the true history of the Indian state remains unwritten, but can be written,
albeit under the censorial gaze of the new government.13 The casual form of the selfie is mobilized here as
an invitation to participate in a sort of an instant history that is a token participation at best, and a form of
historiographic surveillance at worst. The form of the selfie is fused with a selective ideal of responsible
citizenship and suffrage in which only that which adheres to the party ideology—whether knowingly or
unknowingly—can be allowed entry into the realm of the historical. The historical is equated with BJP’s
ideological stance in the Modi Mosaic via the medium of the selfie, for the viewer is urged to find her photo
within the portrait of Narendra Modi (see Figure 7).

Figure 7. The Modi Mosaic at different zoom levels.

13
For instance, soon after the BJP government came to power, Megha Kumar’s book Communalism and
Sexual Violence: Ahmedabad Since 1969 was withdrawn from sales by the publisher Orient Blackswan
under pressure from a civil lawsuit filed by Dinanath Batra of the Siksha Bachao Aandolan Samiti, which
was also active earlier in the censorship of Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History.
International Journal of Communication 9(2015) #NaMo 1697

The Modi Mosaic is the digital manifestation of the absolute fusing of the body natural and the
body politic. As one zooms into the portrait, one begins to see thousands of individual selfies, similar to
the ones on Twitter with the hashtag #SelfieWithModi. In an allegorical way, the body of the nation is
equated with the body of Narendra Modi, the sovereign patriarch. The selfies, it would seem, form the
genetic core of the prime minister’s other body—a virtual body whose “virtual reality,” to return to Shaviro
(2013), “supplements and enhances physical, ‘face-to-face’ reality” (para. 9). Not without reason did one
Twitter user claim, “This is #LEVIATHAN already! We have a Hobbesian #sovereign” (Solanski, 2014). The
reference to Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651) on a Twitter newsfeed might be a stray reference, but the analogy
is striking. The Abraham Bosse etching that forms the frontispiece to Hobbes’ 1651 publication features a
rendition of the body of the sovereign formed by numerous human bodies, as if to visually signify Hobbes’
postulation that the social contract entered into by the multitude legitimizes the absolute authority of the
sovereign (see Frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, n.d.). Like Bosse’s Leviathan, the Modi Mosaic
seeks to confer a similar legitimacy onto Modi’s prime ministership. More strikingly, the Leviathan
reference is interesting because it points toward the idea that the sovereign might be created out of the
multitude but is always above both the subject and the law, as the idea of an absolutist regime cloaked in
the grammar of the popular looms large in Hindu right-wing ideology.

Conclusion: Selfie Is as Selfie Does

Whether it is as coded political messages or as affectively seductive viral marketing, the

Narendra Modi selfies played an important role in the run-up to and aftermath of the 2014 general
elections in India. It would be useful to point out that Narendra Modi’s own selfies are perhaps slightly
different from regular selfies, even those shot by his supporters. Modi’s selfies are highly curated public
performances that are part of a much larger public relations machinery including the hologram, the public
forum, and the comic book. But what is crucial is the way the campaign made it appear as if these were
regular selfies by fusing the political function with the language of the everyday.14

If the Narendra Modi selfies can be seen as one possible way in which selfie culture can move,
what are the implications for a general theory of the selfie? To be sure, the selfie is not as casual a form
as it is made out to be; maybe, in its projection as casual, the selfie hides a more deliberately
performative disposition. What can be gleaned from the Narendra Modi example, perhaps, is a need to
recognize the selfie’s status as labor. The work of the selfie can be seen as coextensive with its
materiality. Work does not exist outside of the selfie—the selfie itself is work, whether it is as visual
evidence or, as in the case of Narendra Modi, the consolidation of the affective relations that produce the

14
In effect, the selfies along with the other public relations arsenal made Narendra Modi a star figure in
the sense that Guy Debord has described in The Society of the Spectacle (2002), where he writes that
such figures are “specialists of apparent life [and] serve as superficial objects that people can identify with
in order to compensate for the fragmented specializations that they actually live” (p. 16). Debord goes on
to elaborate an important point about social labor and stardom when he writes that stars “embody the
inaccessible results of social labor by dramatizing the by-products of that labor which are magically
projected above it as its ultimate goals—power and vacations . . . a governmental power may personalize
itself as a pseudostar” (p. 16). This seems to translate very well in Narendra Modi’s case as the PR
machinery did play with the idea of political labor by making it look more recreational.
1698 Anirban K. Baishya International Journal of Communication 9(2015)

sovereign. In its status as work, the selfie constitutes a crucial object of knowledge. To borrow from Gilles
Deleuze’s (1992) postulation in “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” technology does not exist in a
vacuum, but instead expresses “those social forms capable of generating and using them” (p. 6). And it is
in this expression of the selfie that the imprint of our times can be found—the selfie, after all, is what the
selfie does.

References

Admin. (2014a, May 14). Dedicated life [Web page]. Retrieved from http://www.narendramodi.in/the-
activist/

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