From folk melodies to campaign anthems, music continues shaping public perceptions of political power and leadership.Political songs can manufacture spectacle, but only the public can turn a ruler into kin.
A particular sound has gathered around Indian politicians lately, and it does not issue from party headquarters alone. On YouTube channels with a few thousand subscribers, on speakers strapped to campaign jeeps, an informal literature of praise has taken shape. A Bundeli Raai by the singer Rani Vishwakarma sets Shivraj Singh Chouhan to a folk dance rhythm and calls him “Mama,” precious gold the family must not lose. A Bhojpuri number hails Yogi Adityanath as “Bulldozer Baba.” A statelier register reaches for “Mohan Raj,” casting the sitting Chief Minister as a benign sovereign. Such songs are cheap to produce and quick to circulate, easy to wave away as noise. They are also among the more honest documents of how Indians picture the people who rule them.
Listen to one and the template is familiar even when the face is not. A synthetic dholak starts a beat before the leader’s name lands, a voice greets him as kin, bhaiya or mama or maharaj, and his photograph holds the frame while digital marigolds fall over footage of ribbon cuttings. A popular song is built to travel, made for a crowd and alive only when the crowd carries it. The political tribute works the same way, mass music aimed at a leader, judged above all by whether people pass it on. Some such songs register an affection that already exists. Others set out to manufacture one, and telling the two apart is most of the task.
The impulse runs deep here, older than the republic. For centuries devotion in India has travelled as song, the verse of Kabir and Tukaram and the Alvars made to be memorised and carried mouth to mouth rather than read. Much of that verse cut against hierarchy, Kabir’s above all, striking at caste and priestly power. This is no straight descent from Bhakti to the campaign jeep. What political praise borrows is the grammar, not the charge, the conviction that faith travels furthest when sung and the habit of reaching for kinship and the sacred to make power intimate. It is why a leader who becomes Mama or Amma or Didi lodges deeper than a mere administrator. The name performs work that no manifesto can.
None of this began with the present government or belongs to one party. Tamil Nadu built two Chief Ministers, M.G. Ramachandran and Jayalalithaa, out of fan clubs and cinema halls, and still calls the second Amma. Andhra did the same for N.T. Rama Rao, and a generation earlier the slogan “Indira is India” fused a person and a nation into one word. Bengal has its Didi, Uttar Pradesh its Behenji. The names are not random. Mama, Bhaiya, Amma, Didi, Behenji, each folds a distant office into a household role. The verticality does not vanish, its language only turns domestic. The ruler stays above you, now kin as well.
Not every tribute is born the same way. At one end are organic compositions, perhaps a welfare beneficiary posting four lines of thanks herself. At the other are commissioned productions, professional voices fronting party anthems timed like a film release. Every major party runs this machinery, the BJP and the Congress alike, the AAP courting migrant voters, the DMK with its election numbers.
Between the two lies the least candid category, the song that wears the costume of folk feeling while working as political infrastructure, some of it commissioned and dressed to seem unpaid. Some songs travel from the public towards the leader, a crowd naming a man and claiming him, as Shivraj Singh Chouhan’s Mama was fixed on him. Others travel outwards from the leader, warmth broadcast at an audience in the hope it will be returned, which is how much of the music around his successor moves. The first kind is bestowed. The second must be accepted, and acceptance cannot be scheduled. In January 2025, the Aam Aadmi Party launched “Phir Layenge Kejriwal,” a song certain the city would return him. Weeks later Delhi did not, and Kejriwal lost even his own seat.
Praise is not the only political use of a song, and the ecosystem is not even-handed about the others. A 2026 report by the Washington-based Center for the Study of Organized Hate identified 523 tracks across YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music and Meta, a darker genre that menaces minorities rather than making a leader into kin, most of it hosted and monetised without friction. What runs against power fares differently. In 2021, as farmers massed at Delhi’s borders, the government asked YouTube to pull Kanwar Grewal’s “Ailaan” and Himmat Sandhu’s “Asi Vaddange,” protest anthems with millions of views, and it complied, even as fans reposted them within days. The asymmetry is hard to miss. Praise is rewarded, hate often survives, and protest can meet the state’s takedown machinery. A song that thanks a government for a pension is still not the same act as one that calls for a community to be driven out.
A further question sits underneath. When affection for a leader is composed and monetised at scale, does it crowd out the work of accountability? A song answers nothing under oath. The survey evidence is suggestive rather than settled. When Pew asked Indians in 2023 about a strong leader able to act without the check of Parliament or the courts, most approved, the highest share among the countries it polled, though what a respondent pictures by a strong leader, and how far such numbers travel, are both fair to argue. The same survey found Indians also among the keenest anywhere on direct democracy, citizens deciding the issues themselves. Devotion and scrutiny may be two moods a citizen moves between, the song one and the ballot the other.
Madhya Pradesh is where this is easiest to watch. One leader spent the better part of two decades accruing a name. His successor is trying to build one far faster, inside the same party and the same welfare machinery, and in a grander key, the Mohan Raj of processions. Can spectacle manufacture the trust Shivraj gathered slowly, or is that something an audience grants rather than a campaign can commission?
The name Mama settled on Shivraj across nearly two decades and statewide, and the state still reaches for him with it, on fan pages and in wedding-season reels. On his successor the idiom is only beginning to catch, and in a different key. In the Vindhya region a folk singer, Rakhi Dwivedi, has made Mohan Yadav a “Jeeja Ji,” a brother-in-law rather than a maternal uncle, and the song has circulated widely enough there to draw an NDTV segment. The jeeja belongs to the joking kinships, teased and needled and never quite obeyed, where the mama carries an indulgent authority a household looks up to. As a name for a Chief Minister it is warmer and weaker at once, intimacy without the protective charge that did Shivraj’s political work. But it is regional and recent where Mama is statewide and settled, and the local press still asks whether any name will stick to him at all. His own music, meanwhile, runs the other way. He sings to the Ladli sisters at Raksha Bandhan, bhajans at temple consecrations, patriotic numbers from Independence Day stages, the affection travelling outwards from him, not back.
Taken together the songs are a mirror held to an old reflex, the one that turns a ruler into kin or into a king. But the mirror shows one thing clearly enough. The market can now make the song, at scale and on demand, and it cannot yet make the belief. A name still has to be given before it can be sung back, and the giving is the one part of this machine no producer controls.
*Darshim Saxena is a film and cultural writer and the founder-host of The Second Seat, a long-form conversation platform on cinema and culture.
