Volume 29, Issue 3
DOI: 10.24205/03276716.2020.776
Ideological Representations in the Indian Newspapers’ Editorials: A Case Study of Pulwama Incident in Kashmir
Abstract
In the perpetual hostility between India and Pakistan, newspapers play an important role in constructing peace, war, ideologies and their dissemination. After the ‘Pulwama Attack’, the worst of its kind in the last 30 years in the Indian Administered Kashmir, the two nuclear states once again came on the verge of war. In such situations, the role of media becomes critical. This study aims at understanding how Indian press constructs ‘Self’ and ‘Others’ in conflict. To study the role of the newspaper in such situations, the editorials of the two mainstream largely circulated Indian English newspapers are analyzed using Teun van Dijk’s (1989) framework of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). It is found that highly nationalistic and ideological words are used to represent ‘Us’ and ‘Them’. The country where these newspapers originate from, is represented as powerful, with many powerful friends while its rivals as weak, isolated, hypocrite and terrorist or their facilitators.
Keywords
Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), nationalism, objectivity, ideology, editorials, Kashmir, India, Pakistan