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

Until the 1970s, in the political sphere, the topics of national integration, economic development, and the eradication of poverty and illiteracy were the familiar subjects of electoral campaigns and political agendas. By the 1980s, the terms of political debate had been expanded to accommodate the claims of Hindu nationalism. The vocabulary of Indian politics began to grant a more central role to the idea of India as a Hindu nation and to the necessity for political parties to win over Hindu sentiment. As Brass notes, in the 1984 general elections, “the Hindu majority was mobilized in an atmosphere of hostility to minority demands and behavior. The Congress itself appealed to Hindu nationalism and communalism in this election.”³⁹ The communalization of politics was most visibly reflected in the role played by Indian politicians in polarizing the Hindu and Muslim communities over the controversial Babri Masjid, a disputed religious structure in the city of Ayodhya that both Hindus and Muslims claim as their own. The controversy reflected “the self-conscious and deliberate resurrection by national political leaders of a long dormant local dispute and its transformation into a vital issue affecting the faiths and requiring the solidarity of the two communities.”⁴⁰ The communalization of Indian politics would bear disastrous consequences; indeed, the political landscape of late twentieth-century India is stained with its bloody legacy. Upadhyaya points out that there were nearly 4,500 incidents of religious violence between 1982 and 1989 “in which over 7,000 people lost their lives, almost four times as many deaths of this type in the 1970s.”⁴¹ The riots of 1992 and 1993 that followed the destruction of the Babri Masjid marked, in a sense, the full-fledged return of Hindutva ideology as a formidable political and cultural force in Indian society.

The dominant social understandings of technology and the statist legitimation of scientificity and technological expertise reflected in Hindu technocultural nationalism are also rooted in histories that precede the post-1991 shift. Ironically, they can be seen as partly stemming from the legacy of the socialist, secular vision of Nehru, the very perspective that Hindu nationalists dismiss as anti-Hindu and anti-Indian. Scientificity, socialism, and secularism were the three fundamental components of Nehruvian nationalism.