Description
The rise in ethnonationalism in India and the growing vulnerability of minorities correspond to the resurgence of global conservatism and its fabrication of internal enemies. Building on scholarship that situates anti-Muslim hostility within a global imperial genealogy, this project examines how contemporary Indian Islamophobic media discourses are embedded in and reinforced by transnational narratives of the “Muslim enemy” amid the worldwide rise of hypernationalism. It argues that Indian right-wing media does not merely reflect local ethnonationalist anxieties but actively reproduces them by mobilising globally circulating Islamophobic tropes, affects, and legitimising frameworks. While Deepa Kumar’s Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire provides an important conceptual starting point, this study extends the analysis by examining how such narratives are operationalised within specific Indian media ecosystems. Methodologically, it combines critical discourse analysis with comparative media analysis of television news, digital platforms, and selected AI generated images, read alongside transnational Islamophobic media narratives. Focusing on the post-2014 political landscape, the study demonstrates how exclusionary discourse normalises minority vulnerability and contributes to democratic erosion in contemporary India. Situated primarily within media studies, and informed by cultural and identity studies, this research examines the mediated production of anti-Muslim hostility and its political consequences.