The gradual rise of right-wing populism in India has, for the time being, dominated the conversation about Indian politics. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has served as the protagonist of this political genre. The role of his personal experiences, particularly during the years he spent in the Hindu nationalist organization, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), in the formation of his populist politics has been well-studied. What researchers have not yet focused on is Modi’s rhetoric on the family and the role it plays in his populist mobilization. This commentary aims to address these issues through a discourse analysis of Modi’s invocation of family in his politics. I will address the dialectics of family vis-a-vis political rhetoric and compare Modi’s discourses of “Indian-diaspora-as-extended-family” and estrangement from his own family—both of which are present in his rhetoric on family and politics as well as on family-in-politics. I argue that Modi’s two-faced discourses on family, however contrasting, play a central role in his populist mobilization.
Keywords: family, populism, Modi, India
BIONOTE
Sandeepan TRIPATHY is currently a Ph.D. Candidate at the Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore. Previously, he finished his MSc in Sociology from the London School of Economics and Political Science. He also received a scholarship at the Karl Jaspers Center for Advanced Transcultural Studies at the Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg.
