Page 42 - From Bombay to Bollywoord The Making of a Global Media Industri

Media Industries and the State in an Era of Reform >> 29

the countries of their residence and India. The BJP will seriously examine
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the question of dual citizenship to NRIs.” In September 2000, the BJP gov-
ernment appointed a High Level Committee under the chairmanship of L.
M. Singhvi, an MP who had served as High Commissioner to the U.K. and
was regarded as someone familiar with issues relating to the Indian diaspora.
The committee had a clear mandate: to conduct a “comprehensive study of
the global Indian diaspora” and to “recommend measures for a constructive
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relationship with them.” Redefining the NRI as a Person of Indian Origin
(PIO), the BJP government went on to declare a few years later:

We believe that the vast community of NRIs and PIOs also constitute a
part of the Great Indian Family. We should endeavour to continually
strengthen their social, cultural, economic and emotional ties with their
mother country. They are a rich reservoir of intellectual, managerial and
entrepreneurial resources. The government should devise innovative
schemes to facilitate the investment of these resources for India’s all-round
development (my emphasis). 15

The BJP government also followed the Singhvi report’s recommendation to
organize an annual event that would celebrate the nation’s relationship with
its diaspora, and serve to strengthen cultural ties. In 2003, the Ministry of
External Affairs and the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and
Industry (FICCI) jointly organized the first ever Pravasi Bharatiya Divas
(The Day of the Diaspora). Held during the month of January, this event
hoped “to bring the Indian family from all over the world together . . . and to
acquaint the Indian people with the achievements of the Indian diaspora and
to use them as a bridge to strengthen relationships between India and the
host countries in this age of globalization.” Attracting individuals from over
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sixty different countries, the extravagant event was billed as “the largest ever
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gathering of the global Indian family (my emphasis).” It was, as Bakirathi
Mani and Latha Varadarajan note, “a striking example of the new historical,
political, and cultural relationship between the Indian state and diasporic
populations in the early twenty-first century . . . and crucial to the reimagi-
nation of the postcolonial Indian state and constitutive of India’s place in a
neoliberal global order.” 18
How does this transition in state-diaspora ties and the reimagination of
the figure of the NRI as pivotal to India’s fortunes in a global economy relate
to what Ashish Rajadhyaksha terms the “Bollywoodization of Indian cin-
ema”? There are two interrelated developments that need to be elaborated:
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first, Bombay cinema’s role in mediating changing relations between India