Page 278 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

Eastern spiritualism. Rather, like Ram, our Independence through consumption
occupies a space within the discourse of consumerism. Further, it reproduces a
similar logic where technology like DTH is wholeheartedly embraced along
Seth’s argument for “pragmatic decisions” (ibid., 81). If such a reading would
be considered farfetched or too generalized in its claims, witness the following.
In “Market Freedom: Tryst with Destiny Again,” a special A&M feature in its
August 15, 1997, annual review, the lead writers open the article thus:

Ironic. That’s just the word. India awoke to “light and freedom” having struck the
world dumb with what was perhaps the planet’s biggest ever victory of persuasion
over might. Then she chose to let people choose their leaders, even religions. And
then somehow ended up with an economic system so warped that the allocation
of the nation’s resources are determined by the mighty, not people’s persuasions on
what they want to consume. (ibid., 86)
The interpenetration of discourses of a chauvinist Hindu nationalism and
economic globalization fueled through the promises of consumerism are central
to the evolving cultural nationalism in India. The numerous examples above
illustrate this structural homology between religiously oriented culturalist dis-
course and a future-oriented discourse of globalization. What we see is a har-
nessing of the new possibilities of technology within a global imaginary in the
construction of a particular discourse of the “local.” Further, this discourse ma-
terialized through the Hindu nationalist-led governments in India, is structured
hierarchically, and is fed by a strong demarcation of those who belong to the
nation and those who do not. It is undergirded by practices and discourses of
militarism, where the con®ict in Kargill in Kashmir, for example, is repeatedly
used as a sign of the strength not so much of the military but of the militaristic
discourse of Hindu nationalism.
Etienne Balibar (1998, 220) has observed that “borders have stopped mark-
ing the limits where politics ends because the community ends.” As we have
seen, the “community of the faithful” for Hindu nationalism obeys no logic of
state-de¤ned territoriality, and mapping the borders of nationalism remains a
futile task if it sticks to such an emphasis. Balibar rightly argues that the com-
plexity of thinking about borders does not entail the conclusion that we live in
a “borderless world.” Rather, it is precisely through the global “borderlessness”
of Hindu nationalism that borders are being drawn (the ideology of “true Hin-
dus,” “true secularists,” etc.). The point here is that one must grasp contemporary
religious nationalisms on a changing map where “borders are both multiplied
and reduced in their localization and their function, they are being thinned out
and doubled” (ibid., 220). It is this dialectic of dis-attachment and reattachment
across an imaginary landscape where borders remain un¤xable in time and
space through which Hindu nationalism operates. The mass media, satellite
television in particular, lends itself to such an understanding in terms of the
“territory” of operation (at a planetary scale beyond state control), the problem-
atic relation to the nation-state, and the affective power of cultural belonging.
In this context the fragmentation of the singularity of the time/space nexus,

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