ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how the media tactics constraint and empowerment has operated within the context of the recent mass anti-corruption movement focused initially on the neo-Gandhian anti-corruption campaigner Anna Hazare and subsequently the Right to Information activist Arvind Kejriwal. The aim of the chapter is to investigate what happens when we approach the field of possibilities within which this aesthetic and somatic politics is mobilized not as ‘tradition’ but as a zone of effervescent bricolage in which politicians pursue magical mimetic strategies in the belief that they ‘can produce any effect [they desire] merely by imitating it’. The film (Lage Raho) brilliantly demolishes the empty ‘statist’ Gandhi. Rang de Basanti upset many on the political right (and was reportedly pulled from all Gujarati cinema halls), but many on the left saw it as an appropriation of a collective struggle for justice into a practice of statist proceduralism in which ideology was of no account, merely participation – ‘doing something’.
