ABSTRACT
The aim of this chapter is to understand how India and its diaspora have been represented in two Canadian newspapers over the past thirteen years (1999–2012), and how the style of representation has changed during that time period. We use the categories of soft power, hard power, and deficient state as three conceptual lenses to examine how India and its diaspora were represented in the Canadian print media. We focus on two major Canadian newspapers, the Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail, and assess relevant Indo-centric articles in terms of how they align with the three categories of soft power, hard power, and deficient state. Building on Pritchett’s concept of ‘flailing state’ (2009), we propose the notion of the deficient state not only to incorporate how the flaws of the government are communicated in the press, but also to signal how this might be extended to the representation of that nation’s diasporic communities in their sites of global settlement, in our case Canada.
