The debate between secularism and Hindu nationalism – how India’s textbooks have become the government’s medium for political communication

If they rise, will we fall? Social identity uncertainty and preference for collective victimhood rhetoric

“…The two experimental conditions—the victimhood and the pro‐diversity conditions—were developed to closely reflect and mimic the distinctive polarized rhetoric in the Indian political context (e.g., Banerjee, 2005; also see Anand & Lall, 2022; Anderson & Longkumer, 2018; Basu, 2016; Devji, 1992). The majoritarian Hindu nationalist narrative, on the one hand, emphasizes a symbolic threat to majority Hinduism by highlighting historical threats from Muslim invasions, and on the other hand, is the opposing secular or pro‐diversity narrative that is perceived by the majority as prioritizing minority voices.…”

Translanguaging Practices and Recontextualizing Learning Material: A Corpus-Based Study of Global Chinese Language Textbooks Used in Sri Lanka

“…In a similar study situated in the context of China, propose that elementary Chinese language textbooks in China offer a limited representation of the ethnic multilingualism of contemporary China in a centralized effort towards national identity construction among minority groups. Anand and Lall (2022) have illustrated how the Indian government has used textbooks as a 'medium of political communication contextualizes the discourse of citizenship'. As claimed by Hagai et al (2014), a similar situation has occurred in Cambodian textbooks aimed at constructing and propagating Vietnamization in favor of the allies of the Cambodian government.…”

India 2022: Political realignments in a bjp-dominated system

“…These included the usage of investigative agencies to target journalists, opposition members and civil society leaders [Tiwari 2022, 21 September;Outlook 2022c, 13 October]; the erosion of institutions, including attempts by the government to have a greater say in the appointment of Supreme and High Court judges [Jain & Chaturvedi 2023, 19 January] -reminiscent of Indira Gandhi's quest for a «committed judiciary» [Maiorano 2015]; and threats to freedom of expression [Reed 2022, 10 October], such as the arrest of Mohammed Zubair, founder of AltNews, a fact-checking website. Zubair was arrested in June 2022 on the basis of some 4-year-old tweets and kept in jail for almost a month, until the Supreme Court eventually granted him bail, noting that the UP government had effectively «trapped [him] in a vicious cycle of criminal process where the process itself has become the punishment» [Anand 2022, 26 July].…”