Jean-Thomas Martelli

Contact: jeanthomas.martelli(at)sciencespo.fr

CERI, Sciences Po

Jean-Thomas Martelli‘s interdisciplinary work in political science is concerned with democratic representation in South Asia. He researches populist discourses and imagery, youth activism, political professionalisation, digital media, and practices of the self in contemporary India. He is a non-resident research fellow at the Center for International Studies at Sciences Po Paris. He is an incoming associate editor of the South-Asia journal SAMAJ and the outgoing scientific secretary of the French Association of Political Science. He was previously a visiting scholar and FSCIS grant holder at the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University, while simultaneously serving as a fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies at Leiden University. He co-headed the Politics and Society research division at the French research unit in India, the Centre de Sciences Humaines in New Delhi. He holds my doctoral degree in political science and sociology from the King’s India Institute, King’s College London.

Populist Styling and Democratic Decline in India

While authoritarian regimes such as China attempt to justify their absence of electoral democracy by promoting supervised deliberative democracy, India leans towards the opposite. While celebrating elections as the single measure of democratic conduct, it curtails individual freedoms, the rule of law, minority protection, fair political competition and institutional autonomy. This interdisciplinary research agenda examines this transition from democracy to authoritarian rule from the standpoint of populist political oratory. Passages to democracy have often elicited more participation from citizens, inviting public figures to be closer to their constituents through embracing a more accessible language.³ However, with the rising fortunes of populist politics globally, expressions of proximity to the masses have paradoxically damaged democracy rather than strengthened it.⁴ Why do populists use this type of discourse, and how do they benefit from new forms of digital communication? In what ways do specific uses of political vernaculars by elected representatives end up making democracy weaker? The significance of this project lies in combining computational and ethnographic methods to retrace the historical and linguistic lineages of populist, authoritarian, and communal rhetoric in the world’s largest democracy: India. To that end, I build and analyse a novel archive of Indian political speeches since the late 19^th century. In parallel, I propose to examine speech-making ethnographically from the standpoint of political leaders and political advisory.