Unpacking Digital India: A Feminist Commentary on Policy Agendas in the Digital Moment

Abstract

This article is a feminist commentary on India's national digital agenda in the current political context. The analysis pursues three main policy strands—social welfare, democracy, and economic growth, unpacking the meta-narrative of technology, gender, and development that characterizes the particular complexion of authoritarian neoliberalism reconstituting Indian democracy in digital times. The Indian case, the article submits, is reflective of the contemporary digital moment, not only marked by the evisceration of the transformative content of gender politics, but also constitutive of it. Under the circumstances, it is imperative to produce alternative feminist imaginaries of social, political, and economic discourse nationally and globally.

Introduction

A key thread in feminist media scholarship over the past two decades is the call for alternative imaginaries of the media that reject a techno-driven, market-centered approach.¹ Information society developments have, however, complicated media discourse, with media permeating all aspects of society. In the impassioned appeals for choice and freedoms that have characterized emerging social discourse on the information society, feminists find themselves caught on the same side as actors with oppositional ideological persuasions.² How media policies can address gender justice in a manner that advances “principles of transparency, diversity, participation and social and economic justice”³ in the information society is a debate that is unfortunately not commonplace.

This is partly because gender equality advocates have not forged epistemological bridges with media studies scholarship in political economy and critical theory. Contemporary media and communication policy framings fail to recognize power differentials in the “right to communicate” between different classes of citizens in the information society context. The communicative environment of the information society enlists more and more users through a win–win mode; it valorizes user participation, where the user is the product.⁴ As connectivity and access become the new normal, gender concerns in media policy are reduced to the imperative for women's inclusion, and hence, the need to bridge the gender digital divide. Experiences of exclusion arising from the capture of contemporary communication architecture by monopoly-finance capital⁵ and by the informational state⁶ are rendered illegible. Existing analytical frames of gender and media therefore bypass the material-discursive apparatus in and through which gender relations are reproduced in the current social order.

Scaffolded by the Internet, neoliberalism has risen as the dominant political dogma in a globalized world. It has fuelled a hegemonic information society discourse that uncritically celebrates the new opportunities for individual autonomy, flexibility, and innovation in the immaterial, digital economy.⁷ Meanwhile, the current global economic model, reflective of the “crisis in” neoliberalism,⁸ and the rise of identitarian fundamentalisms on a global scale has revealed the gendered fault lines of poverty, racial profiling, violence, and war.⁹ As this article demonstrates, the dominant digital paradigm combines with an emerging “authoritarian neoliberalism”¹⁰ on national scales and perpetuates the myth of “masculine entrepreneurialism” and “misrecognition” of women.¹¹ Authoritarian neoliberalism is the new manifestation of neoliberal governance, in the face of the global capitalist crisis. It is the modus operandi through which governments and elite social groups start relying on direct exclusion and nondemocratic practices rather than hegemonic control as a strategy for insulating the “capitalist state” from social and political conflict.

Proceeding from this analytical angle, we examine the digital agenda of the Indian state in an attempt to trace and recover the gendered assumptions and politics underpinning key national policy arenas. Through an analysis of the Digital India policy discourse, we tease out the particular complexion of authoritarian neoliberalism reconstituting Indian democracy in digital times. The specific methodology adopted for this exercise is that of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). CDA focuses on “revealing structures of power and unmasking ideologies”¹² through the study of discourse as social practice rather than discourse as text. The onus is on individual researchers to establish a set of arguments to justify the particular approach they adopt.¹³

We use a two-layered analytical approach to tease out the idea of Digital India as a socio-relational discourse, unpacking its gendered substructures. At the first level, the official policy documents of the Digital India program, the prime minister's speech at the launch in July 2015, and his tweets on digital policy between February 2014 and November 2015 are examined to identify the gender imaginaries latent in the programmatic vision of Digital India. At the second level, the prime minister's key utterances on global and national platforms (identified through media reports and speech transcripts on the prime minister's official website) between April 2014 and November 2015 about broader policy questions of social welfare, democracy, and economic growth are analyzed. The rationale guiding the choice of timeline is as follows. February 2014 was when the election campaigning began, and the current prime minister (then a candidate) was extremely active on Twitter and other social media—laying out his policy position on many agendas. April 2014 was the month in which the sixteenth Indian general elections, in which the current prime minister emerged victorious, were held. The cut-off date of November 2015 was determined, taking into consideration the pragmatics with regard to this research article.

The digital agenda in the Indian context has not been monolithic.¹⁴ It has displayed an ambivalence—combining market-oriented policy positions on one hand with interventionist, “public interest” policy making on the other. What our analysis underlines is that a grand narrative of digital technology for development—deployed as a key trope for the Indian nation-state's resurgence in the global marketplace—is coalescing in the current political conjuncture. Further, we demonstrate how the authoritarian state's digital agenda reveals a patriarchal subtext in the strategic assertions about, and erasures of, women. The Indian case, we submit, is reflective of the contemporary digital moment, not only marked by the evisceration of the transformative content of gender politics, but also constitutive of it. Under these circumstances, we are faced with the extensive task of producing alternative feminist imaginaries of social, political, and economic discourse in the information society. Toward this, the re-politicization of gender in media and communication policy frameworks at global and national levels is a critical first step.

The Political Content of Digital India

The official policy vehicle of the present dispensation on technology and development, Digital India, is a flagship program that seeks to “transform India into a digitally empowered society and knowledge economy.”¹⁵ It was officially launched on July 1, 2015, in a gala event attended by over 10,000 people including 400 industry captains, by the prime minister of India, Narendra Modi. The program's strategic document prepared by the Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY) outlines three core elements in discussing the vision of Digital India. Highlights of these are summarized as follows.

Digital Infrastructure as a Public Utility

All citizens are to be provided access to high-speed Internet infrastructure, and a unique digital identity that can serve as an authenticating mechanism for availing welfare services. This digitalized service delivery system is expected to be enhanced in the future, through the introduction of mobile banking and a system of “digital lockers” (i.e., where every citizen is allotted a private space within a public cloud for storing government documents).

Governance and Services on Demand

Existing e-service delivery arrangements are to be revamped to ensure seamless integration of services across different departments and jurisdictions, with digitalization of financial transactions between state agencies and citizens. In this recasting of service delivery, “cost-effective Public Private Partnership (PPP)” models are seen as the modus operandi for creating “transformational and outcome oriented e-governance initiatives.”¹⁶

Digital Empowerment of Citizens

Universal digital literacy drives, the promotion of local language digital resource production, and the creation of digital platforms for citizen consultation and collaborative governance are seen as core strategies to create a digitally empowered citizenry.

The program documents of Digital India can be described as gender-neutral, if not gender-blind, officialese that many have described as a continuation of the previous government's policies and strategic directions, revamped to fit in new technological offerings (such as mobile devices) for citizen-end communication and participation.¹⁷ At the heart of the Digital India policy discourse, however, is not merely the rather aseptic technical content of the program, but the seemingly discrete fragments—“imaginaries of a digitally empowered society” espoused by the ruling political dispensation across various policy narratives.

At the official launch of Digital India, the prime minister spoke about his dream:

This call to the nation, broadcast live on national radio and television, encapsulates the imagination of a Digital India, where inequality and marginalization (with respect to education, health care, governance services, and the economy) are framed as problems of “access.” The grand narrative of India is a spectacle of global envy, emerging as it does through a netizenry—connected citizens who overcome ignorance, corruption, and poverty. As many commentators have pointed out, a disciplined India, unafraid to claim its rightful place as a thought leader in the global order, is a recurring political theme, presented as the development model by the prime minister.¹⁹ Its hallmark is the ease with which it combines a postmodern neoliberal aspiration of material prosperity with a hegemonic disciplined idea of “Indianness” in which every citizen performs her preordained part to reestablish an ancient Hindu nation's pride and glory. In this vision, democracy will connect citizens (imagined to be upwardly mobile, enterprising men) to the global marketplace. There is no room for historical exclusions arising out of the socioculturally and politically differentiated experiences of citizenship.

Neither the Digital India policy document, nor the prime minister, in his address during the formal launch of the program, explicitly makes reference to the digital agenda envisioned for women's rights and empowerment. Socioeconomic policies in the post gender-mainstreaming era seem to have “ended up streaming gender away in policy spaces.”²⁰ The omission of the “woman” question in Digital India is a strategic silence. It reflects the state's servicing of existing patriarchal structures, an active perpetuation of the “sexual contract”²¹ to build a virile Indian nation, one that “the world looks to for the next big idea”!²²

As we unravel further the narratives of technology, social inclusion, democracy, and economic growth in India's current conjuncture, what is evident is that policies do not envision women as active political or economic agents. In the next sections, we unpack the political ideas of development and nation in the utterances of the current prime minister, in global and national platforms.

The Technocracy of Welfare Privatization and Bio-Surveillance

The present government, during its first year in office, launched only one major scheme directed at women and girls—the “Save the girl child, Educate the girl child” campaign, in 100 districts that have the worst child sex ratios. India's alarmingly low sex ratio has its roots in gender bias and discrimination that result in neglect of girls and sex selective abortions. In some regions, the country is witness to social catastrophes such as the absence of young women of marriageable age,²³ and of girl-child births, for years on end.²⁴ The scheme's broad logic is to incentivize households for educating girls through staggered cash transfers, upon the attainment of key milestones in early childcare and school education, combined with effective policing of sex-selective abortion practices at the community level.²⁵ Faced with the rather embarrassing reality of the lack of progress on human development and gender development indices, mounting international pressure to address its abysmal sex ratio, this measure comes as a rather nonnegotiable instrument of the government's public management strategy.

The aphorism to “Save and Educate the Daughter”²⁶ blends with flagship programs to “Clean India” and “Make in India,” reflecting new sensibilities congealing rather neatly into a brand of Indian orderliness for the nation's global future. At the launch of the program, the prime minister made a strong appeal to the social morality of the patriarchs in Haryana state, where his party had just won a landslide victory for the first time. Exhorting them to shun “18th century backwardness,” he identified himself as a “beggar begging for the life of daughters” (emphasis added).²⁷

While the moral imperative of saving the girl child and sending her to school is reflected in the government's development priorities, agendas such as safety²⁸ and the provision of a targeted social security net for women²⁹ have been completely dropped, despite electoral promises. In fact, in the Union Budget of 2015–16, the total allocation to the area of Women and Child Development has been slashed by over one-third compared to the previous year.³⁰ Funding for programs that are well proven to directly impact women's lives and livelihoods—such as the national rural employment guarantee scheme set up by the previous government—has also been drastically reduced.³¹ Instead, the focus has been on building a “distinctly center-right, conservative”³² development model that focuses on utilizing a digitally enabled governance architecture to open up access to the market for the poor. The Direct Benefit Transfers (DBTs) program represents the best exemplar of this.

In January 2015, the government announced its decision to roll out DBTs for thirty-three different schemes of fourteen ministries/departments.³³ Even under the previous regime, an overwhelming push for DBT was already evident. But unlike its predecessor, the push for DBTs under the current regime is accompanied by a systematic dismantling of a broad-based social welfare approach³⁴ and of traditional, targeted social security programming for women.³⁵ In-kind support for health, education, food security, and childcare is sought to be replaced with more “efficient” cash transfers, based on the technological restructuring of governance. During his Independence Day speech in 2014, the only structural solution to the ills of poor governance that the prime minister introduced was that of technology. Evidence on the ground is, however, contrary to the hope that technology will reduce the layers of intermediaries; it has instead increased the number of intermediaries involved in payments, often with complex processes that make the payment process more opaque than in a purely bureaucratic mechanism.³⁶ The privatization of social security has gendered impacts. Existing studies reveal that the assumption of an automatic link between cash transfers and women's empowerment can be misleading. In many instances, cash transfers may reinforce traditional gender roles and also leave intra-household gender inequalities untouched.³⁷

This transition to DBTs is being facilitated through the creation of an elaborate ICT-enabled de-duplication mechanism, in the form of the Aadhar/Unique Identification Number scheme. Aadhar aims at creating a universal identity infrastructure at the national level by issuing every resident of the country a unique identification number linked to his/her biometric and demographic information (name, gender, date of birth, address, mobile number). This number is to serve as a mechanism that enables the assembling together of an individual's data traces that are currently scattered across multiple agencies—public and private—thereby creating a massive apparatus for social profiling and targeted welfare. In the specific instance of the DBTs, the government plans to seed bank accounts of welfare recipients with their Aadhar number for beneficiary authentication, and use mobile numbers linked to the Aadhar cards to alert recipients about fund transfers to their bank accounts.

Scholars have highlighted how the Aadhar scheme exemplifies the shift from a broad-based social welfare paradigm to one of “bio-surveillance,” which focuses on using the body itself as the border “par excellence,” for classification of citizens into “high-risk” and “low-risk” individuals on some occasions, and “deserving” and “undeserving” poor on other occasions.³⁸ What makes this possible is the easy two-way movement between specific, corporeal bodies and disembodied, abstract data systems that the technological affordances of biometric identification and big data analysis have enabled. The creation of large-scale citizen databases allows for the abstraction of individuals into virtual data points, whose corporeal bodies can then be summoned by the state at will, through biometric tracking.

India's unique identity infrastructure represents the disciplining of citizens through “welfare surveillance.” Feminist scholarship points to how welfare surveillance systems tend to “artificially abstract bodies, identities and interactions from social contexts … (and) obscure and aggravate gender and other social inequalities.”³⁹ Inequalities are obscured, since such systems reconstruct gender and social inequalities as individual “lacks.” At the same time, inequalities are also aggravated as such systems promote a paternalistic supervision of citizens at the margins. By using “masculine logics of disembodied control at a distance,”⁴⁰ the surveillance state reshapes the democratic space.

The current welfare regimes in India deploy digital technologies to dis-embed social and economic rights from their deeply social and gendered moorings. Using ideologies of information society utopianism and privatization, they “desocialize”⁴¹ questions of well-being, care, and support. By shifting the whole “arena of the perception, identification and treatment of the problems of society”⁴² that concerns women's economic and political citizenship into the private sphere, the desocialization of welfare reorders gender ideologies informing public policy. Reinforcing “masculinized representations of social experience and value,”⁴³ the “filtering out” of social contexts through technocratic governance systems leads to objectification and othering of marginal citizen subjects.

What current trends in India seem to tell us is that gender is permissible in policy and program as a paternalistic meme that will appeal to the moral conviction of a patriarchal social order. However, the socio-structural basis upon which gender-based discrimination stands is negated in the making of the new Indian nation. Digital technology is deployed in this pursuit to integrate women citizens into the market, fix the means and methods to surveil the poor, and neutralize feminist gains in public policy.

The Digitally Reconstituted Public Sphere at the Service of Authoritarian Protectionism

The prime minister's savviness in navigating the digital media in an age of “politics as optics” has been noted by observers, right from the days of his electoral campaign.⁴⁴ Social media and web-enabled platforms have played a central role in promoting the particular mix of “liberal free market discourses … (with) conservative themes of tradition, family, nation, respectability, patriarchalism and order,”⁴⁵ an analysis that holds good for the “authoritarian populism”⁴⁶ of the current regime in India.

The establishment of the Mygov.in citizen portal exemplifies the government's efforts in this area. The main opportunities for participation that the portal has so far provided include

• Enabling citizens to sign up for freewheeling discussions on broad policy issues, such as “how do we leverage youth power?,” “how can we end violence against women?,” and so on, that are opened up from time to time on the platform, but without any guarantee of the right to be heard or strong linkages to offline, consultative mechanisms;

• Conducting citizen contests on naming and designing logos for newly introduced government schemes and services; and

• Issuing invites to citizens to develop governance apps.

Mygov.in encourages disciplined debates where citizens can dutifully engage in discussions whose terms are set by the government. It exemplifies an undermining of democracy through the obscuration of the real debates raging in the body politic. This analysis is strengthened when we take into account the recent developments that indicate a slow and steady erasure of the space for dissent in the Indian context. Community radio stations have been issued diktats on ensuring pro-government standpoints in their broadcasts,⁴⁷ and to make place for the prime minister's monthly radio address. Research studies that reveal inconvenient truths about India Inc.'s success story—such as UNICEF's study on child malnutrition in Gujarat (the home state of the prime minister)—are buried.⁴⁸ Further, civil society organizations fighting for the rights of India's first peoples and questioning environmentally unsustainable development are being strangled through regulations that tighten the screws on their access to international funding, while their activists are being subjected to extreme harassment.⁴⁹

In this hegemonic project, omissions are as important as assertions. Despite being extremely active on social media (especially Twitter), the prime minister, during his first year in office, has steered clear of debates on women's rights and gendered experiences of marginality. Entrenched in caste and communal equations, the lack of a cohesive political constituency of women complicates public debate and political negotiations around women's rights in India. Policy response to gender is based on a careful political orchestration to avoid alienating the male vote bank vital to party politics. Men often interlocute “their” women's rights, owing to which, debates become polarized between the progressive middle class feminists and conservative, communal forces. Grassroots women's movements⁵⁰ present a strong force of resistance on issues of land alienation, right to forests, sexual violence, access to livelihoods, and so on. Unfortunately, the ephemerality and sexualization of gender issues in current cultures of media production flattens out structural injustice in the media space.⁵¹ This means gender justice is seldom debated as an issue straddling social, economic, cultural, and political imperatives. While social movements face a closure of political spaces, the Internet age has spawned newer movements, redefining gender politics on a broader scale, to include new issues such as LGBT rights. However, the mass media reach of new age movements and their appropriation of new media seems to render older movements invisible.⁵²

The current government has managed the women's rights agenda through avoidance. There are two exceptions to this. The strong messaging from the prime minister on the sex ratio (discussed earlier) in his Independence Day speech in 2014 advising “mothers and sisters not to sacrifice daughters in the hope of son” [sic]; and an exhortation to parents in the same speech, to play their role in dealing with the “shame of rape”: “Those who commit rape are also someone's sons. You should stop them before they take the wrong path.”⁵³ In March 2015, in an international media controversy over the banning of India's Daughter, a film by the BBC on the rape of a young woman in 2012 that was widely condemned, the prime minister maintained a stoic silence. The running theme of daughters was, however, back on the agenda in June. But this time, moving away from his disciplinary admonition, he took to cajoling fathers in a Twitter campaign entitled #SelfiewithDaughter. The campaign aimed at boosting pride in the girl child, asking fathers in particular to take selfies with their daughters and post them on Twitter. Criticism for this as “eyewash,” from a female celebrity, met with hate tweets and trolls directed at her on Twitter.⁵⁴

Attacks on women are shockingly high in the virtual public sphere in India, with online abuse and harassment becoming new additions to traditional tactics for silencing women who dare to speak out.⁵⁵ On various occasions, the current government has faced embarrassing situations owing to patriarchal, and even misogynistic, utterances by its ministers and party members. However, the prime minister has consistently steered clear of engaging with these instances. The ruling party routinely employs gender politics to pursue its communalization goals. The propaganda of “love jihad”⁵⁶ is one such a tool. In a recent episode, a religious female leader and member of Parliament from the party urged Hindu women to reproduce more in the interest of the nation (to prevent it from becoming Islamized)!⁵⁷

The regressive ideology of authoritarian protectionism in the Indian public sphere is but an instantiation of the distinctly gendered ideology used by populist regimes. Promoting discourses that reinforce gender hierarchies foundational to the existing social order within the nation-state, it silences narratives that threaten the idea of patriarchal omnipotence.⁵⁸ What we see in India is that statecraft in the information society uses old and new media alike through a combination of propaganda management, public disciplining, patriarchal benevolence, repression of freedoms, and active intimidation of dissenters, conducting politics as spectacle. Strategic silences around gender issues speak to the erasure of gender equality as a public-political goal for policy.

The Digital as a Central Trope in the Pursuit of Growth-Oriented Development: Space for (Only Some) Women?

India has actively adopted a growth-oriented development paradigm since 1991, following a balance of payments crisis that led to the large-scale liberalization of the economy. Since then, subsequent governments have focused on facilitating foreign investments in the national economy, through de-licensing and de-regulation, the easing of labor laws, and the globalization of agricultural markets. In the post-reforms period, soliciting foreign capital to ensure India's presence on the global economic stage emerged as an acceptable policy priority for all ruling parties, irrespective of their stated ideologies. This has been accompanied by a rise of neoliberal utilitarianism in the space of jurisprudence, with verdicts in the Supreme Court shifting from “rights-talk” to the idea of “balancing competing priorities.”⁵⁹

However, more than two decades after the economic reforms, the debate still persists, on the efficacy of the neoliberal economic model in furthering the development agenda. Development economists Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen have cautioned that this development model of according primacy to the market has benefited only the top 20 percent or so of the population, while failing to produce tangible benefits for poor households.⁶⁰ Though the head-count ratio for poverty declined from 50 percent in 1993–94 to 34 percent in 2009–10, they highlight that this is largely attributable to the “density effect”—“the fact that many people are just a little below the official poverty line, so that a small increase in per capita expenditure is enough to ‘lift’ them above the line.”⁶¹ To bolster this claim, they turn to the National Sample Survey Data, which reveals that during this twenty-year period, average per capita expenditure in rural areas grew at the abysmally slow rate of 1 percent per year, and in urban areas at a mere 2 percent per year. Further, during this period, no clear progress on social indicators was made. In fact, India fared worse than some of its less economically developed neighbors!⁶² The evidence clearly debunks the myth of automatic percolation of the benefits of economic growth to all sections of the population.

The current dispensation, despite contrary indications during the election campaigns,⁶³ has followed the footsteps of its predecessor government in aggressively pushing for a market-oriented growth model through the active solicitation of transnational capital. For example, leaders of the current government, when they were in the political opposition, had challenged the previous dispensation's policy decision in 2012 to ease Foreign Direct Investments (FDI) in multi-brand retail. However, after coming to power in the general elections of 2014, the same leaders who opposed the policy backtracked on their decision to revise it, and the policy has been left untouched! In a similar vein, the current government has gone on to increase the FDI cap in fifteen key sectors of the economy in 2015.⁶⁴ The economic policy of the present political regime stands out for a few key facets that we discuss in the following.

The Market as the “Final Solution” to the “Welfare of All”

For the current government, market-oriented growth is the only solution to all the woes of the Indian economy—including poverty alleviation and social welfare. Unlike the previous government that invested in the creation of a large-scale social security net by enacting laws for providing food security and “wage for work” to the most marginalized sections, the current government's stance seems to be that “equal opportunities” to participate in the economy are more than enough for “all-round development” that promotes “the welfare of all.”⁶⁵ The prime minister's inaugural address at the Global Business Summit—a convention of industry leaders and economists in January 2015 exemplifies this stance:

The welfare question is completely recast as an individual problem to be addressed by each person, by building her skill set to effectively participate in the market economy. As discussed in the section “The Technocracy of Welfare Privatization and Bio-Surveillance,” this leads to an exacerbation of existing exclusions.

The Strategic Value of the Digital Economy

The digital and electronics sector has come to play an all-important role. In fact, Digital India has become a trope for the pursuit of this next wave of “knowledge-driven” growth, and hence, the launch speech of the program is peppered with references to: “investments in nation-wide digital highways,” “enabling India to become globally competitive in the electronics goods market in order to reap the benefits of the IT revolution for a youthful nation,” and “encouraging (technological) start-up ventures.”⁶⁷

Alliances with trans-national capital, especially public–private partnerships with mega digital corporations, are considered key to realizing this vision. In September 2015, during his visit to the United States, the prime minister sought out a meeting to dialogue with leaders of top-notch Silicon Valley companies to persuade them to invest in the Digital India strategy.⁶⁸ His mammoth public speech to an Indian-American audience in Silicon Valley in 2015 appealed to the Indian diaspora to join the India growth story.⁶⁹ Most strikingly, the prime minister went out of his way to woo Facebook to be a part of the India growth story, even as the regulator back home was undertaking a national public consultation on whether the Free Basics service of Facebook violated “net neutrality.”⁷⁰ The current CEOs of Google and Microsoft (both of whom are persons of Indian origin) responded to these overtures of the prime minister by offering to partner in some components of the Digital India vision. Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, announced a partnership with the Indian Railways for the provision of Wi-Fi in over 500 railway stations in the country, on the heels of the prime minister's visit.⁷¹ And Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, followed up by expressing his eagerness to participate in the development of “smart” villages through digitalization of public services and infrastructure enhancement.⁷²

In September 2014, a few months after coming to power, the prime minister had launched the Make in India program to “transform India into a global design and manufacturing hub” in a number of core sectors, including electronic systems design and manufacturing, by easing licensing and investment regulation.⁷³ And a year later—a few months after the prime minister's visit to the United States—the government started pushing for the up-gradation of the existing Intellectual Property Rights policy framework to international standards in order to reassure global investors.⁷⁴

The move that best captures the aggressive pursuit of transnational capital for nation building is the Smart Cities Mission launched by the Government of India in 2015. The Mission plans to set up 100 Smart Cities in the country with high-quality infrastructure and Information Technology solutions for efficiency in governance, through joint ventures with private partners.⁷⁵ The idea is to have world-class urban areas that “India Inc.” can leverage, in its attempt to become a force to reckon with in the global digital economy. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the vision document of the Mission remains completely silent on how the pursuit of smartness will make the cityscape inclusive.⁷⁶

The Buzz on Enskillment and Entrepreneurial Energies of Women in the Digital Economy

The creation of an emerging class of individual entrepreneurs who can benefit from the India growth story is another theme that has been given much more emphasis by the current regime when compared to its predecessors. The Start up India, Stand up India initiative, launched in January 2016, aims at rewarding Indian entrepreneurs with the “capabilities” to stand up in the digital economy by supporting them in setting up innovative start-ups. The Skill India Mission and National Digital Literacy Mission are two other initiatives that aim at realizing the economic potential of India's demographic dividend through enskillment and digital literacy. In partnership with technology companies, the Skill India Mission aims at setting up a network of training centers in the country for enskilling 2.4 million youth across the country within a year, as part of its mission for “empowering youth by equipping them with the skills that meet industry needs.”⁷⁷ The National Digital Literacy Mission intends to provide digital literacy training to 5.2 million people across the country, roping in state government agencies, industry partners, and corporate social responsibility initiatives.⁷⁸ In a country of one billion, where 50 percent of the population is below the age of twenty-five years, one wonders whether this is adequate investment in creating an opportunity structure for enhancing youth employment. In a society stratified variously by caste, ethnicity, class, and gender, a roadmap for skilling would need to spell out how the opportunity structure will be altered.⁷⁹ Training programs by themselves cannot automatically translate into functional and meaningful literacy.

In the buzz around promoting citizen participation in the digital economy, encouragement of women's enterprise is an idea that has been recurrent. For example, at the launch event of Digital India, the prime minister personally felicitated two women entrepreneurs who are running digitally enabled one-stop shops for service delivery, at the village level, under the government's Common Service Centres program.⁸⁰ Similarly, in May 2015, the government announced a crowd-sourcing exercise⁸¹ for digitalizing government records, cashing in on the entrepreneurial energies of citizens, especially “housewives,” by using a strategy in which “anyone can (sign-up to volunteer their time for this exercise) in return for points that can later be converted into cash.”⁸²

However, concrete attention to the question of the enskillment of women and other marginalized sections is lacking. Apart from highlighting the importance of providing digital literacy trainings to women community workers who are part of government extension programs,⁸³ the National Digital Literacy Mission does not have specific initiatives that focus on equipping women with the skills that will enable them to effectively participate in the digital economy. Similarly, the National Skills Mission is gender-agnostic in its design.

Neoliberal Masculinity and Entrepreneurial Femininity

The constituents of the meta narrative of Digital India aided by foreign capital and corporate (male) leaders from the Indian diaspora are seen to ensure the resurgence of the nation on the international stage. As the present government's official foreign policy framework puts it, India will emerge as “second to none, on the global stage … (capable) of holding its own against other (nations).”⁸⁴ In May 2015, speaking to an audience in Shanghai as part of an official visit to China, the prime minister proudly proclaimed that within one year of his government coming to power, citizens had moved from being ashamed of their nationality to being proud to represent the country in the international arena!⁸⁵ As commentators have pointed out, this neoliberal masculinity “gestures at and seeks to overturn historical ‘emasculation’—the social inability (of the Indian nation) to deal with internal and external ‘threats’ and the economic inability to be seen as ‘global.’”⁸⁶ Whereas economic ascendancy linked to enskilling and home-grown entrepreneurs continues to inspire politics as sentiment in official speak, statistics belie this spirited optimism. Growth is slowing down and private investment is out of steam. Forecasts suggest that the export sector's performance is likely to be the worst this year (2015–16) since 1952–53.⁸⁷

The results of a search carried out by the authors on the two key Twitter accounts maintained by the prime minister (@narendramodi and @PMOIndia) shed further light on this. These two accounts have a total of seventy-two tweets on the subject of the “digital.” A thematic classification of the tweets conducted by the authors revealed fifty-two tweets on the subjects of digitally enabled nation building and economic development, clearly key priorities in the PM's digital vision. Twenty tweets address the theme of extending the reach of Digital India—through skill development, digital literacy, and bridging the digital divide. Not a single tweet among these pertains to women's economic participation, but implicit to the utterances of the prime minister is the idea that connectivity is inclusion.

A more in-depth examination reflects a strategic ambivalence of gender politics. The digitally enskilled woman entrepreneur and volunteer of humble origins is important to buffer this neoliberal developmental narrative of an emerging India that is “on the path to progress”⁸⁸ by removing the entry barriers that prevent women and other marginalized groups from effectively participating in the economy. However, in this narrative, the “economy” itself is constructed as a “disembedded space” outside the control of social and gender norms.⁸⁹ Therefore, it accords no place for messy questions of social and gender power within the capitalist market. As a result, the figure of the subaltern woman who has managed to “lean in” as a contributor in the digital economy coexists with an uneasy absence of other women, women who stand invisibilized in struggles and contestations about economy and development. For example, the current economic paradigm has no space for economic truths of women farmers resisting policies and programs pushing for the corporate take-over of natural resources to demand their “inalienable rights over livelihood resources.”⁹⁰ Time and again, reminiscent of the spontaneous uprising of women factory workers at the beginning of the twentieth century, laboring women in different pockets of the country have taken to the streets, drawing attention to the injustices of the economic paradigm and the abrasion of basic rights of women. In early 2016, thousands of garment workers in the city of Bengaluru took to the streets, braving police brutality, in a spontaneous flash strike protesting the central government's proposal to amend the Employees Provident Fund rules that would make the government component of the corpus unavailable to them until they turned fifty-eight. This was bad news for women whose everyday lives are highly precarious.⁹¹ In late 2015, women workers in tea plantations in the southern Indian state of Kerala self-organized to protest against the low wages and working conditions, refusing to allow existing patriarchal trade unions to interfere in their affairs. The struggle was “a thunderous slap on the cheek of Kerala's highly patriarchal history of trade unionism.”⁹²

In the discourse of Digital India, there is a “simultaneous articulation and disarticulation”⁹³ of the marginal woman. Sometimes we see concessions being granted to her through developmental narratives (of enskilling and entrepreneurship) that render the new middle class “inclusive,” and at other times, her obliteration, where she represents a cautionary symbol for the limits of the growth story.⁹⁴ The promise of an IT revolution for an India that is on the path to global economic ascendancy is thus a legitimization of a masculinist, neoliberal desire to be part of global markets. This revolution may concede some space for women, but only on its own terms, and only for some women.

Conclusion

Through a discourse analysis of the national digital agenda of India in the current political context, this article sought to uncover the unique characteristics of authoritarian neoliberalism in India. It traced how the particular and unequivocally gendered narratives of governance, public discourse, and economic development are generated through India's digital agenda, shaping a culturally resurgent hypermasculine nation aspiring to compete in the global marketplace. Whereas the Digital India program of the government suggests certain strategic directions for policy, incorporating the ostensibly regular mix of constituents in the grand design of India's information society, we show how digital agendas are not contained in the narrow syntax of public policy pronouncements. As digital technologies become infused with and coextensive of the social in contemporary conjuncture, they intertwine with local articulations of development in a globalized, neoliberal world. States recarve the cartographies of nations in the information society, through corporatist, hypermasculine discourses of power, control, and desire, in which gender politics are reordered suitably to serve patriarchy through digital agenda.

Constitutive of the hegemonic idea of the Indian nation in the contemporary world, the emergent technocratic regime in India reinforces gender hierarchies by erasing and silencing narratives that threaten the idea of patriarchal omnipotence. Through authoritarian paternalism, it creates the spectacle of the female persona commensurate to address the national gender vagaries that compromise its global standing. In the digital agenda deployed by the state, we see the evacuation of gender politics through the desocialization of welfare, infantalizing of gender discourse as the protection of girl children, and invitation to the digital market leaders and diasporic brotherhood to participate in nation building. Social media and online spaces are carefully deployed, and the realpolitik of gender is deleted from public debate. While the digital opportunity is sought to be claimed to aggrandize national capitalists, contesting claims over the nation and economy by laboring women are negated.

The Indian narrative represents how the agenda of gender equality and digital empowerment in national information societies is reduced to a neoliberal political rationality of boundless connectivity and opportunity (the new freedom), uncoupled from structural justice issues. The global digital marketplace, meanwhile, produces a version of women's digital empowerment that seeks to assimilate women as consumers into the homogenizing global discourses of depoliticized access. Women's access to digital technologies is thus a product of the compacts of convenience between global digital capital and patriarchal nation states.

In authoritarian neoliberalism, we see a whittling down of the political framework required for feminist transformation. The structural–institutional basis of gender ideology is “bracketed” out.⁹⁵ At the national level, this means a double whammy for the most marginalized women—the loss of traditional claims over the state and growing political closures, including a shrinking of the spaces amenable to public oversight, violation of women's socioeconomic and civil–political rights, and a slide back in social choices.

The feminist study of digital agendas therefore demands deeper investigation of the multiple sites—social, cultural, political, and economic—of digital discourse. This task involves bringing feminist media and policy studies together with critical media studies for a keener grasp of how local misrecognition is not “a free-standing cultural harm”⁹⁶ but a phenomenon deeply entwined with the structural injustice of global maldistribution. It would entail uncovering the gender ideologies that characterize neoliberalism, in particular material discursive contexts. It would mean understanding gender scripts of the nation state in relation to global informational capitalism.

The hegemonic information society discourse is a particular set of representations with performative force that not only describe our digital condition, but are constitutive of it. They combine with wider narratives of economy and globalization, such as the rhetoric of innovation, competitiveness, and investment we see in other debates, such as about intellectual property.⁹⁷ Producing alternative imaginaries of social, political, and economic discourse in the information society is therefore vital to radicalize the digital agenda for gender justice.

Feminist digital practices in different parts of India are instructive in this regard. For example, the Khabar Lahariya⁹⁸ (literally, “waves of news”) initiative has focused on creating a new cadre of young women community reporters in Bundelkhand—a feudal region in northern India—who use a combination of video and Internet technologies to make visible issues and concerns of marginalized rural women, often ignored by mainstream media. Similarly, Feminist Approach to Technology⁹⁹ focuses on providing technical skills along with critical digital literacy to young women from disadvantaged communities, under its Young Women's Leadership Program. In southern India, IT for Change has focused on creating new information, knowledge, and data cultures through women-run public access points that foreground marginalized women's claims making and citizenship.¹⁰⁰

These efforts point to the need for digital policy frameworks at the national level that address women's status through a citizenship approach. Elements of this approach must focus on women's rights, but also go beyond, into the entitlements that address their disenfranchisement and duress in a globalized information society context. The “right to communicate” for women must contain the erosion of, and rebuild, women's democratic rights. However, the emerging trajectory of digital policies in India reveal ad-hocism.¹⁰¹ For instance, Section 66A of the Information Technology Act 2000,¹⁰² which penalized electronic communication of a “grossly offensive” nature, became an instrument in the hands of the political elite to persecute women's free speech.¹⁰³ It was struck down by the Supreme Court in March 2015 for its unreasonable restrictions on the right to freedom of expression.

As the ideological conduits of neoliberal capital in the information age become socially pervasive and work in tandem with statist interests, the foundations of policy and law for women's right to communicate must, inter alia, draw out the boundaries between the public and the private. The grassroots work of women's rights organizations discussed earlier reveals that a political approach to women's access to the Internet and ICTs is an important starting point. The material means, skills, and perspectives to participate in the social paradigm of the information society are intertwined aspects of the idea of empowering access. Policies must provide for gender-responsive public access spaces at the community level, designing digital literacy programs with a citizenship orientation, and encouraging women's ownership and control of local media processes. In the Indian case, this would translate into an alternative Digital India vision to underwrite gender-responsive local public access programs, an emphasis on the connection between women's online participation and their equal status as economic and political agents in society, a strong “right to be heard” in development processes, and freedom from surveillance and incursions into women's privacy and dignity.

But the essentially global nature of the information society area demands global policy intervention. Rescuing gender politics at the interface of economic justice and social identity requires tackling digital policy as an international, global public policy agenda, whereby discourses of women's rights, human rights, the right to development, and the right to access digital technologies are intertwined with the policy discourse of global capital. The recent WSIS plus 10 review process acknowledges that “the divergent views held by Member States with respect to the process towards implementation of enhanced cooperation as envisioned in the Tunis Agenda”¹⁰⁴ has stalled progress on global norm making in relation to the Internet. The outcome document, in paragraph 56, also recognizes that “there are many cross-cutting international public policy issues that require attention and have not been adequately addressed,” asserting, in paragraph 57, the need for “multilateral, transparent, democratic and multi-stakeholder” management of the Internet as “a global facility.”¹⁰⁵ The debates in the global Internet governance arena have come some distance in underlining online privacy and security concerns of women and foregrounding online violence against women as a key concern for public policy.¹⁰⁶ Feminist intervention would also demand unpacking of the current “access paradigm” as a global neoliberal project de-radicalizing gender politics. The social norms of the virtual space are not free of the realities confronting us historically. The circuits of informational capitalism are part of the gendered reality of discrimination, misogyny, and exploitation.

Confronting the hegemonic narratives of the information society would also call for gender equality activists and digital rights activists to join together in their resistance to foreground structural gender justice issues along with identitarian gender politics; recast techno-centric arguments as social questions; and claim the realm of the digital as an issue of development, justice, and equity at global and national levels. This, however, is a fraught endeavor. The heterogeneity of political ideologies and visions makes it difficult to formulate a “net political voice” that can make itself heard in formal politics.¹⁰⁷ Further, those voices that do enter formal political forums may see a dissolution of “net political ambitions,” with concessions to keep activists in the network of practices stabilizing the power of hegemonic actors, and leaving the nucleus of economic activity untouched.¹⁰⁸

As flagged at the beginning, a “perverse confluence” of agendas seems to mark the way “rights-based” politics is played out today.¹⁰⁹ Recognizing the risk of getting integrated into, and willy-nilly fostering, hegemonic power relations is hence a key challenge in influencing gender transformative change. The determinability of an alternative information society—one in which gender equality is a valued goal—is contingent on feminist resistance to de-essentialize dominant digital agendas and re-politicize policy globally and nationally.

Footnotes

BIBLIOGRAPHY