Populism, Hindu Nationalism, and Foreign Policy in India: The Politics of Representing “the People”

Abstract

There is today a growing sense of a global rise of populism. Right-wing populist leaders and parties claim to represent the people and pit them against a “corrupt” elite and “dangerous” Others. However, the international dimensions of populism remain largely unexplored in the populism and international relations (IR) literature. By analyzing the relationship between foreign policy and populism, this article seeks to show how the phenomenon of populism can be integrated into IR theory and how IR scholarship can inform debates on populism. The article argues that poststructuralist IR, with its focus on foreign policy as a boundary-drawing practice that demarcates the Self from the Other, allows us to study how populist actors can use foreign policy as a site for the reproduction of their claim to represent the people. To grasp this, the article identifies different discursive strategies through which the people/elite antagonism can be constructed and interacts with other antagonisms such as the inside/outside divide of nationalism. It illustrates its arguments with a case study on India's foreign policy discourse under the Hindu nationalist Narendra Modi, who has promised to purify India from a corrupt elite and pursue an “India first” policy.

The ‘saffronisation’ of India and contemporary political ideology

“…It can be a considered a multi‐perspective approach to critical discourse analysis, one which allows the researcher to look past simply linguistic discoveries to demystify the impact of cultural sentiment, political affiliation and social constructions on argumentation and narratives. Such an approach allows the researcher to ‘place greater emphasis on the actual construction of sociopolitical categories such as “the people” and enables us to distinguish between populist and nationalist modes of identity formation by identifying the distinct practices of differentiation and Othering through which such subjectivities come into being in the first place’ (Wojczewski, 2019, p. 2). This framework can be further applied to the investigation of various socio‐political issues, including study of democracy, migration, refugees, emancipation, and globalisation, as each of these issues become the embodiment of ideological tensions of competing discourse clans.…”

“…This particular angle in the narrative then doesn't just depict Modi and the BJP as the moral compass of new India, but also justifies their rule by way of their Hindu roots, positioning them against the rule of a foreign other, 4 pushing an ‘antagonistic divide between “the people” and illegitimately powerful, born‐to‐rule elites by associating the latter with the foreign Other. This discursive strategy conflates elite and foreign Other and makes them a collaborative threat to “the people”’ (Wojczewski, 2019, p. 11), as exemplified in Extracts (7)‐(9).…”

“…The analysis of the dataset revealed the use of common linguistic devices and rhetorical strategies, including categorisation, intertextuality metaphor, and recontextualisation, to create a compelling narrative about the neo‐liberal transformation of new India and the purification of the Hindu identity through adherence to Hindutva. In this way, the discursive construction of Hindutva and its successful infiltration in public discourse, relies on the creation of an imagined homogenised community, with a distinct ‘national essence’ (Wojczewski, 2019, p. 5), that has granted consent to a version of nationalism used as ‘a construct of the state in pursuit of its legitimacy’ (Campbell, 1998, p. 11). The powerful and effective proliferation of Hindutva can be seen as a result of Modi's charismatic sermons, the creative use of Hinglish in attracting both urban and rural readership, and the creation of a formidable other against whom to unite.…”

Trump, Populism, and American Foreign Policy

“…Foreign policy then serves populist actors, in opposition or government, as platform to assert themselves as 'true' representative of the people, thereby creating a popular identity and social order. While De Cleen and Stavrakakis' (2017) discourse-theoretical typology of populism and nationalism is based on a spatial differentiation and would thus arguably link the practice of foreign policy to nationalism's in/out distinction, 1 there are also different ways in which populist actors can use the discourse of foreign policy to construct a populist project (Wojczewski 2019). These discursive strategies can be identified by studying how the populist core categories ('the people' and 'the elite') can be placed in different antagonistic relationships in the realm of foreign policy, ranging from a pure populist up/down antagonism to antagonisms characterized by both inside/outside and up/down dichotomies:…”

“…By focusing on the distinct ways of creating collective identities through the establishment of political boundaries between Self and Other, a discursive approach provides not only analytical tools for distinguishing between populism and nationalism, but can also take into account different variants of populism. In addition, it allows for bringing populism scholarship in dialogue with poststructuralist IR which conceptualizes foreign policy as a discourse that (re)produces the Self (the state) by demarcating it from a series of (threatening) foreign Others (Campbell 1998;Wojczewski 2019).…”