Technology and Nationalism in India: Cultural Negotiations from C ...

Technocultural Hindu nationalism, while indebted to Savarkar’s theorization of the Hindu state, also refashions Savarkar’s views to reflect the interests of an affluent diasporic Hindu population and the demands of global capitalist modernity.

Chapter 6 presents an exploratory quantitative analysis of the characteristics of online Indian nationalisms. Using the technique of correspondence analysis, I undertake a comparative statistical mapping of the distribution of key themes, including scientificity, globality, and rights and freedoms, across Hindu, Sikh, and Kashmiri nationalist Web sites. Each theme has been selected on the basis of its relevance for nationalism as well as for online nationalism. The rationale for the selection of the theme of scientificity is self-evident, given its centrality to Hindu nationalist discourse. With regard to the theme of globality, for instance, the argument is that nationalisms will market themselves in cyberspace as global issues—of relevance to the international community at large, as well as for diasporic ethnic, cultural, or religious groups dispersed across the world—to speak to the potentially global audience using the Internet. The theme of rights and freedoms is included based on the reasoning that a nationalist movement will typically emphasize both the political right to sovereignty and other political, cultural, social and economic rights, with reference to domestic constitutional and legal frameworks as well as the framework of international human rights. The central question explored in the chapter is whether the core characteristics of technocultural Hindu nationalism, such as its emphasis on scientificity, are more reflective of the medium of the Internet than of the substantive content of the ideology. My argument is that the emphasis on scientificity is peculiar to the history of Hindu nationalism and not an artifact of the virtual or online status of the discourse. Accordingly, the primary hypothesis tested in the chapter is that the theme of scientificity should appear more prominently in Hindu nationalist Web sites than in other similar types of Web sites. The secondary hypothesis tested is that the theme of scientificity should occur prominently in Hindu nationalist Web sites at large across the World Wide Web.