Were you praying for respite from them? Is there really any hope of getting away from the ennui that sets in when you watch the suave and telegenic faces of Indian politics on your TV screen? One of the most sought after management schools in the country doesn’t share your concern, and doesn’t give you any reason to be optimistic on this count. On the contrary, the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore (IIM-B) plans to flood you with an assembly line of glib talking heads. And it will have a gender dimension too. The Hindustan Times reported on April 11, 2012, that IIM-B has launched a course in political leadership for women, that includes media interaction as a module.

The medium of instruction for the course is English and the 10-week course will cost Rs 4.75 lakh. The relevance of such a finishing school for wannabe politicians is questionable. But for consumers of television debates and discussions, what is more disturbing is that such a course seeks to ‘teach’ interaction with media, and in the process reinforces stereotypes of ‘watchable’ political communication. So the management school is catering to political wannabes and within the framework of marketing education, it intends to groom these future career politicos for the challenges of ‘presentable salesmanship of views’ in the media market.

The heady mix of political aspirations, finishing school and media handling tells you more about the nature of political discourse on the idiot box than it does about the texture of democratic politics in the country.

The closest historical parallel you could draw is the indoctrinated ‘sophism’ in ancient Greece which sought to replace rooted political understanding with persuasive cosmetics of political ‘sophistication’ (the word owes its origin to it). However, it is relevant to remember that Aristotelian tutelage or Machiavellian and Hobessian instructions had no place for the rope tricks of public communications.

The eligibility conditions for telegenic political operators is scripted by the demand in television channels for articulate sound bites and the dramatics of political shadow boxing (preferably in 2-D). But an even greater anxiety is to cater to an influential section of the audience (who possess the purchasing power for advertised products) and place a premium on watching ‘presentable’ political faces and listening to well-heeled political voices. News channels seek such studio performances from the political class and they are not disappointed. Each political party has some ‘eligibles’ for such assignments and the same set of talking heads can be seen channel hopping. These are not to be confused with the official battery of spokespersons who of course are the staple diet offered by political parties for media consumption.

So for the Congress, Renuka Chaudhary has to be supplemented by Manish Tiwari and Abhishek Manu Singhvi, while for the BJP Nirmala Sitaraman co-stars with the blue-eyed boy of all news channels – Arun Jaitley. Can CPI (M) do without Sitaram Yechury and CPI without D Raja? And where do you think Behenji’s Nawab and Netaji’s articulate lawyer are stationed? The TV studios, of course. If you missed them on one channel, just surf and you’ll get a darshan of them on another. Omnipresent people.

By excluding the not-so-telegenic elements of the body politic, and underplaying political communication from the not-so-articulate voices of the political spectrum, the political parties and the media deprive themselves of engaging with diverse and seminal undercurrents of democratic discourse.

A section of the political class, desperate to get the approval of the ‘image’ consuming class, seems to be dictated by a key message from news media. If you are not PLU (People Like Us) in the cosmetics of your communication, we will not hear you.

From the time political scientists David Easton, Almond and Powell asserted the centrality of communication in democratic dialogue, the idea has taken weird and almost distorted forms with the expansion of mass media. The worrying part is that an esteemed educational institution is legitimising such restricted and often misleading understanding of political communication. So, new political performers are in the making. Prime time is ready for campus recruitments. Performances awaited.