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ABSTRACT
Conventional wisdom on India’s nuclear geopolitics takes a top-down approach, foregrounding state perceptions of India’s nuclear role in regional and global politics. This conventional approach overlooks the bottom-up processes, such as media representations, which have been fundamental in shaping India’s nuclear identity. This is because media representations comprise common-sense knowledge, since media is the primary source of information in a democracy. Building on theoretical underpinnings of popular geopolitics, this article focuses on analyses of media representations in the Editorial of the English daily The Hindu from 2011–2020. This national newspaper boasts the second-largest readership among English dailies. The direct link between The Hindu Editorial’s representations of ‘nuclear India’ and India’s ‘regional’ and ‘global’ selfhood is crucial. The concerned period of 2011–2020 was pivotal in charting Indian geopolitical identity, as India partook in international negotiations after the US-India Nuclear Deal in 2008 and became a member of multilateral export control regimes like the Wassenaar Arrangement, Australia Group, and Missile Technology Control Regime. This article deconstructs the Editorial texts to elicit the intertextual links underpinning the ‘geopolitical cultural signifier’, ‘geospatial mythology’, and ‘self/other’ binary representation that operationalises India’s nuclear identity in regional and global settings.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Mahan recognised the interdependence between military and commercial control of the sea. His publications The Interests of America in Sea Power, Present and Future in 1897 and The Major Operations of the Navies in the War of American Independence in 1913 sought to codify America’s maritime responsibilities.
2 Russian political theorist Dugin’s The Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geopolitical Future of Russia published in 1997 is widely claimed to be the basis of current Russian geopolitical strategy.
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Tanvi Pate
Tanvi Pate teaches Undergraduate Certificate in International Relations and Diploma in International Relations at the Institute of Continuing Education (ICE), University of Cambridge. She is also a Lecturer at the Centre for Security and Intelligence Studies (BUCSIS), University of Buckingham, where she teaches undergraduate and postgraduate modules on International Security. Her primary research interests include critical approaches to international relations and security, focusing on great power-rising power encounters, India and the global order, India's bilateral relations, and Indo-Pacific politics.