Amid concerns of a global learning crisis, foundational literacy and numeracy (FLN) has become a recent focus area for low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). For instance, in 2021, India launched one of the world's largest initiatives to achieve universal foundational literacy by 2026-27. Given that the term "foundational literacy" was largely absent from earlier policy discourse in India, little is known about how this idea was made salient to become a current policy priority. Through a corpus-based critical discourse analysis of 90 documents and reports published by government and non-state actors, we identify several discursive strategies used to prioritize FLN as a policy priority in India. These include using science and evidencebased discourse to produce legitimacy for foundational literacy; building consensus by projecting common sense; and producing a temporality of emergency and crisis towards immediate action. We emphasize that the foundational literacy discourse in India is highly political. In particular, we argue that such crisis-driven policy narratives and discourses are not so much tied to specific literacy approaches as they are to larger agendas of privatization and political consensus in education.