Linguistic Resistance and Power in Indian Political Public Relations Practice: A Video-Ethnographic Study

Abstract

India’s multilingual landscape presents political public relations (PPR) practitioners with both strategic opportunities and communicative challenges. Campaigns often rely on Hindi and English, but regional languages such as Kannada and Tamil are also used to assert identity and push back against Hindi and English dominance. This article draws on 56 hours of video from ethnographic fieldwork and ten semi-structured interviews with social media teams at two South Indian political parties during the 2019 general election. Using Ethnographic Communication Analysis (ECA), it examines an everyday professional interaction through critical discourse analysis, conversation analysis, and gestural analysis. The findings show how multilingualism functions as a site of symbolic struggle, where practitioners negotiate belonging, exclusion and representational legitimacy. Humour, code-switching, and language-based microaggressions emerge as communicative tactics of solidarity and resistance. By foregrounding the Global South context and adopting a multimodal ethnographic approach, this study extends critical public relations scholarship by showing how multilingualism is used in the reproduction of power and inequality.