Beyond Threat: Governance-Based Othering and Muslim Representation in BJP Political Discourse (2014–2026)

This paper examines how the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) official political discourse represents Muslims in India between 2014 and 2026, in comparison with the representation of Hindus. Earlier research on Islamophobia in India has usually emphasized security, exclusion, and the construction of Muslims as a threatening Other. This study is based on a bilingual corpus of 2205 English and Hindi documents (3,445,843 words) and speeches by Narendra Modi and Amit Shah, together with BJP election manifestos, and applies corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis, combining frequency, collocation, keyness, and frame analysis with close reading of representative contexts. The results identify a clear asymmetry between Hindu and Muslim communities. Hindu is associated mainly with vocabulary of civilization, culture, sacred geography, and religious tradition, while Muslim is named alongside reservation, personal law, Triple Talaq, Waqf, Pasmanda, and other terms of policy and legal reform. Security vocabulary is common across the corpus, but its co-occurrence with explicit references to Muslims varies by frame. This study also identifies three recurrent patterns of Muslim othering: security association, party-political contestation, and governance-based intervention. It proposes governance-based othering for the third pattern, whereby Muslims are repeatedly addressed as objects of law, public policy, welfare, and institutional reform rather than solely as security threats. The findings extend existing accounts of Islamophobia by showing that minority difference is constructed through governmental as well as exclusionary forms of representation.