Yesterday’s newspaper offered a fascinating lesson in political narratology. What looked like news slowly unfolded as a carefully structured story - crisis in the past, redemption in the present. In the age of neoliberal communication, elections are no longer just campaigns; they are narratives crafted like advertisements. When politics begins to speak the language of branding, what happens to democracy?
Political Narratology: When Politics Learns to Tell Stories Like Advertisements
Elections have always been moments of heightened political imagination. Parties mobilize symbols, slogans, and promises to persuade voters. But in recent decades something subtle yet profound has changed. Elections are no longer merely arenas of political campaigning; they have become laboratories of political storytelling.
Until the late twentieth century, professional political advertising had not yet become an established feature of India’s electoral landscape. Politics had campaigns, not advertisements. Persuasion was anchored in rallies, speeches, pamphlets, and ideological appeals rather than in carefully crafted narratives resembling brand promotions.
That distinction has now quietly collapsed.
What we are witnessing today is not simply political communication but what might be called political narratology - the art of structuring political reality as a story.
The Newspaper as Narrative
This thought occurred to me while reading The Hindu (05 March 2026). The newspaper opened with an unusual format: four preliminary pages labelled J1 to J4 before the “main” newspaper began from page 1.
J1 and J3 were in Malayalam, J2 followed the paper’s regular feature layout, and J4 appeared as a classified-style page.
But what unsettled me was not the format; it was the story these pages collectively told.
Act One: The Crisis Narrative
Page J1 presented a bleak portrait of Kerala in crisis:
KSRTC on the verge of collapse
Nearly 40% of government schools facing closure
An empty treasury
Disrupted welfare pensions
Civil Supplies unable to control soaring prices
Government hospitals reportedly lacking medicines
The narrative expanded through reports on stalled infrastructure: unpaid tar bills halting road construction, delays in NH-17 expansion, deadlock in the GAIL pipeline project, and uncertainty over the Idamalayar–Kochi transmission line meant to address power shortages.
At the centre of this tableau was a dramatic headline:
“Kerala in Darkness.”
Literally, it referred to one-hour load shedding beginning that day. But metaphorically, it framed the entire discourse as one of economic collapse and administrative failure.
The story was clear: a state in decline.
Act Two: The Temporal Trick
But the narrative contained a subtle device - one that would escape a casual reader.
The dates of these news reports appeared in extremely small font. Only a careful reader would notice them. And those dates mattered.
They mapped precisely the period between May 2012 and September 2015, corresponding to the tenure of the UDF government.
The ten years of LDF rule from 2016 onward were conspicuously absent.
In narratological terms, this was selective temporal framing - a way of assigning crisis to a specific past.
Act Three: The Redemption Narrative
Then came page J3, where the story suddenly reversed itself.
Every crisis described earlier appeared miraculously resolved:
no load shedding
welfare pensions distributed without interruption
pipelines progressing
roads being built
new school buildings constructed
textbooks delivered before the academic year
KSRTC reporting profits
Unlike J1, J3 carried no dates.
The absence of dates was itself rhetorical. While J1 anchored crisis in a carefully curated past, J3 constructed a timeless present.
The implicit message was simple:
Look where we are now.
Advertising Disguised as News
A small disclaimer on the margin stated that these pages were not editorial content but advertisements issued by the Information and Public Relations Department of the Government of Kerala.
Yet the placement of this disclaimer was so discreet that most readers would miss it.
What we see here is not straightforward misinformation but something more sophisticated: narrative orchestration.
Facts are not invented; they are arranged.
Events are not fabricated; they are sequenced.
Memory is not erased; it is curated.
The Rise of Political Narratology
What fascinated me was not the politics of one party versus another but the broader transformation in political communication.
Across party lines, politics today increasingly resembles neoliberal marketing. Governance is narrated through metrics, visuals, emotional cues, and carefully managed timelines. The state communicates with citizens the way brands communicate with consumers.
In this transformation:
achievements become story arcs
crises become plot points
statistics become visual props
memory becomes narrative material
The voter is no longer addressed merely as a political subject but as an audience.
When Campaigns Become Stories
Political narratology works through familiar literary devices:
Temporal framing – selecting specific time periods to structure blame or success.
Narrative contrast – crisis versus redemption.
Visual sequencing – arranging information to guide emotional response.
Selective silence – what remains unsaid becomes as important as what is said.
In short, politics begins to operate like storytelling.
The Unsettling Question
This brings us to a deeper question:
What happens to politics when campaigns transform into narratives designed like advertisements?
When governance is narrated as a success story, dissent reframed as noise, and history edited like a promotional reel, politics risks losing its ethical friction.
Debate gives way to branding.
Accountability yields to affect.
Memory becomes a resource to be mined rather than a terrain to be contested.
Elections may still remain democratic in form.
But when political communication adopts the grammar of advertising, democracy itself begins to speak in slogans.
And that, perhaps, is the most telling narrative of our times.
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