Baudrillard's simulacra and death of solidarity? The case of subalterns in Northeast India

On Oct 31st, 2020, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi applauded a four-year-old girl from the state of Mizoram for singing a contemporary version of the national song Maa Tujhe Salaam from A.R. Rahman’s album “Vande Mataram''. The music video uploaded on YouTube caught the attention of the audiences as it crossed 6.9 million views 4 months after its release (as of February 2021). Taking this context as the point of reference, the paper will contribute to existing scholarships on Baudrillard’s simulation and simulacra. At the same time, the same approach enables the possibility of critically analyzing the contemporary meaning of solidarity in media studies. Rather than looking at the music video exclusively as an ideological product in itself, or what it seeks to signify and what it signified, the paper seeks to problematize the relation between simulacra and solidarity, or the simulation of solidarity in the age where media encapsulates everyday life. It attempts to derive possibilities of simulating the absence of solidarity as presence, which hides the oppressive experience and the socio- cultural, historical, and political struggles of the subalterns in India. The simulacra precede the original, leaving it impossible to distinguish what is real and what representation is. The simulacra, as Baudrillard argues, conceals the fact that there exist none; it feigns what one hasn’t: it feigns to have solidarity. It argues that through simulation, there is a process of corrupting the notion of ‘solidarity’ against its conventional application and understanding due to the intrinsic embodiment of the individual into the hyperreal. The question then is, does the media kill ‘solidarity’?