India as a Regional, Rising Power: Discursive Framings of its Neighborhood

How does internal nationalism shape the discursive strategies and rhetoric that rising powers use to articulate their international status ambitions, especially in an era less governed by the Liberal International Order? India provides a case study to explore these questions further, as a contemporary rising power governed by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). In this thesis, I examine the foreign policy rhetoric used by both of India's major political parties – the BJP and the Indian National Congress (INC) – to understand how each regime articulates India's status ambitions. To answer these questions and gain some insights into how nationalism may alter the foreign policy rhetoric of a rising power, I provide a temporal content analysis and discourse analysis of Indian government communications directed towards India's Neighborhood to assess how each party articulates India's status ambitions within its historical sphere of influence in South Asia. Analyzing over 300 Indian foreign policy communications from 2010 to 2019, I find that the BJP has introduced a statistically significant rhetorical shift from the Congress Party. This is primarily due to increased nationalist sentiments and articulations of India as a rising global power. These findings suggest that rising powers face foreign policy constraints imposed by domestic actors, and that they tailor their rhetorical strategies to additional audiences beyond great powers and dominant international institutions alone. A rising power governed by a nationalist regime, such as post-2014 India, deploys foreign policy rhetoric also informed by its domestic agenda – constructing and projecting its particular national identity onto the world stage to articulate its status ambitions in connection to its domestic political ideology. Thus, rising powers controlled by nationalist regimes use foreign policy rhetoric that mirrors their language domestically, facilitating the collective mobilization of constituencies within their borders or in their region of influence to internally legitimize their status ambitions, in tandem with attempts to secure recognition from current great powers and advocate for a higher place in the global hierarchy.