Opinion Oh, snap
What the prime minister’s selfie spree is meant to accomplish.
Narendra Modi at a cricket stadium to talk to Indian expatriates on Monday, Aug 17, 2015, in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. (Source: AP)
Each time Prime Minister Narendra Modi takes a trip abroad, one of the outcomes is an image of him staring into a camera with his counterparts in whichever part of the world he happens to be visiting. Before he whipped out his cellphone outside the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi, Modi and Chinese Premier Li Keqiang tweeted a picture from Beijing that the Wall Street Journal labelled as perhaps “the most powerful selfie” ever. There was one in Fiji with Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama and another at the Melbourne Cricket Ground with Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott. (A notable absentee from Modi’s selfie bingo card is US President Barack Obama; instead of a selfie, the two were pictured embracing.)
These images become wildly popular for one reason: They seem unburdened by the pomp and bombast of proper protocol. Instead, the awkwardly composed shots suggest informality. After all, it’s what ordinary folk — people who don’t run countries — would do to record a special moment. With a selfie, Modi and his companions indicate an offbook, impromptu interaction that comes from a place of genuine friendship, and so they become instantly more accessible to their constituents.
Yet, for all their seeming spontaneity, these selfies are likely just as affected and carefully curated as the more traditional forms of diplomatic communication. The studied casualness of a selfie is a handy way to reflect a vision of diplomatic relations that privileges the personal equation between two leaders. As a side benefit, politicians come across as less stuffy and more in tune with the zeitgeist — also the reason why, say, the White House released Obama’s summer playlist. Still, such experiments with the cellphone are fraught with danger. Diplomacy is a deliberate art and mixing its natural tendency to caution with the selfie’s impetuousness is bound to create tension, as Obama, UK PM David Cameron and then Danish PM Helle Thorning-Schmidt found out, to their own peril, when they decided to take a selfie at Nelson Mandela’s funeral.
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