Subject Area
Language and Literature, English and American, Political Science and Government, Communication, Sociology, Anthropology, Humanities
Abstract
This project traces the rhetorical formation termed “meritocratic nationalism,” a political vocabulary that makes national belonging conditional on moralized merit, converting structural advantage into the language of individual character. Meritocratic nationalism is traced across three political figures whose rhetoric represents successive moments in a single ideological trajectory. Reading Narendra Modi’s 2014 and 2018 Independence Day addresses and his 2014 Madison Square Garden speech to the Indian American diaspora as the formation’s originating texts, this project argues that Modi’s recurring moral tetrad of conduct, values, traditions, and ability translated the structurally concentrated advantages of India’s upper-caste professional class into a universalist vocabulary of ancient, civilizationally inherited virtue. That vocabulary traveled with the post-1965 upper-caste Indian immigrant professional class to the United States, finding its American expression in the conservative rhetoric of Nikki Haley, whose decade of public addresses performed the same ideological grammar (discipline, gratitude, refusal of grievance, merit as character) in an American political register. The project then traces the formation’s fracture through Zohran Mamdani’s 2025 New York City mayoral campaign, whose rhetoric does not merely depart from meritocratic nationalism but inverts it, replacing moral vocabulary with structural analysis, individual virtue with collective conditions, and gratitude with inherent right. This project contends that the contest between meritocratic nationalism and its second-generation refusal is a structural consequence of the conditions under which different generational cohorts were formed.
Degree Date
Spring 5-16-2026
Document Type
Distinction Project
Department
Department of English
Advisor
Dr. Juliet Shields
Second Advisor
Dr. Jayson Sae-Saue
Number of Pages
73
Format
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
Recommended Citation
Jaiswal, Aarushi V., "Inherited by “Merit”: What Caste Carries Across the Indian American Diaspora" (2026). English Undergraduate Distinction Projects. 6.
https://scholar.smu.edu/hum_sci_english_distinction/6
Included in
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