India's socio-economic and political arenas underwent unprecedented transformations over the course of the 1990s. In fact, the national public sphere went through changes that altered the fabric of the nation and state in ways that were radical and irreversible. The most salient and powerful transformations were tethered to two processes: the advent of economic liberalization and the concomitant and meteoric rise of Hindu nationalism. Despite the suddenness with which the two phenomena appeared to annex the affective and political energies of the nation, their genesis was in fact in the making for several decades. For my purposes, however, the break that characterized the 1990s to the present is most crucial to underscore.

In July 1991, after a few decades of tentative pro-liberalization rhetoric and under heavy pressures from international lending agencies such as the International Monetary Fund, the Congress government under Prime Minister P V Narsimha Rao undertook concrete steps to liberalize the Indian economy.