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

The events of the year also indicated that foreign direct investment could not be a panacea for all of India’s social problems and that Hindu nationalism remained a potent threat to Indian society at a time of economic growth, technological development, and imminent global ascendancy.

The two disparate images of India dominant in media coverage in the last few years can justifiably be seen as a foreshadowing of the fate of the nation in the twenty-first century. What is less obvious is that these strongly contrasting expressions of the Indian state and society should be so deeply and fundamentally related in the imagination of many Indians. Many Hindus in India and elsewhere did not see the actions of Hindu mobs and the state apparatus as anti-Muslim at all. As Ashutosh Varshney points out with regard to the anti-Muslim violence in 2002, “The Hindu right believes that its elected government did exactly what was required: namely, allowing violent Hindu retaliation against the Muslims, including those who had nothing to do with the mob that originally torched the train.”⁴ For those who held such opinions, there was no necessary contradiction between the brand image of India as an emerging global technological and economic power and its perception as a society at threat of being torn apart by Hindu fundamentalism and nationalism. To the contrary, in the Hindu nationalist perspective, as seen online and offline, in India and in the diaspora, Narendra Modi’s actions were viewed as assertions of Hindu cultural pride and honor.⁵ In tandem, numerous Hindu and Hindu nationalist Web sites strongly emphasize technological and scientific ability as Hindu cultural qualities—another source of Hindu cultural pride and honor.⁶

The juxtaposition of technological achievement with antiminority sentiment as different forms of the same phenomenon—an assertion of cultural and national identity—reflects but one of the modes in which contemporary online Hindu nationalist discourse yokes together technology and nationalism. Other related forms in which the two discourses combine with each other can be seen on Web sites aimed at a global Hindu population. Sites like the comprehensive Hindu Universe portal reveal several propositions about Hindu and Indian identity that embody the core claims of technocultural Hindu nationalism.⁷