Paula Chakravartty is Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her teaching and research cover global media studies, political economy and postcolonial theory, with a focus on India, Brazil and the US. She is currently working on a book about the political culture of exclusion, access and citizenship in India's fractured information society. Her articles have been published in the International Journal of Communication, Media Culture & Society, Emergences, Television & New Media, Asian American Policy Index, Economic and Political Weekly, and Social Semiotics. She has published several book chapters in edited volumes covering, among other areas, new approaches to international communications, communications and public interest, labor and globalization, and political culture in South Asia. She is the co-author of Media Policy and Globalization (Edinburgh University Press 2006 and Palgrave 2007 - with Katharine Sarikakis) and co-editor of Global Communications: Toward a Transcultural Political Economy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2008 - with Yuezhi Zhao).

In the last decade it has become commonplace for cities, regions and national governments to formally brand themselves in order to market the comparative advantages of doing business in a specific location. As in most other emerging economies, in India in the 2000s, the strategy of branding has become enmeshed within the institutional functions of the neoliberal developmental state. The formal branding of the nation's economy is a joint venture of the Indian national government and a consortium (confederation) of Indian industries. Despite the global financial downturn and more importantly the on-going domestic challenges for redistributive equity, Brand India continues to promote the monolithic virtues of the nation's rapid economic growth rates, alongside its expanding information technology (IT) sector and foreign investor confidence in its untapped and growing middle class markets. Meanwhile, the majority of India's largely low-income population has experienced unprecedented forms of disparity marked by growing income inequality, massive slum removals and the growth of gated communities in urban India to new forms of violence against marginalized rural communities and growing rates of unemployment and insecurity.

In this paper, I first locate the current public-private institutional convergence in a coherent vision of national development embodied by the India Brand Equity Foundation (IBEF) in the longer history of twenty years of social contest over India's emergent unequal information society. These include on-going contestations over the use of social space in both urban and rural areas as well as a range of social claims for access to the aspirational promises of Brand India that invokes the opportunity for education, employment and mobility regardless of caste, class and gender. I argue that the merits and limitations of a high-tech, globally integrated and deeply technocratic vision of development has become subject to a much wider public debate well outside the corridors and portals of corporate and state power. This paper therefore examines the contests over the symbolic power of India Inc. precisely on the very terms that are meant to distinguish democratic and institutionally sound India from its main international competitor: Communist China. In other words, the challenges posed to the symbolic legitimacy of the promise of Brand India are constituted by the very fact that India is purported to be the "fastest growing free market democracy". In this paper, I assess the political context within which the branding of economic modernization and cultural modernity is negotiated in India with the objective of raising questions about the larger project of branding of modernity in other parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America.