No promises, no guarantees — “Our message is that the BSP is your party, our ideology is your ideology,” said Mayawati, dismissing the need for a manifesto. While this position is original, it isn’t particularly significant. Barring the Left, none of our big parties are people of the book. We know that these political manifestos are largely pointless exercises — they are not meant to persuade the vast electorate or even to prompt drawing room chatter. Words are at a discount in India, and post-NTR, the focus is not on fancy wordplay but concrete deliverables — whether it’s cheap rice, colour TVs or laptops, as the BJP is now promising. Even the Congress has had to move from garibi hatao talk to the NREGA walk. Individual party manifestos can promise the moon, knowing that they will ultimately be held only to consensus documents — their coalition’s common minimum programme.

So then, it’s no surprise that they’re bleached of the very qualities that make manifestos — force, theatricality and novelty. Mary Ann Caws, who has analysed the poetics of the manifesto form in a wonderful anthology called A Century of Isms, writes: “At its most endearing, a manifesto has a madness about it... Always opposed to something, particular or general, it has not only to be striking but to stand up straight... LOOK! It says. NOW! HERE! The manifesto is by nature a loud genre, unlike the essay. The manifesto makes an art of excess.”

As a literary form, manifestos have complicated origins. They have surface similarities to catechism and to charters of political grievance, but the modern manifesto is relatively recent. The Communist Manifesto is arguably the ur-text of the genre — still skin-pricklingly beautiful, it is a surpassing rhetorical achievement. It distilled the recognisable features of the form — putting forth a particular vision of the world, combining political explication, polemic and concentrated poetic images. The 1955 Soviet Publishing House edition of the Manifesto described it as the working class’s “banner... its compass in its revolutionary struggle... its historic mission.” It was “the theoretical weapon needed to combat capitalist slavery.”

... contd.