Delving deeper into OpIndia.com’s representation of Hindus and Muslims

Abstract

The paper examines 54,580 articles published from 12 December 2014 to 15 May 2023 on the right-wing news and current affairs website http://www.opindia.com through a corpus-assisted discourse-historical approach in three stages. First, it looks at the entire dataset using corpus-based keyword analysis to gauge the relative prominence of four node words Hindu(s) and Muslim(s) in OpIndia’s content. Second, it analyses a down-sampled set of 696 articles and identifies 42 prominent themes shaping the discourse surrounding the nodes. Finally, examining a set of 36 articles further down-sampled and analysing the discursive strategies through the discourse-historical approach demonstrates that OpIndia perpetuates a perniciously polarising discourse demonising Muslims. Also, it reaffirms that the formative rift on which the discourse thrives is – the Hindu nationalist versus secular imaginations of the nation.