Neha Singh Rathore shot to fame in 2020 through her self-composed YouTube video song- Bihar mein ka ba? And UP mein ka ba indicating developmental and welfare failures in Bihar and UP- India's two cow belt states. With millions of followers on Facebook and YouTube, and several thousand on Twitter and Instagram, she has emerged as a new and young antihegemonic face and alternative voice of issue-oriented online activism. 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 is said to have created a new political horizon for the regional public on the digital platform in the age of what may be called 'authoritarian democracy' with the 'mainstream media' blamed as being substantively servile to the former.
What also sets her activism apart is her Bhojpuri songs borrowed from the regional folk contexts- she takes the gendered emotions of the local (feminine) folk expressive traditions and converts them into ‘political resources’ in her strategic mobilizational tactics on digital spaces. Though she also composes songs with political content that are pressing and timely, I focus more on her ’traditional’ Bhojpuri folk songs filled with the “feminine” emotions of a complaining wife strategically deployed to launch her critical attack on the ruling establishments, which seems to have both educative and emotional appeal and she ends up creating a critical public sphere and a politically informed regional public. I use digital ethnography as a technique of data collection and 'alternative media' theories and Edward Said's 'Counterpoint' and the concept of ‘emotional capital’ (Heaney 2019) as theoretical and analytical tools.
