How sexist is the latest TV advertisement of the Aam Aadmi Party? And does it promote the personality cult of Arvind Kejriwal, the Delhi Chief Minister, at the expense of the party?
If you couldn’t view it, the ad features a middle-class woman in the starring role.
At one point, she is shown in the kitchen chopping a lauki, or bottle gourd, as she waxes eloquent about Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal. She is also shown buying vegetables, balancing the household budget, serving tea to her husband, showing the electricity bill to him, dropping her son to school and serving him dinner. All through, her husband is only watching TV.
Even though he isn’t seen, Kejriwal’s name is mentioned several times in the ad.
These tweets highlight the supposed sexism of the ad.
But ad film-maker Prahlad Kakkar disagrees.
Kakkar says:
1. That women’s supposed stereotyping in the ad is an “elitist point of view”, as this is daily life for many middle class Indian women.
2. AAP is not the only one promoting a personality cult around its leader; the Congress and BJP does it too.
3. The ad is targeted just right, to the lower middle class and the middle class of India.
Meanwhile, veteran ad man, Alyque Padamsee, thinks the ad is ‘puffery’ at its best.
But when we posed the question of the Kejriwal overdose in the ad to Deepak Vajpayee, an AAP media coordinator, he said:
Arvind Kejriwal is the face of the Delhi Government. He is the ambassador of hope. So what it is the harm?
– Deepak Vajpayee, Media Coordinator, Aam Aadmi Party
(At The Quint, we are answerable only to our audience. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member. Because the truth is worth it.)