Who would have thought that India’s mainstream national political parties, the Congress and the BJP, would have weaponised rap music to, presumably, target the youth vote and win on social media? The popularity of the songs from the Bollywood film Gully Boy has provided just the right impetus.
Most recently, the two parties have used a song from the album to fight it out on twitter. While the videos must have been in the making already, the battle escalated when the BJP’s social media account tweeted the video above, set to the song Azadi (“Freedom”). The Congress posted its own version soon afterwards, using the same song.
Predictably, the parties accused each other of corruption, and while the message in the BJP’s video was “Congress se azadi” (Freedom from Congress), the Congress went with “Dar ke aage azadi” (Freedom before fear).
The original version of the song was produced by Dub Sharma and released in 2016, during the height of student protests at Jawaharlal Nehru University, when the “azadi” slogan gained currency.
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