Srirupa Roy

Srirupa Roy is associate professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. She is author of Beyond Belief: India and the Politics of Postcolonial Nationalism (Duke University Press, 2007 and Permanent Black, 2007); co-editor of Violence and Democracy in India (with Amrita Basu, Seagull Books 2007); and co-editor of Secular Publicities: Secularism and Religious Nationalism in the Middle East and South Asia (with Alev Cinar and Maha Yahya, University of Michigan Press, forthcoming 2010). She is currently completing a book on television news media and Indian democracy based on field research conducted in India in 2007-08 as a Senior Fellow of the American Institute of Indian Studies.

http://polsci.umass.edu/profiles/roy_srirupa

“Neoliberal Secularism”

Abstract

This paper examines the relationship between the politics of economic liberalization and the politics of secularism in India. How has the restructuring of state authority in the context of neoliberal economic reform affected the institutional and ideological structures of secularism? What has the rise of the “new middle classes” in India meant for the “old” problem of ethnoreligious violence? Through a case study of how the electronic news media—a paradigmatic institutional agent of economic liberalization—engages with secular politics, this paper seeks to understand whether and how “neoliberal secularism” differs from its statist counterpart.

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