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Rhetoric of political newness and Muslim politics

Levesque, Julien (2022). Rhetoric of political newness and Muslim politics. Seminar, (758):43-45.

Abstract

In recent years, the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has repeatedly invoked the notion of ‘New India’ to describe its policies. In a Times of India column on 30 May 2022, Home Minister Amit Shah defined New India as ‘resilient, strong, capable and atmanirbhar’ (self-reliant), adding that its ‘foundations have been laid by the PM’. The idea denotes a political project that the government seeks to bring about, but also rings of self-congratulatory triumphalism – New India is not only a goal towards which the government strives, but it is in the making in the here and now. What does the project of New India entail? The themes of the Home Minister’s article remarkably illustrate what historian Ravinder Kaur has termed as the ‘capitalization of the nation-state’. It insists on the economy, arguing that India recovered tremendously well from the Covid crisis and lauding India’s rise in the ease of doing business ranking. Amit Shah depicts the government’s economic policy as an inclusive project, repeating the official slogan ‘Sab ka sath, sab ka vikas’ and listing schemes and packages supposed to have benefitted ‘all sections of society’. The article also mentions India’s standing in the world of nations, praising the prime minister for making ‘the world realize the importance and significance of India’ – a search for global recognition in line with what Kaur describes as an aspiration to ‘cleanse the shame of colonial subjugation’. This assertion rests on a ‘deep focus on national security’: the minister invokes the defence budget, the acquisition of new armament like the Rafale fighter jet, and a tough stance on terrorism as signs that the nation now has a decisive and unwavering leader in the prime minister. In short, in Amit Shah’s words, the advent of New India is something Indians should celebrate as the country commemorates its 75 years of independence. New India is the moment when what the independence was supposed to bring finally becomes a reality. New India, the reader seems to be implicitly told, is the moment when you finally get a chance. The rhetoric of New India thus addresses a dual audience: it tells the world of India’s readiness for investment, while telling Indians that a new dawn has come. Ravinder Kaur thus describes New India as ‘the popular name for the postreform, techno-friendly, high-consumption entrepreneurial nation’ which is meant to be ‘an income-generating asset’. The current government, however, is not the first to talk of New India. At the time of independence, Jawaharlal Nehru spoke of India’s new awakening, wishing the decolonial moment to see the triumph of democracy, with India as a moral leader among postcolonial states. Moreover, New India was to achieve prosperity through central planning and industrial development, led by rational engineers and technocrats. Yet despite the modernist character of Nehru’s post-independence project, it is interesting to note that a major book on the subject, Sunil Khilnani’s The Idea of India, does not mention the expression at all. The idea of New India took on a different meaning with the liberalization initiated in 1991, one that sought, precisely, to consign to the past what were now seen as the problems of the Nehruvian era – a slow and bureaucratic state that impeded economic growth. The exercise of branding India to the world as a new capitalist Eldorado thus began not with the Bharat Janata Party’s ascent to power in 2014 but in the 1990s, later reinforced by the BJP’s India Shining campaign in 2004 and the Congress’ focus on the benefits to the common man, the aam aadmi. What is so new, then, about New India?

Additional indexing

Item Type:Journal Article, not_refereed, original work
Communities & Collections:06 Faculty of Arts > Institute of Asian and Oriental Studies
Dewey Decimal Classification:180 Ancient, medieval & eastern philosophy
290 Other religions
Language:English
Date:October 2022
Deposited On:25 Jan 2023 14:52
Last Modified:02 Aug 2023 17:04
Publisher:Romesh Thapar
ISSN:0037-1947
Additional Information:Themenheft Exploring Muslim India: a symposium on Islamic presence in ‘New India’
OA Status:Closed
Official URL:https://www.india-seminar.com/semframe.html
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