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Epilogue: ‘Making India a Dharmic Superpower’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 March 2012

Christiane Brosius
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Summary

We (the BJP) have tried to marry technology with tradition, and to send a very strong message to all those in India and abroad who used to think and propagate this falsehood, that if the BJP comes to power, being an obscurantist party, it would take India back to the eighteenth century. And we are trying to tell the people that being the first party to go on the Internet-and to go on the Internet in the manner that we have done it, we have proved that we alone have the perspective for the 21st century; to make India a strong information power, that India can harness this technology, it can communicate confidently through this new medium.

This statement by one of the BJP's media experts is representative of the ‘New BJP’, ‘the party with a difference’, as the political wing of Hindutva promoted itself from the late 1990s onwards. To some extent, in projecting a new national confidence, Kulkarni's comment is reflective of the international recognition that India has gained in recent years on the basis of her software expertise, thereby changing the dominant image of India as an economically backward country into that of an equal player “in the new world order”. Information technology thus became the flagship, or synonym, for the scientific and rational spirit of the ‘new BJP's’ claim to nationality; like video, it ties the power of political representation to economic and technological development.

Type
Chapter
Information
Empowering Visions
The Politics of Representation in Hindu Nationalism
 , pp. 279 - 290
Publisher: Anthem Press
Print publication year: 2004

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