A Critical Account of the Digital India Initiative

In this article, I inquire how India’s public policies like the Information and Technology Rules (IT Rules) have become a conduit to channelize a majoritarian agenda. I rhetorically analyse the IT Rules to demonstrate how it employs technology to create a rift between the people on the basis of their religious identities. In what follows, I will highlight that the current predicament of civil discourse in India is a result of religious extremism which is codified and formalized through the amendments to the IT Rules. To counter this waning of civil discourse, I propose rhetorical interventions through the mobilization of ample debates and conversations around public policies that can be harnessed to shatter the deliberative impasse gripping the country. As a response to that call, this article is forwarded as a rhetorical model of civil communication in practice weighing the conflicting values of security, rights, and privacy that are often in play in conversations about cyberspace and new technology. Additionally, by instituting rhetorics as a cornerstone of principled and effective civil discourse, I suggest that our efforts to resist communal polarization in India should also include developing heterogenous deliberative models that can accommodate India’s diversity of religion, caste, language, and culture.