Often, the key point of an event is not drawn from any particular happening or utterance. Instead, the noteworthy detail is a missing element that has, at times, been an essential feature of the entire programme.
The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh Sarsanghchalak’s annual speech in Nagpur on the morning of Vijaya Dashami or Dussehra has become an unmissable event of the political and media calendars in recent decades. In the pre-2014 period, public interest in his address waxed and waned, depending on the organisation’s proximity to political power, or its capacity to influence major narratives of the year.
Mohan Bhagwat has the advantage of being comparatively more media-savvy than his predecessors, besides having assumed office with technological connectivity, gradually taking the address into the ‘hands’ of more interested listeners or viewers; on mobile phones, first by text, and thereafter on video.