Digital Politics and Culture in Contemporary India

Book excerpt: The relationship between information and the nation-state is typically portrayed as a face-off involving repressive state power and democratic flows: Twitter and the Arab Spring, Google in China, WikiLeaks and the U.S. State Department. Less attention has been paid to those scenarios where states have regarded information and its diffusion as productive of modernity and globalization. It is the central argument of this book that the contemporary nation-state, especially in the global South, is far from hostile to the current informational milieu and in fact makes crucial use of it in order to develop adequate modes of governance, communication and sociality in a networked world. This book focuses on India – an emerging country that has recently witnessed a "software miracle" – to highlight the critical role informatics has historically played in the national imagination and to demonstrate how the state, private capital and civic society have drawn upon and engaged the precepts and protocols of the information age to fashion an "info-nation."