Conclusion

The Conclusion presents a review of the key findings. It draws the consistencies and the inconsistencies in the rhetoric of Prime Ministers Rao, Vajpayee, Singh and Modi. It engages in a transversal discussion of how the vocabularies of Nehru’s ‘New India’ differ from the texture of the ‘New India’ after 1991. The next section elaborates on the category of what I have called ‘Airport Literature’ (mainly because of its overwhelming presence at Indian airports). This literature celebrates India’s market liberalization and is part of the changes it seeks to glorify. The conclusion discusses how the genre of speeches speaks to this genre of literature. The last section returns to the debate of New World Orders to establish how the Indian state has attempted to recalibrate its position in the wider changing architecture of geopolitics and open markets and how the PMs as the voice of the state have attempted to legitimize their own authority as the voice of the nation.

Speaking the Nation ‘Secular’

This chapter shows how Prime Ministers have profiled India as ‘secular’ and how the discursive production of Indian secularity converges with the staging of India’s emergence, both for the ‘outside’ world as also for those deemed as ‘Indian’. It investigates how the PMs translate the paradigm of secularism to the Indian population by showing which vocabulary is adopted to lend credibility to this claim, as well as how the Indian state, through the addresses of the elected head, positions itself vis-à-vis the wider world through the same concept. It follows from the analysis that the paradigmatic notion of secularism constitutes an interface, ‘a common shared boundary’, a zone of contact between the perceived ‘internal’ and ‘external’. In internal settings, it acquires different ambivalent understandings which draw their resources from the Indian context of religious pluralism. In the external settings, the term is used as such to concretize the image of India as being in ideological cohesion with the world as an ‘emerging’ yet ‘secular’ democracy.

The Prime Minister’s Legacy and Traditions of Public Speech in India

The office of the Prime Minister and tradition(s) of public oratory have a distinct legacy. The chapter illustrates how Jawaharlal Nehru re-engineered the role and powers of the office in the newly constituted postcolonial state and how his oratorical legacy continues to impact the expectations accorded to speeches of the successive Prime Ministers. The first section traces how Nehru negotiated the executive powers of the office to make it the most powerful one in the Cabinet, a higher ‘First Among Equals’. It then shows how his persona was used to give the office an irrefutable status. The second section tracks the gravity of the spoken word in India by embedding it in its longstanding cultural history of orality and aurality. A concluding part brings the two themes of the Prime Minister’s Office and public speech in India together, grounding the importance of the Prime Ministers’ speeches as material to be studied in its own right.

Introduction

The reforms of 1991 marked a paradigm shift from the Nehruvian import substitution economy to market liberalization. How have the Prime Ministers explained this shift to the population and the world and how are these transformations projected as the glossy embodiment of a New emerging India? How have Prime Ministers attempted to rescue state secularism in moments of crisis? The larger framing of the questions posed by the book is: How do nation-states recalibrate and renegotiate their authority as the vanguards of the nation in times when they come to be severely challenged by forces dubbed under the rubric of ‘globalization’? The author explains how the book treats both the cross cutting themes of state secularism and market liberalization not as two distinct themes, marked by separate events, but as intertwined topics through the lens of the same sources. It grounds why it is important to study prime ministerial oratory.

‘The World Is Changing…’

This chapter shows what the PMs speak and how they speak is highly dependent on the spatial context, i.e. the audience for which the speech is intended. For the perceived internal audiences, the first three PMs naturalize the reforms by signaling them as a change made necessary by the transitions the world faces at large. These ‘global’ changes necessitate that India adapts to transformations as well. However, this is accompanied by a simultaneous assurance: India’s adaptation to that change is cautious and calculated. The sense of assurance is produced in two distinct ways: Firstly, by giving people the re-assurance that opening up of the economy will not jeopardize India’s economic sovereignty and secondly, by stating that in spite of change, India’s cultural core is fundamentally secure. For external audiences, however, India is presented as an Investment Destination, ready to embrace the world markets and celebrating change. The chapter concludes by analysing Modi’s spatializing strategies in light of continuities/discontinuities with the former PMs.

Time and Temporalizing Tactics II

The Chapter shows how a selective past is conjured to feed into, supplant the present of ‘Emerging India’. In this ordering of time, the simultaneity of breaking and bridging with a heritagized selective past is kept alive. The second section traces how the reforms are embedded in a temporal order, which is presented as something pre-ordained, even destined for India, how the speakers naturalize a particular sequence of events, which legitimize the change that the reforms embody as something pre-determined, even an act of providence. The third section focuses on the temporalizing tactics of the current Prime Minister Narendra Modi starting with the suggestive slogan Achche Din aane wale hain (Good Times/days are about to arrive) which hallmarked his electoral campaign of 2014. The slogan not only aptly captures the temporalizing mood of the campaign for the cause of electoral victory but its popularity also indicates how Modi himself became a popular brand through it, the prime mover and sole guarantor of good times.

Time and Temporalizing Tactics I

Chapter 2 illustrates how in order to give currency to the reforms, the PMs conjure the idea of an idealized future. Growth is presented as a human necessity and reforms become the inevitable means to realize the dream of growth for all. India’s move to the future is presented not as an uncalculated measure, but a controlled trajectory which does not succumb to ‘unlimited capitalism’. However, behind this rhetoric emerges the category of an ‘other within’ India- large sections of Indian population who are no immediate winners of the reforms but are tranquilized, by being relegated to a “waiting room” condition. Trickle down is legitimized by informing people that they ought to wait for the benefits of the transitions to reach them. The PMs also paradoxically employ a vocabulary of the socialist past to project the future. Although what is being introduced is a drastic shift, the resources used to present the new borrow heavily from the lexicon of Nehruvian developmentalism. Thus, the new is sold by using a vocabulary which is not so new.