Constructing the Threat: A Critical Discourse Analysis of India’s Terrorism Discourse Across the 2001 Parliament and 2008 Mumbai Attacks

Abstract

This article examines how Indian state institutions discursively constructed the 2001 Parliament attack and the 2008 Mumbai attacks through official speech acts, diplomatic communications, and parliamentary interventions. Drawing on a primary corpus of 29 MEA documents produced between December 2001 and February 2009, the study applies Norman Fairclough's three-level critical discourse analysis alongside Buzan and Wæver's securitisation theory within a broader constructivist framework. The analysis reveals how Indian official discourse performed a layered securitisation of both events — constructing existential threats to democratic identity, sovereign integrity, and international order — while simultaneously constituting India's national self as a restrained, law-abiding, ascending democracy positioned against a Pakistan constructed as the structural 'epicentre' of regional terrorism. Comparing the two cases, the article traces a significant evolution in Indian counterterrorism discourse: from the militarised, coalition-seeking register of the BJP-led government in 2001 to the institutionally calibrated, internationally oriented communication of the Congress-led UPA in 2008. Both discursive formations, however, share a foundational ideological architecture that naturalises India's regional dominance, forecloses structural explanations for political violence, and systematically marginalises Pakistani civilian perspectives, Kashmiri political grievances, and Indian policy failures. The article contributes to the literature on securitisation in non-Western contexts, the discursive construction of state identity in South Asian security politics, and the role of official language in mediating the India-Pakistan conflict.