Discursive Practices and Blame Game: A Corpus Assisted Study of the Representation of the Pakistani Tehrik-e-Labbaik Movement in the Indian and Pakistani Print Media

Abstract

This study aims at exploring the discursive ideological war on terror between India and Pakistan in the print media of both the countries. In doing so, it primarily focuses on the lexical choices used by the Pakistani and Indian print media for the representation of the Tehrik-e-Labbaik protest in the context of their conflicting ideologies on war on terror. Data was collected from the Indian newspaper Times of India and the Pakistani newspaper The News International and analyzed through the corpus software Antconc. This study employed, as a theoretical Lense, van Dijk’s theory of “US’ vs “THEM and his ideological square model in the analysis of data. The analysis was delimited to keywords and collocations only. The results of the study revealed that The Times of India represented the protest by Tehrik-e-Labbaik using negative lexical choices in order to implicate Pakistan in terrorist and extremist activities in the region. In contrast, The News International used neutral and positive lexical choices for the same protest so as to present Pakistan in a positive light and highlight its efforts for eradicating terrorism in the region. Thus, the print media of both the countries propagate the respective ideologies of their countries and represent the positive image of the ‘self’ and the negative image of the ‘other’ in the context of war on terror in the region.