Shaping the digital world: views on the internet in India in Prime Ministerial speeches (1998–2019)

Abstract

Despite the key role played by political elites in enacting and justifying policies related to the internet in India over the past few decades, the manner in which they viewed digital technologies has received relatively little attention. Using Charles Taylor’s notion of social imaginaries, this work attempts to help address this gap by examining the key values espoused within the narratives put forward by high-ranking government functionaries to understand the perspectives of this small yet powerful group. Through a thematic analysis of Prime Ministerial speeches from 1998 onwards it explores their visions in terms of the kind of internet users these were centred on, the role such technologies could play in pursuing development agendas, and how they addressed major issues such as private enterprise, the rural-urban divide and infrastructural gaps. Augmenting this with data on the growing accessibility of the internet itself during this period and major legislative acts passed, it offers a glimpse at the on-going process of shaping the internet by elite groups through the narratives they represent it by.

Keywords:

• Internet history
• India
• political speeches
• IT policy
• digital narratives

Acknowledgements

This article owes much of its present shape to the incisive comments given by anonymous peer reviewers as well as feedback provided on an earlier draft by my fellow participants at the National Seminar on 75 Years of Public Policy in India organised by the University of Hyderabad in collaboration with ICSSR.

Disclosure statement

The author reports there are no competing interests to declare.

Notes

1 Speeches by Prime Ministers prior to this time were not considered as the three years between the initial availability of the internet for the general public in India in 1995 and the general elections of 1998 were marked by fractious coalition politics within the central government which meant that no Prime Minister served a full term.

2 Out of a total of 2201 speeches, 55 speeches were unavailable due to technical failure, stemming for the most part from the use of older formats for uploading scanned copies of speeches.

3 A complete list of speeches analysed is given in Appendix A.