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

Even to those skeptical of the hyperbole about the meteoric rise of India and free market miracles, the stories provide a welcome foil to the standard fare in the Indian media about the myriad failures of the Indian state. For diasporic Indians in the United States and other Western nations, the positive portrayal of India in the Western media has been doubly refreshing, long accustomed as these expatriates are to seeing their country of origin covered in the Western press in terms of Orientalist stereotypes, with mandatory references to the caste system, cows, and poverty. A modicum of national pride, even the most dour cynic would grudgingly admit, is not out of place.

The new millennium, however, has also witnessed the ugly manifestations of misguided national pride in India, exemplified by the events in Gujarat in 2002. On February 27, 2002, a train car of the Sabarmati Express was set afire at Godhra in the western Indian state of Gujarat, allegedly by a mob of Muslims. In the weeks that followed, Hindu nationalist mobs systematically targeted Muslim communities in Gujarat in revenge, setting Muslim-majority villages ablaze and burning Muslims to death. The anti-Muslim violence had the blessings and logistical support of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) state government and its chief minister Narendra Modi. The central National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government, a coalition spearheaded by the BJP, reacted slowly to curtail the situation, tantamount to deliberate inaction at a time when an urgent response was the need of the hour.

Neither communal violence nor the dangers of Hindutva, the ideology of Hindu nationalism, are unknown to India. Close to a decade before the Gujarat riots, the country had been afflicted by Hindu-Muslim riots in Mumbai in the state of Maharashtra in December 1992 and January 1993 following the destruction of a mosque by a Hindu nationalist mob on December 6, 1992. On that occasion as well, the state government of Maharashtra had been complicit in the violence against Muslims. But the anti-Muslim pogrom of 2002 was a chilling reminder that the ideology of Hindutva had lost none of its inflammatory and divisive potential in the course of a decade.