Page 41 - From Bombay to Bollywoord The Making of a Global Media Industri

28 << Media Industries and the State in an Era of Reform

Hindus on a global scale, characterized Nehru’s policies toward expatriate
8
Indians as “confused, erratic and apathetic.” As early as 1977, when the Janata
Party held power in New Delhi for a brief period of two years, Atal Bihari
Vajpayee, who was the Minister of External Affairs at the time, declared:
“India would never disown overseas Indians, or fail to appreciate their loy-
9
alty to the motherland.” The ruling Janata Party attempted to reframe India’s
relationship with the diaspora through a number of formal and informal ini-
tiatives—sponsoring seminars on overseas Indians, exploring the viability
of establishing a department that would deal exclusively with the affairs of
overseas Indians, introducing new laws to allow overseas Indians to return to
India even if they held citizenship elsewhere, and so on. None of this, how-
ever, made any significant impact until the late 1980s and early 1990s when
India’s gradual integration into the global market economy was set in motion.
Several scholars have shown that the program of structural adjustment and
economic liberalization that successive Indian governments undertook dur-
ing the 1990s was not just a matter of reframing economic policies. These
structural changes also opened up, as Aditya Nigam observes, “immense
imaginative possibilities for the new elite imagination of a deterritorialised
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global nation.” He writes:

In the vision of this “global nation,” those who went away were no longer
to be seen as traitors. They were the resources that the nation, now prepar-
ing to move into the brave new world, could profitably utilize. They had
state-of-the-art skills, knowledge and capital to invest in the new areas that
needed to be rapidly developed. Enter, therefore, the ubiquitous figure of
the NRI—the privileged citizen of this global nation. 11

While this transition in the cultural and political elites’ imagination of a
deterritorialized national family began during the 1980s with Prime Minis-
ter Rajiv Gandhi inviting diasporic entrepreneurs like Sam Pitroda to guide
India’s march into the twenty-first century by capitalizing on the “microchip
and communications revolution,” it was only during the late 1990s when the
right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power that the state began
12
forging ties with the diaspora in aggressive fashion. Refashioning India’s
relationship with the diaspora, particularly with wealthy first-world expatri-
ates in countries such as the United States and England, was a key element
of the BJP’s agenda for governance. In a document titled “Foreign Policy
Agenda for the Future,” this objective was clearly articulated: “The people of
Indian origin living abroad are an asset, which the BJP would try to utilize
to the fullest extent to foster relations of friendship and cooperation between