The Technological Self in India
Joyojeet Pal · 2017
In this paper, I propose that ICTD in India has been defined and promoted by an aspirational discourse of modernity that is not necessarily tied to the outcomes of actual projects in this space, but rather exists independently and has wide-ranging implications, including in mainstream politics. I highlight cases from specific ICTD projects, or the way they have been portrayed in the public sphere, to establish ways in which the symbolic value of technology has been an important driver of their purchase in public consciousness. Using these to foreground the discourse of technology in India, I examine the brand imaging of Narendra Modi, the current prime minister of India, and propose that he both understood and ably used the aspirational sentiment toward technology to craft an image of technocrat modernizer, obscuring a longer-standing image as a sectarian politician. I propose that Modi's is a beneficiary of an ICTD wave of thinking in India, and at the same time, his own careful curation of an online persona brings finesse to the notion of a technological self in politics. In this, the citizen-state relationship is mediated by the imagination of an enlightened, tech-savvy politician leading people who are themselves legitimated as citizens by their relationship to the technologies they use.