Indian politicians are, in general, a pompous lot.
Their parliamentary and campaign speeches may be filled with rousing rhetoric but contain precious little self-deprecation or humour, unless, of course, these are unintentional, as when they make remarks that they later regret.
But a few politicians, such as the late Bal Thackeray, head of the Shiv Sena, and Lalu Prasad Yadav, the former Bihar chief minister, used humour as both a powerful political weapon and a useful tool to connect with their audiences.
Popular Hindi poet and professor Kumar Vishwas, campaigning for the Aam Aadmi Party, appears to have been cast in their mould.
He will contest the Lok Sabha election due later this year from Amethi, Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi’s constituency.
He is a Hindi professor and frequently convenes kavi sammelans, or poets’ gatherings, in which he makes many off-colour and politically incorrect jokes while delivering his verses.
Like AAP leader and Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal, Vishwas is from Ghaziabad, a city in Uttar Pradesh that is considered a backwater because of its lack of development and its history of violent organised crime.
Before the Delhi assembly election results, the state's former chief minister, the Congress's Sheila Dikshit, dismissed Kejriwal as a “broom-wielding man from Ghaziabad who thinks he can come to Delhi and sweep it clean.”
That remark proved to be quite ill-considered, because Kejriwal roundly defeated her in her constituency of New Delhi, and AAP won 28 seats, eventually forming the government.
If Kejriwal is a "broom-wielding man from Ghaziabad", Vishwas is even more so.
He was a star campaigner for AAP during the poll, and his ribald humour and provincial image may now help the party win over votes in the Hindi hinterland.
The following video shows him speaking at a rally in Delhi before the assembly election results were announced. He makes numerous quips about Sharad Pawar, Rahul Gandhi and Narendra Modi.
On Sharad Pawar, he said, "That man is worried more about the IPL than the BPL (below poverty line). And he, my friends, is the agriculture minister."
But the same qualities that hinterland voters find charming could repel the intelligentsia. And political opponents could use it against him.
He could also cross the line.
Indeed, even before the Delhi assembly election results were announced, Vishwas had got entangled in controversy over remarks about Muharram several years earlier, for which he had to issue public apologies repeatedly.
The furore over his remarks about Muharram gain significance as they were made nearly a decade ago, but came back to bite him when he entered politics.
While apologising for the remarks about Muharram later, he said he had made them in 2005, at one of his kavi sammelans, where such things were common.
Someone had edited the video of the event to show only the remarks, and the BJP had then tweeted from its official Twitter handle, he said.
Even religious leaders, Vishwas claimed, had acknowledged that his remarks had been taken out of context.
But he reiterated his apology to Janata Dal (United) MLA from Delhi, Shoaib Iqbal, who had supported AAP in the trust vote in the Delhi assembly but had threatened to withdraw support over the remarks.
Protests, however, followed Vishwas to Amethi in Uttar Pradesh, where, on Sunday, Muslims threw stones at his convoy, raised black flags and taunted him to leave the city.
Unfazed, Vishwas said later that the protest had been staged, and that he would win in Amethi by a huge margin.
Even Kejriwal came to his defence, saying that Vishwas had intended the remarks as satire.
So he may have to recalibrate his sense of humour in order to better use it as a political tool, for satire can backfire in politics, unless it is used by masters of the form, such as the late Bal Thackeray.
“Thackeray was a cartoonist and he thought like one,” said Vaibhav Purandare, senior editor of the Times of India, who has written a biography of Bal Thackeray.
Purandare said that Thackeray used humour as a political weapon and also to connect with his audience, who would often come to his rallies in droves just to listen to him.
His humour was also frequently off-colour, and anyone, including the people who shared the dais with him, was fair game.
“Thackeray’s humour was inclusive, in that he was able to engage in a dialogue with his audience, but also very political. But he did not like jokes at his expense,” said Purandare.
Although much of Thackeray's humour was through word play in his native language, Marathi, and hence lost in translation, he would even resort to non-verbal gestures to amuse the audience.
But even Thackeray steered clear of jokes on religion, Purandare said. “The only time when the Sena chief, who exploited religious sentiment, said anything against god was when his wife died."
He had said, bitterly, that there was no god. But for Thackeray, being flippant about religion was political suicide.
The former Bihar chief minister Lalu Yadav, currently in jail for his alleged involvement in the fodder scam, was another politician prone to rib-tickling remarks.
Here is a list of his one-liners.
Here is Lalu, showing his characteristic wit when asked about his success as the railway minister, a portfolio he held from 2004 to 2009. "My mother always told me not to handle a buffalo by its tail, but always catch it by its horns. And I have used that lesson in everything in my life, including the railways."
Later, while discussing the economic turnaround of the railways, he said, “If you don’t milk a cow, it’ll turn sick.”
Unlike the Sena chief, he was often game for laughter at his own expense.
In the following video, he tries to describe in parliament, in broken English, his success with the railways, and gives up halfway through with a self-deprecating laugh. The honourable members of the Lok Sabha, meanwhile, are in splits. These remarks, and this video, reduce Lalu to a buffoon.
But he was also adept at turning his sense of humour to telling effect while discussing politics. Here is Lalu at his best during the 2008 UPA trust vote, describing Mayawati's prime ministerial ambitions:
The UPA trust vote came about as a result of the Left's opposition to the nuclear pact between India and the US. What is significant about the video is how Lalu seamlessly moves from his crack about Mayawati to a discussion of the Hyde Act (the US senate's name for the Indo-US nuclear agreement).
Lalu was no man's fool, though he enjoyed playing the rustic buffoon who knew more than he let on.
Vishwas has little of the buffoon about him, but he appears highly charismatic to the Hindi-speaking people of Amethi and UP.
He is by no means the first person to make off-colour jokes during kavi sammelans, and is a shade less ribald than many poets who participate in the events.
Irreverent, misogynist and politically incorrect humour is common fare during the gatherings, and it appeals to the sensibilities of the country's Hindi-speaking north.
Vishwas, a veteran of these gatherings, and a great orator and public speaker, can add greater nuance and a political dimension to his quips to score among the voters.
There has been controversy already over Vishwas's right-wing remarks. TV journalist Rajdeep Sardesai on December 30, 2013, tweeted about his reservations regarding Vishwas.
'when I listen to @AapYogendra I feel good. When I listen to Kumar Vishwas, I don't feel good. Am I alone in this regard?'
In the Twitter conversation that followed, many English-speaking users, some from the corporate sector, echoed his sentiments.
'@sardesairajdeep No you are not alone. Kumar Vishwas is the Digvijaya Singh of AAP. Is a liability for AAP!' said user Transfer Pricing, who claims in his Twitter profile that his tweets are retweeted by the Wall Street Journal, and supports Narendra Modi for PM.
'@sardesairajdeep @AapYogendra yes, one is balanced another is like a SP politician, boorish' said TV Mohandas Pai, a former member of Infosys' board of directors.
Perhaps the funniest tweet in this conversation was that by Yog Wadhwa, who claims to be a hospitality consultant:
'@sardesairajdeep When I listen to @AapYogendra i fear for my kid's generation. When i hear Kr Vishwas i give up'
However, the reservations of India's elites, or at least, its Twitterati, notwithstanding, Vishwas clearly brings a brash irreverence to politics, that should be tempered by the idealistic nature of the party to which he belongs.
"Politicians in India generally try to appear earnest," said Purandare.
Vishwas clearly does not subscribe to this approach.
In this regard, he stands in very sharp contrast even to his party's convenor, Arvind Kejriwal, whose defining quality, in all of his discussions with the media or his speeches in the Delhi Assembly, is earnestness.
Part of his appeal lies in creating a compelling narrative around himself and his party's members as abused common men and women.
In this video, he attacks Modi on his failure to appoint a Lokayukta in the state. He is combative and very much the activist, but never resorts to humour to undercut his target.
In the following video, Kejriwal is speaking to the media after the attack on AAP's Kaushambi office on Wednesday last week, following party member Prashant Bhushan's support for a referendum in Kashmir.
In this interaction, he is even more earnest, and even plays a martyr to some extent.
It is almost impossible to imagine Kejriwal making a joke like this one by Vishwas:
If Vishwas uses his wit to target his political opponents without resorting to vulgarity, he may well become the giant-killer who also deflates the giant's self-importance.
Their parliamentary and campaign speeches may be filled with rousing rhetoric but contain precious little self-deprecation or humour, unless, of course, these are unintentional, as when they make remarks that they later regret.
But a few politicians, such as the late Bal Thackeray, head of the Shiv Sena, and Lalu Prasad Yadav, the former Bihar chief minister, used humour as both a powerful political weapon and a useful tool to connect with their audiences.
Popular Hindi poet and professor Kumar Vishwas, campaigning for the Aam Aadmi Party, appears to have been cast in their mould.
He will contest the Lok Sabha election due later this year from Amethi, Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi’s constituency.
He is a Hindi professor and frequently convenes kavi sammelans, or poets’ gatherings, in which he makes many off-colour and politically incorrect jokes while delivering his verses.
Like AAP leader and Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal, Vishwas is from Ghaziabad, a city in Uttar Pradesh that is considered a backwater because of its lack of development and its history of violent organised crime.
Before the Delhi assembly election results, the state's former chief minister, the Congress's Sheila Dikshit, dismissed Kejriwal as a “broom-wielding man from Ghaziabad who thinks he can come to Delhi and sweep it clean.”
That remark proved to be quite ill-considered, because Kejriwal roundly defeated her in her constituency of New Delhi, and AAP won 28 seats, eventually forming the government.
If Kejriwal is a "broom-wielding man from Ghaziabad", Vishwas is even more so.
He was a star campaigner for AAP during the poll, and his ribald humour and provincial image may now help the party win over votes in the Hindi hinterland.
The following video shows him speaking at a rally in Delhi before the assembly election results were announced. He makes numerous quips about Sharad Pawar, Rahul Gandhi and Narendra Modi.
On Sharad Pawar, he said, "That man is worried more about the IPL than the BPL (below poverty line). And he, my friends, is the agriculture minister."
But the same qualities that hinterland voters find charming could repel the intelligentsia. And political opponents could use it against him.
He could also cross the line.
Indeed, even before the Delhi assembly election results were announced, Vishwas had got entangled in controversy over remarks about Muharram several years earlier, for which he had to issue public apologies repeatedly.
The furore over his remarks about Muharram gain significance as they were made nearly a decade ago, but came back to bite him when he entered politics.
While apologising for the remarks about Muharram later, he said he had made them in 2005, at one of his kavi sammelans, where such things were common.
Someone had edited the video of the event to show only the remarks, and the BJP had then tweeted from its official Twitter handle, he said.
Even religious leaders, Vishwas claimed, had acknowledged that his remarks had been taken out of context.
But he reiterated his apology to Janata Dal (United) MLA from Delhi, Shoaib Iqbal, who had supported AAP in the trust vote in the Delhi assembly but had threatened to withdraw support over the remarks.
Protests, however, followed Vishwas to Amethi in Uttar Pradesh, where, on Sunday, Muslims threw stones at his convoy, raised black flags and taunted him to leave the city.
Unfazed, Vishwas said later that the protest had been staged, and that he would win in Amethi by a huge margin.
Even Kejriwal came to his defence, saying that Vishwas had intended the remarks as satire.
So he may have to recalibrate his sense of humour in order to better use it as a political tool, for satire can backfire in politics, unless it is used by masters of the form, such as the late Bal Thackeray.
“Thackeray was a cartoonist and he thought like one,” said Vaibhav Purandare, senior editor of the Times of India, who has written a biography of Bal Thackeray.
Purandare said that Thackeray used humour as a political weapon and also to connect with his audience, who would often come to his rallies in droves just to listen to him.
His humour was also frequently off-colour, and anyone, including the people who shared the dais with him, was fair game.
“Thackeray’s humour was inclusive, in that he was able to engage in a dialogue with his audience, but also very political. But he did not like jokes at his expense,” said Purandare.
Although much of Thackeray's humour was through word play in his native language, Marathi, and hence lost in translation, he would even resort to non-verbal gestures to amuse the audience.
But even Thackeray steered clear of jokes on religion, Purandare said. “The only time when the Sena chief, who exploited religious sentiment, said anything against god was when his wife died."
He had said, bitterly, that there was no god. But for Thackeray, being flippant about religion was political suicide.
The former Bihar chief minister Lalu Yadav, currently in jail for his alleged involvement in the fodder scam, was another politician prone to rib-tickling remarks.
Here is a list of his one-liners.
Here is Lalu, showing his characteristic wit when asked about his success as the railway minister, a portfolio he held from 2004 to 2009. "My mother always told me not to handle a buffalo by its tail, but always catch it by its horns. And I have used that lesson in everything in my life, including the railways."
Later, while discussing the economic turnaround of the railways, he said, “If you don’t milk a cow, it’ll turn sick.”
Unlike the Sena chief, he was often game for laughter at his own expense.
In the following video, he tries to describe in parliament, in broken English, his success with the railways, and gives up halfway through with a self-deprecating laugh. The honourable members of the Lok Sabha, meanwhile, are in splits. These remarks, and this video, reduce Lalu to a buffoon.
But he was also adept at turning his sense of humour to telling effect while discussing politics. Here is Lalu at his best during the 2008 UPA trust vote, describing Mayawati's prime ministerial ambitions:
The UPA trust vote came about as a result of the Left's opposition to the nuclear pact between India and the US. What is significant about the video is how Lalu seamlessly moves from his crack about Mayawati to a discussion of the Hyde Act (the US senate's name for the Indo-US nuclear agreement).
Lalu was no man's fool, though he enjoyed playing the rustic buffoon who knew more than he let on.
Vishwas has little of the buffoon about him, but he appears highly charismatic to the Hindi-speaking people of Amethi and UP.
He is by no means the first person to make off-colour jokes during kavi sammelans, and is a shade less ribald than many poets who participate in the events.
Irreverent, misogynist and politically incorrect humour is common fare during the gatherings, and it appeals to the sensibilities of the country's Hindi-speaking north.
Vishwas, a veteran of these gatherings, and a great orator and public speaker, can add greater nuance and a political dimension to his quips to score among the voters.
There has been controversy already over Vishwas's right-wing remarks. TV journalist Rajdeep Sardesai on December 30, 2013, tweeted about his reservations regarding Vishwas.
'when I listen to @AapYogendra I feel good. When I listen to Kumar Vishwas, I don't feel good. Am I alone in this regard?'
In the Twitter conversation that followed, many English-speaking users, some from the corporate sector, echoed his sentiments.
'@sardesairajdeep No you are not alone. Kumar Vishwas is the Digvijaya Singh of AAP. Is a liability for AAP!' said user Transfer Pricing, who claims in his Twitter profile that his tweets are retweeted by the Wall Street Journal, and supports Narendra Modi for PM.
'@sardesairajdeep @AapYogendra yes, one is balanced another is like a SP politician, boorish' said TV Mohandas Pai, a former member of Infosys' board of directors.
Perhaps the funniest tweet in this conversation was that by Yog Wadhwa, who claims to be a hospitality consultant:
'@sardesairajdeep When I listen to @AapYogendra i fear for my kid's generation. When i hear Kr Vishwas i give up'
However, the reservations of India's elites, or at least, its Twitterati, notwithstanding, Vishwas clearly brings a brash irreverence to politics, that should be tempered by the idealistic nature of the party to which he belongs.
"Politicians in India generally try to appear earnest," said Purandare.
Vishwas clearly does not subscribe to this approach.
In this regard, he stands in very sharp contrast even to his party's convenor, Arvind Kejriwal, whose defining quality, in all of his discussions with the media or his speeches in the Delhi Assembly, is earnestness.
Part of his appeal lies in creating a compelling narrative around himself and his party's members as abused common men and women.
In this video, he attacks Modi on his failure to appoint a Lokayukta in the state. He is combative and very much the activist, but never resorts to humour to undercut his target.
In the following video, Kejriwal is speaking to the media after the attack on AAP's Kaushambi office on Wednesday last week, following party member Prashant Bhushan's support for a referendum in Kashmir.
In this interaction, he is even more earnest, and even plays a martyr to some extent.
It is almost impossible to imagine Kejriwal making a joke like this one by Vishwas:
If Vishwas uses his wit to target his political opponents without resorting to vulgarity, he may well become the giant-killer who also deflates the giant's self-importance.
Limited-time offer: Big stories, small price. Keep independent media alive. Become a Scroll member today!
Our journalism is for everyone. But you can get special privileges by buying an annual Scroll Membership. Sign up today!