Speaking the Nation

Features

• First book that is dealing with the rhetoric of Indian Prime Ministers also the first scholarly commentary on the rhetoric of Narendra Modi
• Fresh perspective on secularism and market liberalization given all scholarly literature works with very different primary sources and mostly with second level critiques, this book gives a new twist to the two most evergreen topics in Indian politics, about the most official visions of the state in India
• More than looking into the why and pros or cons of both state secularism and market liberalization, it asks how the state ‘sells’ both to the Indian population as well as the wider world
• It answers how ‘adjustment’ (both economic adjustment specifically and change in general) is remixed with continuity to make it digestable for people-How to sell the new in the cloak of the old.
• It shows how prime ministers, as prime politicians of the state spring the nation into existence and therein also reconsolidate the position of the state as the legitimate authority over the nation.
• It shows how India’s prime politicians are not just speaking banal words—the nation waits for them to speak, to explain and to answer; they are the most skillful balancers of the axis between the global and the local—they do not just produce India to unite the nation, but also to inform the world of India’s role in the world; this book narrates the concrete story of this process.
• The book is both a scholarly reading of statist visions on these two topics but will be approachable also for non-academic audiences who will have numerous ‘aha’ moments as the stories unfold because they may have lived and experienced the contexts it describes.