Joyojeet Pal: Technopopulism and the Assault on Indian Democracy

The South Asia Center presents Joyojeet Pal from the University of Michigan.

The idea of technocracy in politics, which presents the rational management of policy and administration as a means of legitimacy, has taken on a new populist logic in India’s digital age. In this talk, Joyojeet Pal argues that technology—and specifically the use of digital technology and its accompanying language of modernity—has been presented as an aspirational form of governance and as a cover for charismatic leadership over the last three decades.

Pal frames contemporary articulations of this Indian configuration of technopopulism within aspirations related to the technology industry and computing artifacts since the 1990s, tracing their progress through the branding and public outreach of Indian politicians like Chandrababu Naidu and Narendra Modi.

He proposes that social media has exacerbated the purchase of Indian technopopulism, in which a politician’s performance of the language of technological modernity is used to obfuscate underlying institutional capture.

In conclusion, he discusses the ways in which technopopulism provides social elites normative cover for supporting a political system that works in their favor.

This event is co-sponsored by: The Newhouse School’s Public Diplomacy and Global Communication Program