Neha Singh Rathore shot to fame in 2020 through her self-composed YouTube video song- Bihar mein ka ba? and U.P. mein ka ba, indicating developmental and welfare failures in Bihar and UP- India's two cow belt states. The governance failures in these two states appeared more sharply than ever before during the pandemic. With millions of followers on Facebook and YouTube, and several thousand on Twitter and Instagram, Rathore has emerged as a new and young antihegemonic face and alternative voice of issue-oriented activism during and 'after' the pandemic. Her self-composed regional Bhojpuri songs on YouTube constitute music education with pedagogic value (Hess, 2019) and assume significance in awakening the 'regional public' (Rege, 2010). She has created a new political horizon for the regional public on the digital platform in the age of 'authoritarian democracy' amidst a substantively servile mainstream media. She effectively tried to bring to light what was silenced by the mainstream media and political establishment during the pandemic continuing in "post-pandemic" India. She denounces sexist, toxic, and uncritical Bhojpuri film and folk industry and directs her criticism on the film-actor-turned-Bhojpuri politicians aligning with national political-elites.
Through digital ethnographic engagements, the present paper attempts to delineate:
- The elements of contrapuntal reading (Said 1993) in her YouTube songs during the pandemic and afterward
- Her attack on the anti-intellectualism of the regional (Bhojpuri) power elites who fully align with their national political mentors.
- Her attempt at creating a critical public sphere and a politically informed regional public
It also addresses how she converts many of the existing Bhojpuri folk songs into valuable political resources for value-based politics and critical pedagogic tools during and after the critical pandemic. We use 'alternative media' theories and Edward Said's 'Counterpoint' as analytical tools.
