Short abstract:

This paper attends to the constitutive role of digitalization to emerging articulations of nationalism, modernity, and postcolonial development in contemporary India. The primary analytic focus is on the state-promotion and discourses around the 2015 "Digital India" federal policy.

Long abstract:

In February 2014, during his campaign for Prime Minister, Narendra Modi laid out a simple formula to promise a bright future: “IT + IT = IT: Indian Talent + Information Technology = India Tomorrow. Thus, internally, and globally, the IT sector can become a shining light of Brand India” (Modi 2014). The transformation into ‘India Tomorrow,’ he assured, would be all but guaranteed with his vision—that “India should become ‘DIGITAL INDIA’”(Modi 2014). Within his first one hundred days in office, Modi manifested this vision: announcing plans for a flagship federal policy named “Digital India,” imagined as an ambitious modernizing measure “to transform India into a digitally empowered society and knowledge economy” (“Vision and Vision Areas | Digital India Programme” 2017).

This paper attends to the rhetorical work of state-led digitalization efforts to analyze these visions of transformation. I examine a multi-modal archive of state artifacts on Digital India including promotional films, mobile applications, radio shows, policy handbooks, and public statements by high-ranking Ministers—national addresses, op-eds, speeches at various governmental and non-governmental events (2014-2022). This archive represents the extensive institutional rhetoric on digitalization in contemporary India to demonstrate the emergence of a rhetoric of ‘digital development.’ I argue that rhetorics of digital development be studied as offshoots of long-standing techno-nationalistic imaginaries built around postcolonial preoccupations around science, technology, religion, and development. By tracing these discursive histories, and analyzing their reinvention throughout my archive, I show that the digital development promoted under Digital India promises a distinctly populist techno-nationalistic imaginary of India.