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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2004. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 268-278). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

The central thesis is classical Marxian views concerning the peasant masses have been adopted regarding India; two causal factors are the Hindu Caste system and parliamentary democracy. Descriptive and analytical methodology is utilized to study classical and Indian Marxian theory and its relationship to "Marxist" practice in India. Four major elements involved are: wealthy landowners, poor and landless peasants, the Indian government, and Indian communists. Nonimplemented land reforms and recent capitalist farming compounded the problem. Attacks were launched on the Congress government by three communist parties. Government coalition has included the CPI, and has implemented agrarian reforms advocated by the CPI(M), thereby postponing possible militant communist success.

Amidst the public’s declining trust in news, media prosumers—that is, media consumers who have also become producers of mediated texts—are not equipped with any credible alternative mechanism to better understand the world around them. Prior academic studies of news and its delivery have not adequately explored the ideological framework we need to confront this frightening situation. This dissertation does so. I problematize the narration of news as an aesthetic process. Such mass-mediated narration stitches together our world in ideological ways. A tidal flow of stories highlights and obscures selected truths in a frenzy of “new” news cycles, the frequency of which intensifies with each new delivery platform. Social media platforms, which peddle short videos, need to be understood using new analytical methods, given that the aesthetic and narrative dimensions of such audio-visual texts are so far removed from the pace, delivery, and meaning of 19th-century objects like newspapers. In the current moment, I theorize the process through which an incident is converted first into a media event, then a media spectacle, and finally into myth. My work breaks new ground in mass communication studies by understanding this aesthetic and narrative process as mystification, a formulation I borrow from contemporary philosophers, particularly Cornel West. As an aesthetic process, mediated narration presents what the power brokers of a society deem desirable, while evacuating that which contradicts their ideological position. In this dissertation, I theorize this process in terms of “absenting” as a narrative process and “invisibilization” as an aesthetic maneuver. Aesthetic value undergirds the narration of the news by falsely presenting certainty and consensus to media prosumers. To accomplish this, I employ Theodor Adorno’s aesthetic theory to explain how news narration routinizes values of visibility, forming a discursive field that envelops the media prosumer. Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus best explains this theoretical field. An important implication of my work concerns the current obsession with “media literacy.” I argue that media literacy has not adequately explained the ideological nature of mediated narration, shifting the blame for a disinformation society from the structural forces of textual production onto a purportedly “illiterate” public. I destabilize the current understanding of media literacy by revealing the ideological implications of the aesthetic and narrative construction of what both practitioners and scholars of the news reduce to a binary notion of truths and falsehoods. The domain to which I apply this theoretical apparatus is the narration of majoritarian nationalism. Postcolonial governments use nationalism as an emotional trigger to co-opt their citizens into participating in the modernization project. Current institutions use rationality to showcase their nation as modern. The general narratives I have just described are in fact gleaned from three disturbing media events in recent India. My nation’s shift in recent years from a pluralistic democracy to a majoritarian, authoritarian state makes it a timely location for inquiry. In my three case studies, news narration showcases the desirable and hiding undesirable elements; depicts farmers in a negative light, as obstacles to modernization; and discredits resistant voices and deems them illegitimate individuals with smartphones or unethical practitioners of journalism. First, I analyze a media spectacle created in the city of Ahmedabad in 2020 by Narendra Modi’s government for Donald Trump’s visit. The government showcased this Potemkin Village as an example of the modernization project, a false construction that illuminates presentable elements of the city while walling off the unpresentable. I evaluate eight visual moments of this event and draw attention to the aesthetic facets of visibilization and invisibilization. Second, I examine narrative performances in a news-based television show anchored by Arnab Goswami, who analyzes murders involving politicians and farmers in a small rural road on which farmers marched and a convoy of vehicles led by the son of a central minister ran over them from behind, inviting retaliation. The aesthetic practices of this coverage destabilize in a chilling way who are the perpetrators and victims in these stories. In the third event, I analyze moments of journalistic struggle in a story of the police forcibly burning the body of a victim of gang-rape. Four men of an upper caste allegedly gang-raped a lower-caste woman in a village, and her dead body was brought back from a hospital in New Delhi. The media followed, and their cameras serendipitously captured the alleged destruction of evidence by the police. My dissertation concludes with questions about what cultural capital would be required in a world in which a media prosumer would be able to read and interpret the aesthetic and narrative presentation of such mass media objects. I conclude by understanding how the visibilized and invisibilized maneuvers of our current news media lead to the construction, not of media literacy, but instead, of “media illiteracy.” It is my theoretical conclusion that demystification is the best process to undo the debilitating effects of this dire situation. My dissertation ends with recommendations for completely transformed media literacy programs that deliver to communities, and specifically not individuals in a classroom, pedagogical tools rooted in critical theory.

India's nonalignment policy attracted the attention of many newly independent countries for it provided an alternative to the existing American and Russian views of the world. This dissertation is an examination of both India's nonalignment policy and the official American reaction to it during the Truman-Eisenhower years. Indian nonalignment should be defined as a policy of noncommitment towards rival power blocs adopted with a view of retaining freedom of action in international affairs and thereby influencing the issue of war and peace to India's advantage. India maintained that the Cold War was essentially a European problem. Adherence to military allliances , it believed, would increase domestic tensions and add to chances of involvement in international war, thus destroying hopes of socio-economic reconstruction of India. The official American reaction was not consistent. It varied from president to president, from issue to issue, and from time to time. India's stand on various issues of international import and interest to the United States such as recognition of the People's Republic of China, the Korean War, the Japanese peace treaty of 1951, and the Hungarian revolt of 1956, increased American concern about and dislike of nonalignment. Many Americans in high places regraded India's nonalignment policy as pro-Communist and as one that sought to undermine Western collective security measures. Consequently, during the Truman and Eisenhower presidencies the United States took a series of diplomatic, military, and economic measures to counter India's neutralism. America refused to treat India as a major power and attempted to contain its influence on the international plane by excluding it from international conferences and from assuming international responsibilities. The Russian efforts to woo India and other nonaligned countries with trade and aid softened America's open resistance to India's nonalignment. As a result, although tactical, a new trend in America's dealings with India was visible during the closing years of Eisenhower's presidency. Therefore, America sought to keep nonaligned India at least nonaligned by extending economic aid.

This work discusses the change in Indian position in international relations during the Cold War. It is a qualitative case study, which is also dedicated to finding influences that caused the change in the Indian position. Work includes the following sections. The first part describes the theory of international relations relevant to the study of the Indian position within the great power relations. Next part analyzes India's economic development and historical development of India's foreign policy and relations with the most important global actors. The final chapter is a study of global governance institutions and policies of BRICS and its position to the institutions of global governance.