Eating words: a discourse historical analysis of the public debate over India’s 2013 National Food Security Act

Abstract

Purpose – This paper aims to provide a situated critical discourse analysis of the public debate around India’s 2013 National Food Security Act (NFSA), describing its rhetorical characteristics and the context within which it has taken place. Design/methodology/approach – Using Wodak’s (2001) Discourse Historical Approach (DHA), the authors examine media coverage of the NFSA, attending to perspectivization, intensification and mitigation and representational and argumentational strategies. The authors also consider this coverage in light of its intratextual, intertextual, situational and wider socio-political and economic contexts. The corpus consists of 29 English-language Indian newspaper and magazine articles, published in print and online between 2011 and 2014. Findings – This paper explains the rhetorical purchase of the term “food security” in contemporary Indian public policy debates by comparing the leftist, right wing and centrist arguments. Research limitations/implications – Owing to the detailed qualitative analysis presented here, the corpus is necessarily limited in size. Newspaper articles contributed by one of the authors were omitted from the study. Originality/value – The DHA claims to be an interdisciplinary framework, but relatively few studies involve true cross-disciplinary research. By contrast, this study relies on close collaboration by scholars active in economics and applied linguistics – thus, demonstrating both the potential for, and the value of, working coherently across academic disciplines. Also, unlike most DHA studies, which interrogate dominant discourses, this paper compares diverse discourses competing for influence.