Shadow Warrior by Rajeev Srinivasan

A version of this essay has been published by firstpost.com at https://www.firstpost.com/world/the-usual-gambit-by-deep-state-and-isi-a-million-woke-mutinies-all-the-time-10372271.html

Why is there a veritable fusillade of anti-India commentary in the West these days? Why has there been a sudden upsurge of communal tension in coastal Karnataka? How come a bunch of MNCs including Hyundai, KFC etc. endorsed Pakistan’s claims to all of Jammu and Kashmir? How come the tragic story of Lavanya, who committed suicide because of pressure to convert, has suddenly been pushed off the front pages?

The answer, my friend, as Bob Dylan once put it, is blowin’ in the wind. There is a narrative, and it reaches a cacophony of hysteria whenever there are elections in India, because the intent is to rally the faithful against the allegedly fascist BJP: the Mudi sud rejine. Well, elections in UP have begun, so you can expect the baying to reach a crescendo soon. UP, they well know, is the prize. If they can defeat the BJP there, suddenly Modi is vulnerable. 

UP shows a dramatic contrast between the utter fecklessness of the Congress years, and the tremendous improvement in the Yogi years: in law and order, in infrastructure, in how suddenly the state is a power to reckon with in its State GDP and industrial prowess. I received this interesting book from Garuda Prakashan about Yogi in the mail: it’s full of facts.

Personally, I am hopeful about the upward trajectory of UP and Bihar, and distressed by the downward trajectory of Kerala, Bengal and Punjab, as I wrote in:

 Whenever there are important State elections, the ‘toolkit’ is activated, sleeper cells are given the go-ahead, and there is a plethora of stories in the compromised Western media about how things are going to hell in a handbasket in India. This is yet another reason to hold synchronized elections every 2.5 years rather than what appears to be endless politicking the entire time. 

Thank you for reading Shadow Warrior. This post is public so feel free to share it.

My friend Gautam Sen connected the dots on firstpost.com in his essay https://www.firstpost.com/politics/why-theres-a-sudden-surge-in-international-efforts-to-destabilise-modi-government-10343751.html. I too wrote about this some time ago in an essay: https://www.indiafacts.org.in/the-withering-attack-on-us-they-have-good-reasons-why-they-wish-us-harm/ 

So Lesson Number One is that, internationally, India has no friends; no, not in the West, despite the honeyed words and the snake-oil salesmen. Just about the only two countries that we have common interests with are Japan and Vietnam, who are just as threatened by China as India is, but the one has the money and skills that we lack, and the other has the actual experience of defeating the Chinese in battle. 

It is telling that it was Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe who suggested the idea of the Quad. It is also telling that a Democratic US President, presumably on the insistence of the Deep State, eviscerated it by doing a side deal called AUKUS, basically a celebration of Atlanticism, which has been long dead and should be given a decent burial. Isolated and increasingly impoverished Britain is hardly the ally anyone wants or needs.

Even Russia, which some of us consider an all-weather friend, is no longer reliable. An allegedly state-related entity named redfish advertised a documentary with a clear bias in favor of the Pakistani point of view. They too, probably, are caught up in the Sino-Pak axis, and Chinese propaganda that India is getting too close to the US. In reality, India is in the unfortunate  trisanku position of choosing between Scylla and Charybdis.

Thanks for reading Shadow Warrior! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Lesson Number Two is that Pakistan’s ISPR is very clever (by half) at coming up with ideas on how to hurt India through propaganda. They were successful in getting a number of MNCs to endorse the Pakistani position that Kashmir is theirs, and theirs alone. Here is a partial list of those MNCs.

At first glance, it is hard to escape the feeling that this is a vote of no-confidence in India from a lot of large companies. It is a little unfathomable that they would do this, considering the growing ‘buyer power’ of the Indian consumer. What if they boycotted Hyundai or Kia in India? Didn’t they see how Fabindia was hurt by a boycott after their urduword-e-urduword for Diwali?

Besides, do these MNCs believe that the Indian government would not take punitive action against them? After all, they grovel and genuflect before the Chinese government despite their genocides of Tibetans, Uighurs and so on. Do they really think they can afford to exit the Indian market which will grow at 9% for the next few years?

Some of these MNCs will find their sales are hurt: there are alternatives. For example, Tata and Mahindra stand ready to step in should people drop Hyundai, Kia or Honda. 

Then the realization dawns that Pakistan is too small a market for the MNCs to have subsidiaries there: they only have franchises. And it is quite likely that every one of these franchisees is a subsidiary of the Pakistani Army, considering that the Army runs most business in Pakistan. No wonder they toe the ISPR line.

ISPR was probably hoping to create some serious problems, perhaps even the burning down of the MNC factories or outlets (which is what would happen in Pakistan). That would in turn induce them to cease to invest in India, and eventually maybe even exit India. But none of this happened, which means the ISPR effort was a damp squib. 

But there was something deplorable: the reaction of the MNCs’ Indian subsidiaries. I was observing, in real time, Hyundai India’s response. In a classic case study of what not to do in a crisis –  business school students will soon be taught this – the PR people at Hyundai first stonewalled, weasel-worded, and started mass-blocking their twitter critics. 

They should have learned from Johnson and Johnson’s legendary response to the poisoning by some psychopath of their product, Tylenol, on retail shelves. They immediately fell on the sword, apologized, and recalled every bottle of their product from the shelves even though it really wasn’t their fault. The goodwill thus created gave J&J an aura, which actually translated to higher sales rather than the opposite.

It is likely that Hyundai India’s PR – probably outside consultants – are the usual leftist types who have no idea what the average Indian consumer thinks. Said leftists may believe in the Pakistani view themselves. Anyway, they totally messed up their initial response. It took a second set of more thoughtful responses to calm things down, wherein Hyundai Global carefully pointed out that they do not involve themselves in local politics, and that their franchisee in Pakistan had not been authorized to make any statements, and that they had been censured.

Besides, the South Korean Ambassador was called in by the MEA and probably given an earful, and their foreign minister called the MEA with an apology. Even though some of us would have preferred India to bare its fangs like the Chinese do, perhaps the softly-softly approach is better for the moment. As Deng Xiaoping advised,

Observe calmly; secure our position; cope with affairs calmly; hide our capacities and bide our time; be good at maintaining a low profile; and never claim leadership.

Lesson Number Three is that Abrahamics create tactical alliances. For example, USCIRF, the grandly named US Council on International Religious Freedom, is basically an evangelistic extremist entity focused on conversion. With Biden as POTUS, the USCIRF is openly cooperating with Islamists. The chair of USCIRF, Nadine Maenza, attended an Indo American Muslim Council event, ‘Protecting India’s Pluralist Constitution’ [sic] on Republic Day 2022, and it also had Archbishop Machado from Bangalore, along with ex-VP Hamid Ansari. 

None of this is a coincidence. DisinfoLab has discovered intriguing connections among Nadine Maenza, USCIRF, IAMC, and various other dramatis personae

.

Archbishop from Bangalore. Isn’t that interesting? There is the Anti-Conversion Bill in Karnataka, which is vigorously opposed by the church. Is it pure coincidence that within a week of this tete-a-tete, a hijab controversy in coastal Karnataka started dominating the headlines? Oh, and did you notice how there are no longer any headlines about the tragic story of Lavanya, a 17-year-old student in a Christian school in Thanjavur, Tamil Nadu, who was so violated by tejovadham about forced conversion that she committed suicide, leaving a damning dying declaration on video?

It turns out Sahaya Mary and Rachel Mary whom Lavanya named are now quietly out on bail. So is the hijab issue a nice little diversionary tactic, that has gotten the entire commentariat (which was totally silent on Lavanya) a chance to display its ‘liberal’ credentials by supporting the girls intent on wearing hijabs to school? Is Lavanya’s case being swept under the carpet?

Of course, it could well be a pure ISPR exercise. It is likely they have sleeper cells in parts of coastal Karnataka, and Karnataka is a State that the Congress really would like to win back, thus they need to trigger their vote banks. 

Breaking news: here’s a statement from the US’s “Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom”, Rashad Hussain, in virtually his first official statement after Joe Biden appointed him at the end of January. He is also accused of ties to radical groups. 

This would have carried a lot more weight if the US had responded similarly to France, Canada,  or Scandinavian countries that prohibit certain Islamic attire. But it has never said a word. The implication is that this interference in India’s affairs is driven by other considerations. The Anglosphere believes India can be shamed into doing things that are not in its best interests. 

Furthermore, the Pakistan Army has recently been humiliated by the Baloch Liberation Army that attacked several army outposts and managed to hold off helicopter gunships and commandos for 48 to 60 hours. ISPR would naturally blame India’s RA&W for the debacle (never considering how much Baloch hate them). That means they have to hurt India somehow, and given the fact that they are virtually bankrupt, what better than to activate sleeper cells and their assets such as Malala, with the connivance of the Deep State and its assets?

1560 words, 11 Feb 2022

1640 words, updated 12 Feb 2022

A version of this essay was published by rediff.com at https://www.rediff.com/news/column/rajeev-srinivasan-the-sooner-woke-dom-dies-the-better/20220211.htm

Canadian Premier Justin Trudeau is hiding “in an undisclosed location” after a huge convoy of truckers demanding relief from Covid mandates, joined by farmers with their combine harvesters and other heavy equipment, made steady progress towards the Canadian capital. Poor man, he now has caught Covid, too.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, who boasts one of the strictest zero-Covid regimes in the world, is under fire for refusing to allow pregnant citizens living abroad to return home, under some quota called MIQ (Managed Isolation and Quarantining). She herself had to cancel her wedding, poor thing.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is on the verge of losing his job: being impeached or whatever the Brits do to unpopular PMs, because it has come to light that he partied several times at his official residence in violation of strict Covid quarantine rules in his country.

US President Joe Biden now has some of the worst approval ratings of any POTUS in history, and faces the certainty of a drubbing for his party in the midterm elections late this year, mostly because of poor handling of the Covid pandemic, as well as high inflation resulting from the generous printing of money in an ineffective economic band-aid. He is now beating the war drums and may drag the US into an unnecessary war in Ukraine.

Thank you for reading Shadow Warrior. This post is public so feel free to share it.

What do all these have in common? First, Covid, and second, the Anglosphere, which is reeling. And, third, they are darlings of the Woke Left crowd, especially Ardern and Biden. 

I’m reminded of the old song, “Video killed the Radio Star”. So Covid is killing the Woke left star?

In a sign that we are living in Internet Time, time scales are being accelerated. In the old days, centuries used to mean something, like a hundred years at least. But ‘centuries’ are getting awfully short these days. Consider:

The European Century of domination was over 200 years, from the Industrial Revolution to World War II. 

The American Century was only about 60 years, from World War II to the Financial Meltdown.

The Chinese Century is going to be about 30 years, from WTO Accession till… well, we are yet to see how their empire will end, one hopes, as TS Eliot said, “not with a bang, but a whimper”. Chances are Xi will not go gentle into that good night.

The Woke Century began with the Biden accession to the throne (some, including me, think it was tainted with irregularities) and the celebration of the Millennium, as it were, by the luminaries of Wokeness. That was just a year ago, although it feels like it was much longer, given the endless debacles. Afghanistan. Build Back Better. The Fauci-Daszak-Collins circus re Gain of Function research.

And coming soon to a TV screen near you, war! Rejoice, Deep State! Let’s ignore the $80 billion worth of weapons abandoned in Afghanistan, a good bit possibly in Chinese hands now. And the signal of US fecklessness that the retreat broadcast. 

There’s a word for it: degringolade. No, it has nothing to do with gringos.

Thanks for reading Shadow Warrior! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

What has (I hope fatally) damaged Wokeism? In the ponderous tones of op-ed writers, it is collapsing under the “weight of its own contradictions”. Wokeism has brought us unedifying spectacles: the cancellation of those whom you don’t like (see Joe Rogan over on Spotify), the ascent of (white) privileged Karens, the relentless rebranding of propaganda as Science(™).

Wokes are into “defund the police” and high tolerance to theft, mugging, drug abuse and squatters defecating on the street, which has effectively erased my beloved San Francisco.

Wokes pretend not to understand that China has deindustrialized the West, and that their supply chains can be turned off at a moment’s notice. 

As far as Hindus are concerned, the eclipse of Wokeism cannot come soon enough. There is a determined assault on Hindus (there are frequent conferences on Dismantling Global Hindutva, and the California State university system has just included caste as a marker of discrimination, like race). 

This means that, like Jews earlier, Hindus are being made scapegoats in the West: declared mad dogs, and then shot. This project has gathered momentum in global media. The full-throated baying in the NYTimes, FT, Economist, NPR, Reuters, etc. has been going on for some time: they want regime-change. TL;DR: The Mudi sud rejine. 

Their latest target is Netaji Subhas Bose. He is a complex and flawed hero. There is a lot to decode about him, as I wrote in 2016 in The abuse of Indian history.

But a recent series of Twitter exchanges by ex-Reuters journalist Myra Macdonald, ex-Financial Times India stringer Edward Luce, and others, was instructive: according to these Woke types, Bose is guilty by association with Hitler, but Churchill is blameless in the Bengal genocide, and is not a war criminal. And oh, according to Luce, Indian business schools teach Mein Kampf. That must be in some alternative Woke universe.

This is what Woke-dom is all about: the willing suspension of disbelief. The sooner it dies off, the better. It has already infected some Indians, for instance those who ‘took the knee’ for Black Lives Matter. They should abandon this silly Woke-ness and aping of the West. Just as India, correctly, abstained from the UN Security Council vote over Ukraine, a fight in which we have no dog. 

880 words, 1 Feb 2022

A version of this essay has been published by firstpost.com at https://www.firstpost.com/world/human-rights-all-humans-are-equal-but-some-are-more-equal-than-others-10340451.html

This story has already receded into the background, but it was quite startling when it took place recently: a Pakistani-Briton named Malik Faisal Akram held four Jews hostage in a Texas synagogue. He was demanding the release of a Pakistani woman, Aafia Siddiqui, sentenced to an 86 year prison term in the US. Why she is important is a good question, but that need not detain us here.

What is intriguing is the fact that Akram was apparently simply shot by a US military or police sharpshooter. The reports were bland, and they just said that the hostages had been freed unharmed; the fate of their captor was barely mentioned at all: it was as though he had been executed, as a matter of course, and that was the proper and normal thing to do.

Without condoning the man, one can look at the interesting implications. Akram may indeed have been a dangerous and unstable armed terrorist, but he was, after all, a foreign national. And he had not actually harmed anybody physically. Aren’t there norms about citizens of friendly powers? Can they be arbitrarily shot dead? Was the UK embassy involved? Could the police have used a tranquilizer dart instead? Why is nobody asking questions, but accepting it as a fait accompli?

True, the human rights of a terrorist or an insurgent are no greater than those of an average citizen, but shouldn’t there be some standard operating procedures?

I remember other incidents in the US where the use of massive force by federal or local authorities was somehow deemed appropriate, with few questions asked. One was the devastating attack in April 1993 on a compound in Waco, Texas, where a religious cult called the Branch Davidians were holed up. 76 members of the group were burned to death after a 51-day siege.

In 1985, the radical (black?) group MOVE, fortified in a Philadelphia house, was attacked by city authorities with a helicopter gunship, and a fire was allowed to burn out of control, killing 11 people, and burning down 61 houses in the neighborhood. A subsequent court ruling held that constitutional rights were violated, and excessive force was used. 

The point is that in some cases violations of human rights (even of terrorists or outlaws) are condoned, but in other cases they are magnified, blown up, and used as narrative-building weapons. The judiciary is sometimes blamed, although in some cases the executive may be at fault for not making a good case, or any case at all, either deliberately or through incompetence.

Thanks for reading Shadow Warrior! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

For example, there is the cause celebre of Ishrat Jahan. This woman from Mumbai was found traveling to Gujarat with her boss Javed Sheikh, and two others including a Pakistani, and they were shot by the police. It is alleged (including in testimony from David Headley, Pakistani-American kingpin of the 26/11 attacks on Mumbai) that she was an LeT operative, and that the group were planning to assassinate then-CM Narendra Modi. There was an international uproar protesting her innocence.

So why are Ishrat Jahan’s human rights so much greater than those of Malik Faisal Akram? 

The answer, of course, is narrative. Information warfare is manufactured on demand. 

Thank you for reading Shadow Warrior. This post is public so feel free to share it.

There has been a series of other human rights incidents in the recent past in India that show how dysfunctional the system is, and how empty the rhetoric is. 

Four years ago, a starving tribal named Madhu in Kerala was caught stealing a small amount of rice. A group of young men videotaped him being tied up, humiliated, and then beaten to death. His hearing came up recently, and the prosecution did not appear at all in court!

Dilbar Negi, a young man in Delhi, was brutalized and slaughtered during the Delhi riots in 2020. His limbs were cut off, and he was burned alive. Recently, a high-powered lawyer got bail for six of the accused in Delhi High Court. 

Bishop Franco Mulakkal of Jalandhar was accused of raping a nun 13 times at a convent in Kerala. Several nuns braved the wrath of the church to bring out stories about oppression and (sexual) abuse in nunneries. Last week, the district court rejected in toto the evidence presented against him, and cleared him of all charges. 

A terrified young commuter, Sowmya, was chased around the empty woman’s coach in a train, pushed off the train, raped on the tracks, and had her head bashed in with a stone by one-armed beggar Charly Thomas in Kerala in 2011. The fast-track court delivered a death sentence in the rape-murder. But on appeal to the Supreme Court, two things happened: the prosecution was not able to present a water-tight case, and the ‘beggar’ Charly was able to hire an expensive, hot-shot lawyer. The result? The death sentence was commuted to ‘life’, which means that he will be released after 14 years. 

Just last week, retired BSF jawan Bhagwat Nishad shot and killed Dilshad Hussain in court premises in Gorakhpur, UP. It is alleged that Nishad’s minor daughter had been abducted and raped by Hussain, and though there was a POCSO case, the accused was out on bail. 

There is the currently sensational case of Lavanya, a 17-year-old student of a residential Christian school in Thanjavur, Tamil Nadu. A top student, she was allegedly repeatedly coerced to convert and even to become a nun. When she refused, she was punished, mentally tortured, and forced to do menial tasks like cleaning toilets. She consumed poison, and in her dying declaration from hospital available on video, she clearly implicates those who were torturing her. 

Instead of taking action against the accused, the instincts of the state apparatus and the media were to cover things up, and to question the credibility of Lavanya and her parents. The police authorities dismissed the whole incident, and it took a consistent grassroots movement to prevent this sad, but not unusual, incident from being swept under the carpet. 

All this leads to the disheartening question: do some people have human rights, while others don’t? Are governments not constitutionally required to treat the powerful and the powerless the same when investigating criminal offenses and human rights violations? Why does it appear that in some cases the executive is content to make a mockery of the judicial proceedings?

Are people gaming the judiciary by filing pointless PILs, which well-connected lawyers can ram through the system? Why, for instance, does the Supreme Court refuse to hear the case of the ethnic cleansing of Kashmiri Hindus in 1990, but is willing to take up the case of Rohingyas, who technically have no locus standi in India, being illegal aliens? India is also not a signatory to non-refoulement treaties, and is perfectly at liberty to send them back to Myanmar.

Who pays for all the expensive lawyers? There is a pattern whereby unseen forces pump in money to hire the best lawyers (sometimes hiding it under ‘crowdfunding’) to get judgments that may have propaganda and other value for them. 

Unfortunately, despite the soaring rhetoric about human rights, the reality is that unless your agenda happens to coincide with that of narrative-builders, you will get no traction. Indian cricketers, in an embarrassing display of cluelessness and dhimmitude, ‘took the knee’ for Black Lives Matter. That they would never do the same for Kashmiri Hindu Lives Matter tells the whole story in a nutshell. 

1240 words, 27 Jan 2022

A version of this essay has been published by swarajayamag.com at https://swarajyamag.com/culture/the-argument-about-a-british-hymn-at-beating-the-retreat-well-heres-an-alternative

I personally have had no idea what ‘Beating the Retreat’ is all about, so I was startled when a full-scale war of words erupted because the Government of India apparently decided to replace a British-era song called ‘Abide with me’ with a Lata Mangeshkar song named ‘Ae mere watan ke logon’ as part of the ceremony.

Thanks for reading Shadow Warrior! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Upon reading the now-famous ‘Abide with me’, which I had never heard of, and looking it up on the Internet, I found out it is a Christian hymn, written by some unknown British padre in the 1850s. Insofar as its literary quality goes, it is not bad, and appears to be a plea for having the Christian God stand with the beseecher as he goes through his times of trouble. It is clearly directed to the Christian God because it includes verses about the cross. 

It is not entirely clear why removing this uni-denominational prayer is a blow to tradition, such as it is. That too a colonial tradition imposed on a prone India in the 1900s. 

Thank you for reading Shadow Warrior. This post is public so feel free to share it.

On the other hand, I have read that Nehru himself cried when listening to ‘Ae mere watan ke logon’ in the aftermath of the 1962 debacle. I have my doubts about that song’s appeal because of its over-reliance on words of Farsi and Arabic origin, which sound alien to my southern ears. When I first heard it, I confused the word ‘watan’ (Arabic for country) with ‘vadan(am)’ (Sanskrit for face), but of course it didn’t make any sense. 

Interestingly, I found out on twitter that ‘Abide with me’ was Gandhi’s favorite hymn! This was on the authority of Shashi Tharoor, Congress MP, on January 26th. He didn’t elaborate as to how it is known that it was Gandhi’s favorite hymn, which I had been earlier led to believe was ‘Vaishnava Janato’.  

Going one step further, another Congress MP, P Chidambaram, let on that it was also Subhas Bose’s favorite hymn. How did he know that? Why, Bose’s grand-nephew Sugata Bose told him. Sugata Bose is a professor at Harvard University; it is probably not necessary to remind people, as per Wikipedia, that “Harvard College was founded in 1636 as a Puritan/Congregationalist institution and trained ministers for many years.”

I guess that would have been clinching evidence for the importance of ‘Abide with me’, except for a small detail: Sugata was born in 1956, 11 years after Netaji disappeared in 1945. So how on earth did he witness the “tears flowing down Netaji’s cheeks”? So it is just a second-hand tale of dubious authenticity?

Remarkable that this obscure prayer was the favorite of not only Gandhi, but also Netaji! And I don’t know about you, but all these tears from the stalwarts of the freedom movement are beginning to make me feel a little queasy.

In other words, all this sounds like a red herring, if not proper fake news manufactured on the spot. The real issue is that the Congress is upset that Narendra Modi has recognized the enduring affection that average Indians have for Bose. Congress’ diligent attempts to obscure Bose’s contribution, along with that of other stalwarts like Patel, worked for a long time, but as they say, you can fool all the people some of the time, but not all of the time. 

Personally, I used to hero-worship Bose, and even attempted to read the monumental Brothers Against the Raj, but later I found that he had certain blind spots about leftism for example, and he had rather absurd ideas about abandoning Indian scripts for Roman, so I now have a more nuanced view. But he clearly deserves, as the head of the Indian National Army, the signal honor of a commanding statue at the India Gate. 

And in case the nation is in the market for a purely non-sectarian hymn that deserves to be accepted as a national prayer, I have one in mind. It is the Daiva-dasakam or Ten Couplets to the Almighty by Sri Narayana Guru. Here’s my translation from the Malayalam original:

O Almighty, watch over us

A version of this essay was published by firstpost at https://www.firstpost.com/india/are-things-looking-up-for-india-at-makar-sankranti-a-time-for-new-beginnings-10286661.html

It is true that the usual suspects and the usual problems remain: malign forces including moles and sleeper cells inside the country; a stepped-up assault on India and Hindus from the Deep State and other ill-wishers; an almost-war on the Tibet border; the creaking bureaucracy and especially the judiciary; and the single-minded hostility towards the Government of India projected by US Big Media and Big Tech.

In the midst of all this, let us consider a few things that make it look like India is on the upswing, while sounding a few notes of caution.

Thanks for reading Shadow Warrior! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Technology Trends

Just a short while ago, there were two big announcements: India hit 1.5 billion vaccinations; and India hit $100 billion in digital transactions in October and November. The first is an example of how, against the odds and in the face of determined opposition by vested interests, India has managed to vaccinate a significant number of its people who are eligible for them, almost entirely with Indian-manufactured or Indian-developed vaccines. It means the State has capacity to scale and that the private sector has the capacity to do process and product innovation. 

The second is an example of leapfrog: India now has more digital transactions than the next three or four countries combined, and this has happened where skeptics said there are no POS machines, no electricity, etc. The humble mobile phone has been a game-changer, and the public has taken to QR codes with gusto: they are ubiquitous. This is hopeful: it means India can use and improve on current tech models. Perhaps radical new technologies such as crypto currencies will take root in India. 

India has been a technology laggard in the last century or two. But there is no inherent reason for that to continue. India’s STEM people are very competent: for instance, see how they dealt with technology denials such as with the cryogenic rocket engine or the Cray supercomputer. If we can harness upcoming technologies we should be able to ride the next innovation tsunamis. In areas such as web 3.0 with their distributed nature, Indians may well create the platforms of the future.

One example of the public acceptance of tech is the immense popularity of mobile phones. There are also the ingenious ways in which people have used them. For instance, there is the ‘missed call’ semaphore whereby you convey a specific message, such as “I have reached my destination”, without actually using up a call! A Harvard case study talks about how fishermen in Kerala increased their average profits by 12% by using their cell phones out at sea to talk to big buyers, cut out middlemen and take their catch to the optimal fishing port. 

The uptake of mobile internet has been phenomenal, and is growing at a rate that will soon rival China. Once Reliance Jio brought inexpensive bandwidth to the masses, usage took off with entertainment and education (in a famous case, a railway porter studied for the State administrative services on his phone with free WiFi at the station, and got through the exam). There is an open-ness in India to science and technology, quite possibly because Dharmic religions are not anti-science or anti-logic. 

One of the hopeful signs is the drive to set up a semiconductor fabrication facility in India. Since computers and cellphones and Internet of Things or IoT devices including connected cars will increasingly drive our future, it is imperative that we have the ability to manufacture the key component of all this, i.e. silicon chips. It is one of several seminal technologies we need to be present in: AI, blockchain, crypto currencies, quantum computing, CRISPR-Cas9 in biology. At the moment, we are far behind in all of them. This cannot continue, and we need to put in a crash program, like America’s Manhattan Project, to catch up. 

Thank you for reading Shadow Warrior. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Indian economy

India is the fifth largest economy in the world, having overtaken Britain in the recent past (which of course is a matter for some schadenfreude). India should overtake Germany and Japan in the next ten years. So India is a player. 

The GDP growth figures of 8 to 9% in 2021 need to be seen in the context of the huge contraction due to the wuhan virus last year, but the important fact is that it is believed that this level can continue for the next several years. Both the World Bank and the IMF have suggested India will once again be the fastest growing large economy in the world. I am more optimistic about the 2023-2024 outlook than this:

This is not coming on the back of massive increases in money supply, as in the US which appears to have printed money by the boatload, which is leading to inflation. Indian inflation, if you adjust for sky-high energy prices, is not all that bad. Incidentally, even with the prospect of higher interest rates in the US, the rupee is not falling: it hit a 3 month high of $1 = 73.9 Rupees on Jan 11th. This implies investors are pricing in India’s improved economic prospects. The reasons are quite basic: improved state finances and thus improved infrastructure investment, along with a young and growing working class which is beginning to be a consumption engine. 

Geo-politics and geo-economics

Things look a little tough in the near future both from the point of view of global politics and global economics. The Cold War between the US and China, despite President Biden’s conciliation or appeasement depending on your perspective, will probably get worse, and I would not be surprised if there is an actual invasion of Taiwan. I wrote twenty years ago about that possibility, and now it looks increasingly likely that the US may not have the will, or the capability, to defend Taiwan in that case. The conflict between the US and China may well lead to the concept of a Thucydides Trap, where the two exhaust themselves. That makes for a dangerous world, and India may have to step into the breach for the defense of the Indo-Pacific. 

From an economic perspective, the massive amounts of money printed by many countries, to combat the covid crisis, is likely to lead to inflation and thus the progressive weakening of the US dollar. The fallout from the Evergrande crisis shows that the extraordinary leveraging of China based on huge corporate and public-sector debt fueled by real estate speculation may also cause prolonged pain, just as it happened to 1980s Japan which has struggled for decades now. 

The chances of war in Asia, especially in Taiwan, or in Japan’s Senkaku Islands, or even in the South China Sea, are fairly high. India is part of the Quad, of course, but we should not be under any delusions that the US, Japan or Australia will come to our aid if war erupts on the Tibetan border. We will be entirely on our own, so it behooves us to be prepared to fight. We have to choose our friends carefully, and at the moment I see only two in Asia: Japan and Vietnam. Maybe Indonesia, too. The others are more likely to choose China. 

Education

Unfortunately India needs a veritable revolution in education, or else it will miss the boat. Unlike East Asia, which opted for universal primary education, India invested in tertiary education. This created a few oases of excellence in a sea of mediocrity, and this is yet another reason manufacturing hasn’t taken off at East Asian levels, and probably never will. 

Also, just last week, the CAG was complaining that at least the new IITs were not producing enough research or industrial consultancy revenue, and were still depending on the government for handouts. That shows a disconnect between the needs of industry and what academia is doing. 

There are also concerns about the much-vaunted STEM schools, which are now producing skewed numbers. For instance, in Kerala, 5500+ students opted for computer science, but less than 10 for civil engineering. Can you believe that? Less than 10 in the whole state in government-run common admissions? The English language issue is also stark: far from producing world-class scientists and engineers, we produce people who are functionally barely literate in both English and STEM. 

The less said about humanities education the better: these students are in the forefront of aping Western fads like wokeism, nothing more. So there are some serious problems, and recent education ministers have not been exactly confidence-inducing.

Stock Markets

Indian stock markets have had a good run, and naturally a correction should be coming. The economic fundamentals are strong, but by some historical measures such as Price Earnings Ratio, the current valuation of the market is too high. It is true that India has some 84 unicorns (startups valued at over $1 billion at the beginning of 2022, more so than any other country except the US and China). The entrepreneurial ferment is excellent, but one can question whether or not they will justify their valuations. 

Some of the companies that went public also don’t seem to have a ‘moat’ protecting their business that would justify lofty valuations, eg payTM. Its founder reportedly rued the fact that he went public at this time. There is a bit of a bubble, as in the 1999 Internet Bubble in the US, and when the day of reckoning comes, it will be a little painful for a lot of us. 

Nevertheless, the medium-term story is pretty good, and is based on good demographics and the observed fact that at a certain GDP per head, things take off in the economy. We are at that level, which I believe is in the range of $2000-$4000 GDP per head. With digitization, a lot of hanky-panky has become either more difficult or impossible to pull off, and the formal economy has grown and with GST, tax collections have grown as well. This is a positive feedback loop which will enable greater investment in both physical and virtual platforms, thus freeing entrepreneurs and industrialists to streamline their operations. 

A simple example is how GST has removed border checkposts, thus reducing waiting time and bribes for interstate transport. This sort of easing of friction and thus improving efficiency is a long-term asset for India, and that optimism may be reflected in the market.

Thus, as always when it comes to India, there is room for both optimism and pessimism. But even the pessimists must concede that there is some positive momentum, and that India may finally be shedding the vestiges of the self-defeating policies of eras past. 

1730 words, Jan 13, 2022

A version of this essay was published by swarajyamag.com at https://swarajyamag.com/politics/was-it-a-plot-to-assassinate-the-prime-minister

The events on January 5th were shocking: the PM’s motorcade was stopped for 15 to 20 minutes on a highway overpass, blocked by a group of ‘protesters’. His car, the only black car in the row of white cars, was completely exposed to a possible drone attack, a Stinger missile, a rocket-propelled grenade, or even an IED that could have demolished the structure. 

The enormity of this situation, and the implications for India’s national security, are astonishing. Here was the Prime Minister of the country with the world’s 5th largest economy and 3rd largest armed forces, a sitting duck, at a location only a few miles away from the Pakistani border. 

Thank you for reading Shadow Warrior. This post is public so feel free to share it.

It cannot be seen as an attack on Narendra Modi, the man, but on the institution of the Prime Minister, and by extension on the Government of India. This, in a country where two Prime Ministers were earlier assassinated. It is almost an existential question. What would happen if Modi were to be killed? I hasten to add that I am certainly not advocating it, as he is the PM, and I have been a fan of his for long. But we have to think of what happens in that eventuality. 

The same question was asked earlier: what would happen if Modi were to lose the elections? Well, not much. Modi would take his small suitcase, and, as in the famous painting, alight from the train in his hometown in Gujarat and walk home alone, in the rain, with his umbrella. It is not "Après moi, le déluge" as in the Nehruvian vanity: somebody will rule.

But the nation will be the loser, just when it is at the cusp of inflection.

There have been other dramatic moments in Indian history where one man made a difference. The stray arrow that pierced the eye of Hemachandra Vikramaditya at the second battle of Panipat doomed North India to centuries of Gurkaniya Timurid rule. The beheading of Rama Raya of Vijayanagar by his own renegade troops at the battle of Talikota caused the disastrous end of that bulwark that had protected South India against invaders from the North. 

It may not be that bad this time if there were to be, in Karan Thapar’s immortal words in 2007, “the sudden removal of Modi”. There are others that could step in. But surely, momentum will be lost, and all those malign forces urging ‘regime change’, especially the Deep State and China and their psy-warfare organs, such as the New York Times and Global Times, will smell blood.

Thanks for reading Shadow Warrior! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

I also personally do not think it was an assassination attempt. If it were, it would have succeeded because there was nothing to prevent it. It was more a signal to Narendra Modi that if he dared enter Punjab again, he would be executed. The real question is, what will happen next?

We have seen this movie before. In West Bengal, there was massive election-related violence and the wanton killing of BJP and RSS people by TMC cadres. In Kerala, there have been dozens of murders of BJP/RSS people by Communists or Islamists. 

There were at least two earlier attempts on Modi himself: the first when Ishrat Jehan, Javed (born Pranesh Pillai) and a Pakistani were intercepted driving to Gujarat to eliminate him. The second was the bomb that went off minutes before Modi was to speak in Bihar during election campaigning some time ago. 

If I were to extrapolate, the federal structure of the Indian Union is itself under strain: opposition-ruled states are acting as little personal fiefdoms that are, in effect, independent nations with only a tenuous link to the Union Government.

For instance, just last week, the President of India was apparently humiliated when he had to cool his heels in the Kerala Raj Bhavan after an honorary D Litt to him was denied, allegedly under pressure from the state government (which, however, cleared D Litts for an actress, Shobhana, and a musician, T M Krishna). 

Opposition-ruled states also did not reduce excise taxes on petrol and diesel, while at the same time opposing bringing those under GST. In Bengal, a Chief Secretary was removed by the GoI, but was re-hired by the state government. In Punjab, the DGP was just installed, hand-picked by an Indian National Congress leader. There are many more instances that we all know of.

So there are under-currents of anarchy being implemented nationwide. The bottom line is that a lot of people do not want the BJP to be in power: among them, the urban chatterati who keep pointing out that the BJP only got some 36% of the total vote, while quietly omitting the fact that the sainted Jawaharlal also did not get a clear majority, only a plurality, of the vote while ruling like an arbitrary, absolute monarch for 17 long years. 

There are several groups hurt by various measures taken by the GoI. Among them is the ‘Chandigarh Lobby’, a group of ex-military middlemen whose handsome commissions earned from foreign arms merchants have evaporated. This explains their schadenfreude when General Bipin Rawat was killed last month, and some of the very same group showed their dismissive contempt for the PM as well.

Then of course there are the arhatiyas, or middlemen, who have profited from the aftermath of the Green Revolution. Let us ignore the fact that excessive rice cultivation has led to water tables falling precipitously and groundwater poisoning through pesticide and fertilizer runoff. This is not sustainable: I am reminded of Californians cultivating rice in the desert (see my old column “Water Wars: Cauvery, Chinatown, and Cadillac Desert”). 

Presumably, these were the ‘protesters’ who stopped the PM’s motorcade. So exactly what are they protesting against? Their demand has already been conceded: the farm bills are withdrawn. No, they have become protesters-for-rent; they are now determined to cause trouble.

Proximate, preponderant and root causes

And that is the proximate cause of the problem. The Indian State, various anarchists have concluded, is a soft state, and they can keep escalating their demands without consequences. These ‘farmer’ protesters (including during their Republic Day 2021 shenanigans), and earlier the Shaheen Bagh protesters, realized that they could, with impunity, hold the GoI hostage. And so they will. 

What can be done? Clearly, large-scale force against them would boomerang. But doesn’t the GoI know who the street thugs are, as well as their shadowy handlers in India and elsewhere? If the GoI doesn’t know, why doesn’t it know? Where is the humint as well as the reams of surveillance camera video? How about tracking their bank accounts, money transactions and vehicle movements via Aadhar, PAN, UPI and Fastag? 

Savitri Mumukshu quoted Chanakya on twitter: “A nation has 4 threats. First, from external enemies. Next, from internal enemies helped by foreigners. Third, from external enemies helped by insiders. But most dangerous is when internal enemies are helped by internal spies, like a hidden snake lurking in the home.” As usual, he was right.

The intelligence agencies, assuming they are not riddled with moles, must identify, track, and then pick off the ring-leaders one by one, quietly. You know, the 2am knock on the door. Enough already with the kadi ninda! The State must show it will impose discipline: it has a monopoly on violence. A little bit of “iron fist in the velvet glove” is salutary and a deterrent.

The preponderant cause, though, is the ridiculous fact that there are elections all the time in India. Yes, ALL THE GODDAMN TIME! This is a serious distraction from the job of governing the country, and politicians must figure out what will win elections, not what is good for the country. It is high time that elections were rationalized, perhaps as follows: every five years there are national elections to Parliament. Half the states must synchronize their elections with these. 

In between, 2.5 years later there will be elections to the other half of the states (so that their legislatures also have a life of 5 years). If there are problems in any state and the legislatures are dismissed for some reason, President’s Rule will be imposed until the next time their elections are due. In other words, no unnecessary and frequent elections, but only to a timetable. 

The root cause of the problem, however, is the Indian Constitution, which has mandated the current system of continuous elections. In general, not only for this but for other reasons as well, the Constitution needs to be rewritten because it is a prolix document, largely a cut and paste of the imperial Government of India Act of 1935, with tidbits thrown in from the US and Irish constitutions.

Both the constitution and the increasingly bizarre interpretations of it, especially of Articles 25-30 that render Hindus second-class citizens, are problems. A Constituent Assembly should be set up and work should begin on a simple, 10-page document rather than a 500+ page behemoth.

It will be the job of the Supreme Court to handle nothing but constitutional cases, which requires judicial reforms, with Regional Courts of Appeal set up to hear inter-state disputes and non-constitutional matters elevated from High Courts. And the National Judicial Appointments Commission needs to be revived as well, with a clear mandate for the legislature to approve the appointment of judges. 

So there are larger problems that need to be solved. But at the moment, the attack on the Prime Minister needs to be taken as an affront to the dignity of the Indian Union, and whoever instigated or participated in it needs to be taught a lesson. Some heads must roll. Otherwise the impression that India is a Soft State, especially after the mysterious death of the Chief of Defense Staff, will gain currency. We simply cannot afford that. 

1600 words, 6 Jan 2022

A version of this essay was published by firstpost.com at https://www.firstpost.com/india/punjab-phenomenon-is-devastating-psychologically-but-is-it-just-reversion-to-the-mean-10254751.html

Perhaps I am naive, but growing up in the South, I had a healthy respect for Sikhs, whom I viewed as men of honor and of principle. Later when I lived in California, I visited the Gadar Memorial Hall, and I wrote in 1996 (“Across a chasm of 75 years, the eyes of these dead mean speak to today’s Indian-American”) about the photographs of “glowering young men”, long-dead patriots, mostly Sikhs.

I wrote of Kartar Singh Sarabha, the 19-year-old from the University of California, Berkeley, who was hanged by the British for ‘sedition’ in 1915. He inspired others like Bhagat Singh. And then there is the Komagata Maru incident; once again Sikhs were prominent. They were the ones who tried, as economic migrants, to move to Canada and the US, and were forced to return, and massacred on arrival.

Thanks for reading Shadow Warrior! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Later, I read O V Vijayan’s under-appreciated masterpiece The Path of the Prophet, and he spoke of “the lament of the innocent first-borns”, and I learned from a colleague named Inderjeet Gujral how he literally was the first-born of a Hindu family who had become a Sikh.

Vijayan wrote of the betrayal ordinary Sikhs felt when the Indian Army attacked the Golden Temple. I wrote about Jallianwallah Bagh (“Remember Jallianwallah Bagh!”) and the sacrifice of the Sikhs, quoting Vijayan (translation from the Malayalam is mine):

As far as the eye can see,

In 2019, I went to Kala Pani, the infamous penitentiary in Port Blair, the Andamans. They broke our patriots there, in a Panopticon, as visualized by the famous British liberal Jeremy Bentham. I paid homage to Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. And I read the plaques that had long lists of those incarcerated there: and they were disproportionately Sikhs and Bengalis.

Thank you for reading Shadow Warrior. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Therefore it is with personal anguish that I have followed the trajectory of the Khalistani movement, and the anti-India fervor espoused by them, including the Air India Kanishka bombing, followed by their infiltration into the farm-bill agitation. There is reason to believe that there are hostile entities’ fingerprints all over.

Then there were the horrifying incidents of two lynchings, one in Amritsar and the other in Kapurthala. It is likely that both the victims were Hindus (the authorities have carefully refrained from naming them and the media has not produced tear-jerker stories about their grieving relatives, and by past experience this only happens when the murdered are Hindus). The likely implication is that there is a plan (now that Afghanistan is in the bag) by the ISI to escalate things back to the daily murders and mayhem in the pre-KPS Gill days in the 1990s.

Worryingly, this is the same template that was used by the ISI to ethnically cleanse Hindus from Jammu & Kashmir in 1990. In Punjab, too, many Hindus were killed; but there was no exodus. Perhaps the idea now is to create enough terror and force a migration of Hindus out of Punjab.

That fits the proposed map from “Sikhs for Justice” of ‘Khalistan’, which, notably, does not include any Pakistani territory, not even the Gurudwara Shri Kartarpur Sahib. That is telling.

Also notice that J&K is not even in the map! This is reminiscent of similarly expansive ‘Eelam’ maps put out by LTTE, which included much of southern India.

Therefore we can conclude that there is a clear political angle. But there is also a socio-economic angle to the troubles in Punjab.

For one thing, there are serious caste fissures among Sikhs, and Jat Sikhs dominate and in some sense oppress SC Sikhs. And apparently Jat-ness transcends religion and even national boundaries: I was amused when a famous woman journalist bragged on Twitter that her half-Pakistani, out-of-wedlock son has classic Jat looks! Apparently this is also behind massive conversions to Christian churches in Punjab recently: what I gather is that the SC Sikhs are converting en masse perhaps in a rebuke to Jats.

But I wonder if there are also some more mundane explanations. It may well be a reversion to the mean. Those parts of India that were ahead may well be now declining in relative terms. Similarly there’s the interesting idea of the “middle-income trap” that has caused some nations to stumble in their path to wealth.

In addition to Punjab with its many freedom fighters (some of whom are alluded to above), Bengalis clearly led the flowering of a nationalist consensus, and there was a veritable constellation of greats: famous names like Bankim Chandra, Rash Behari Bose, Swami Vivekananda, Shri Aurobindo, Subhas Chandra Bose, all the way to unknowns like Bina Das.

So what happened to West Bengal? Why is it benighted, and not the glittering center of Indian civilization? Have both Bengal and Punjab regressed to a mean, after having been outliers for a long time? Of course the two also bore the brunt of Partition.

There is another reason to believe there is a reversion to the mean. Consider which states are well off and which states are poor. Look at the poverty rates in the graph.

Remarkable, isn’t it? The least poor states are: Kerala, Sikkim, Goa, Delhi and Punjab. For the moment, let us ignore Sikkim, Goa and Delhi as they are small. (By the way, earlier data I found showed that J&K was by far the least poor territory. I am not sure what has changed.) So let us look at Kerala and Punjab.

There is a simple reason for Kerala’s prosperity: it is a money-order economy, taking advantage of the superior indices of high school education and of healthcare, a legacy from the enlightened rulers of Travancore. This led to mass emigration, first to the rest of India, and later to many parts of the world: not only West Asia, but also rich white countries. Result: remittance money that props up creaking state finances.

Take a look at the footnote in the graph: Kottayam district in Kerala has 0.0% poverty! Why is this? Kottayam (and nearby Ernakulam, also a winner) are the most Christian areas in Kerala, and produce the majority of the nurses who have become a major export: you can find Kerala-origin Christian nurses in large numbers in every part of the rich world. They emigrate, bring family members, and send good money back.

More recently there has been a virtual invasion of oil-rich West Asia by Kerala people, leading to a windfall (most often from Muslim-dominated Kozhikode district, another winner). But that is coming to an end: I read that some 15 lakh emigres have returned, often after losing their jobs.

Similarly, Punjab’s prosperity is easily explained. Punjabis are talented farmers (note the Sikh-Mexican Catholic farmers of California’s Central Valley who have become some of the biggest producers of almonds and so on there) and landowning castes (Jats in particular) benefited from the Green Revolution.

These castes now do not want to share their prosperity with their landless laborer brethren; besides, they figured out how to make big bucks as intermediary arhatiyas who, among other things, ‘import’ lower-priced grain from other states and demand high support prices in Punjab. In other words, their prosperity now depends on looting the taxpayer and converting public property to private gain. Thus the opposition to the farm bills.

Slowly but surely, this neat trick will cease to work, and Punjab’s gains will disappear.

If I were a betting man, I’d bet on the laggard Gangetic Plain lands: yes, Bihar, UP, MP. All of them are low-hanging fruits, and within a decade, with good policies, leadership and a bit of luck, they will be the places to be. That would only be a reversion to what once was: the Gangetic Plain led the country with its empires: Mauryan, Gupta etc (of course, later there were the Cholas, Chalukyas and Vijayanagar as glittering imperial states).

Thus regression to the mean may not be such a bad thing; and it is only in relative terms. In absolute terms, the entire nation will rise. And I suspect Punjabi separatism will subside, too. It is fairly clear that Sikhs are better off in India than in an imaginary ‘Khalistan’: they merely need to reflect on how they had to flee from Afghanistan with their sacred books as soon as the ISI won there.

1350 words, 31 Dec 2021

Note: a version of this essay has been published by rediff.com at https://www.rediff.com/business/column/rajeev-srinivasan-indias-quest-for-a-role-in-the-future-of-semiconductors/20211228.htm

The announcement of a new semiconductor policy on December 15th is welcome news, and the concerned ministers need to be complimented on putting it out there. There is a caveat though: it is too little, too late; this should have been done 25 years ago. And the amounts being committed by India ($10 billion) pale in comparison to what other countries are rumored to have earmarked: $50 billion by the US, $100 billion by South Korea, and $450 billion by China, according to the Indian Express.

This is a big boys’ game. IC Insights says chipmakers will spend $152 billion this year on new fabs and production equipment this year, up from $113 billion last year. They expect investment to continue to rise at that clip of over 30% a year.

The reason is simple. If abundant oil and gas drove the 20th century economy, it is data that will drive the 21st century. To be precise, it is the ability to collect and manipulate data. And at a very practical level, it means the ability to create the semiconductors, that is chips, that power up most of the data-manipulating devices such as phones, computers and IoT devices. So whoever owns the best chip industry will be the Saudi Arabia of the era of data.

There is one statistic that remains with me from the time I was running an incubator for electronic hardware companies, funded by the Government of India: that India’s import bill for electronics would exceed India’s import bill for oil sometime in the next year or two. And this was even before the production-linked incentives made India a big maker of things like mobile phones.

Thanks for reading Shadow Warrior! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

As basically a software man I had always focused on the design side of things. My undergraduate degree in electronics is a distant memory. While trying to steer a bunch of startups, and establishing an assembly line for manufacturing for them (and others), I had to pay attention to this segment, and how important it is. 

The bottom line is that it is pretty clear that it is a strategic imperative for India to have the ability to make its own chips. At the most elemental level, computer security of any kind can easily be subverted at the hardware level. In other words, if  the lower layers in the stack are compromised, there isn’t a whole lot you can do at the system or encryption layers. 

Therefore, at least for sensitive military applications, it is evident that India must control the entire process, and preferably the entire Intellectual Property, related to at least some part of the product spectrum. It has been customary to build military hardware with customized chips, often radiation-hardened and tamper-proofed, and also gold-plated-level expensive. However, it is also true that designers have lately started looking to use the far less expensive and fast-evolving commercial chips in their military-oriented products.

Thank you for reading Shadow Warrior. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Beyond that, with its rapidly increasing consumption of commercial chips especially in the telecommunication market, India cannot afford supply chain disruptions. There is a global shortage of semiconductors as the result of the pandemic and related supply problems, and India cannot be at the back of the queue when manufacturers dole out chips in future crises. 

See also: ">https://www.rediff.com/business/column/rajeev-srinivasan-suez-de-globalization-and-a-semiconductor-fab/20210331.htm

There is a telling parallel with the vaccine-production saga. Can you imagine how India, with its demand for some 2 billion units of covid vaccine, would have fared in the world of the Pfizers and Modernas and Astra Zenecas if it didn’t have its own giant pharma industry, with the ability to rapidly scale up production and also to invent new vaccines like Covaxin? That’s right, nobody in India would have been vaccinated, much like most of Africa has not been.vaccinated. 

There is also another precedent. A few years ago, China, the world’s largest supplier of rare earth metals, abruptly cut off supplies to Japan without warning. As a result, a good bit of Japan’s electronics production came to a grinding halt. The same thing can happen to India if it depends on foreigners with agendas of their own. 

In fact, chips are one of several seminal technologies that will determine India’s position in the world in the next few years, and India is lagging in every one of them: AI, quantum computing, CRISPR-Cas9, maybe mRNA and maybe blockchains. A famous paper by the late C K Prahalad on ‘The Core Competence of the Corporation’ suggests that companies (and by extension nations) that focus on long-term capabilities will survive. Others will not. 

Therefore, India has to pursue chip-making by using its competitive advantages: design smarts, and a vast emerging market. Let us not dismiss buyer power: if India will buy a lot of chips, then chipmakers will gladly set up shop here. But more interestingly, the fact that chip design is a major skill in India can be leveraged. There must be a few thousand chip designers in India, who are employed by the who’s who of the semiconductor industry. 

But this is a little misleading, like saying India has a lot of software services providers, because these people may only see a small part of the product life cycle. They may be adept at using software to do ‘fabless design’, ie. make the blueprints for what needs to be fabricated in actual factories somewhere else. I am not knocking that model: Britain’s ARM has made a fortune by doing precisely that, and it is more than 90% likely that your phone has a ARM-designed chip.

ARM has also done significant R&D to stay ahead of the curve, and anyway there is a new generation of chips coming up with open-source RISC-V technology from the University of California, Berkeley. This may democratize chip design, so that anyone is able to add value on top of a basic platform, but that needs R&D too. This may well be where there are opportunities for Indian companies to create Intellectual Property in new products.

So Indian firms, including the small entrepreneurial ventures that are coming up, will need to focus on products a few years down the road, because the current generation is already spoken for by the TSMCs, Samsungs and Intels of the world. And without some design-for-manufacturing nous, your designs may not be viable. I am wondering about what happened to IIT Madras’s RISC-V based Shakti chips: not sure they are being made in volume.

An entire ecosystem needs to be put in place, which needs everything from steady power to surprisingly large amounts of clean water, as well as guarantees about logistics and about disruptions such as through labor issues. Given India’s history of politically-launched strikes (see Sterilite and Koodankulam), possible industrial sabotage (see mysterious fires in Chandigarh’s Semiconductor Labs and at Serum Institute’s factory) there have to be strict security measures.

The ecosystem also consists of suppliers of specialty chemicals and gasses, and the large equipment manufacturers such as Advanced Micro Devices, LAM Research etc, as well as specialist photolithographers such as Canon and Nikon. There is a large set of these companies, and if you can get their attention, then you have reached viability.

This is exactly what Samsung did when it first got into chip manufacturing: they decided to built the largest chip factory in the world, which immediately got the attention of all the ecosystem players, who are keenly aware that their business is cyclical. Samsung quickly became a preferred buyer, and out of nowhere it has now become the second largest maker of all chips, including their powerhouse display division as well as their CPU division. 

There is a precedent in India for this, too: private sector players that think big, have the risk-taking nous and the marketing savvy to make a difference. If the government sets the rules and demonstrates intent, creates a powerful regulator, and gets out of the way, things can happen. Any incentives are a sweetener. There are examples in cellular telephony as well as in software services. Given the right environment, India has managers who can excel. 

Thus, even though it is belated, the semiconductor policy is something that can be a game changer for India. Hopefully, it will be. 

1350 words, 22 Dec 2021

Note: a version of this essay was published by firstpost.com at Bharat is rising as 2022 looks like a year of living dangerously (firstpost.com)

I have long thought T S Eliot was wrong: April isn’t the cruellest month, but November. For there is the anniversary on the 12th of the momentous Temple Entry Proclamation by the Maharaja of Travancore in 1936; on the 14th is the birthday of my late, dear friend Varsha Bhosle; on the 18th is 13 Kumaon’s magnificent last stand at Rezang-la; and on the 26th was the attack on Mumbai.

But this year, I am beginning to think it is December, although it is only halfway done. On December 4th, the much-loved Chief of Defense Staff, General Bipin Rawat, died in a helicopter crash. On the 15th, there was the grand inauguration of the Kashi Viswanath Corridor. On the 16th is the 50th anniversary of the surrender of the Pakistani Army in Bangladesh. Also on the 16th, a $10 billion announcement about support for semiconductor fabs.

And, as in ‘The Waste Land’, a pandemic still stalks the land. 

It is a mixture of hope and despair:

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Thanks for reading Shadow Warrior! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

After the devastating death of General Rawat and 12 others, there was the astonishing spectacle of ordinary highland Tamils lining the route of his funeral cortege and showering flower petals on the vehicles carrying their mortal remains. It startled me, because I have been led to believe that the average Tamil is this close to secession. 

The outpouring of genuine grief all over the country at the death of the General is a signal that there is a new India emerging, one where a nation is finally being built, overcoming the fissiparous tendencies and separatism that have bedevilled the country. This is a ray of hope. Gen Rawat stood for a hard, capable, and rising Indian State: he was lionized by the average Indian because he had stood up against the enemies of the nation.

There is another India, though, the one that has long claimed to represent the masses. They showed their abundant churlishness by mocking the General’s death. A famous newspaper  had a headline where they didn’t even call him General, but just Rawat, an egregious violation of protocol. And there were others who could barely contain their glee. 

These people may even actually represent some strands of India: those that are thrusting rentiers, footloose, beholden to or mentally colonized by or pure fifth columnists of various hostile powers, or just plain awed by the West and impelled to copy them. But their days in the sun are over, because Bharat is rising and their India, of connections and plummy accents, is falling. 

The nationalist Dharampal once wrote movingly of a group of villagers on yatra, pilgrimage,  that he met on a train. They were a group from two villages in UP, of different jatis, and they had gone all the way to Rameswaram. Now they were going to Haridwar, and they had voluntarily skipped the great cities, the Nehruvian ‘temples of modern India’. They were indifferent to them, and to people like us, Anglophone urban residents. 

That Bharat has always been there, even if it is not visible to most of us. It was this Bharat that, with tearful faces, mourned the General. It is this Bharat that is happy that the dirty, disgusting bylanes of Varanasi have been removed. This Bharat will visit Ayodhya. And this Bharat is the one that has taken to UPI, QR codes, and digitization with a vengeance. 

It is they who have benefited from various development programs in the recent past, including Direct Benefit Transfer, JAM, UPI, health insurance, crop insurance, new roads and other infrastructure being built, the cooking-gas revolution, reliable electricity, and most of all, the Jal Jeevan mission. If they can be freed from the fetters of the colonial-Nehruvian State (a friend calls it the Anglo-Mughlai State) I suspect they will create miracles. 

It is this cohort, the salt of the earth, that we are only vaguely aware of, that has sustained Hindu civilization, bloodied but yet unbowed. And they are the ones under withering attack by various enemies of the nation, targets of conversion drives, false narratives, and outright extermination attempts. But it is they who are our hope.

Thank you for reading Shadow Warrior. This post is public so feel free to share it.

There will be a realignment, too. The low-hanging fruits are in the formerly benighted interior, the Gangetic Plain, sometimes derisively called BIMARU. From my vantage point, I see Kerala, which got an early start, now declining in the state rankings; perhaps like West Bengal. The North shall rise again, and that is a good thing. 

But others are inventing dangerous myths. There is the oft-repeated (but repudiated even by the Vatican) claim that Saint Thomas came to Kerala in 72 CE. Similarly, there is an effort in Tamil Nadu’s Keezhadi and Kerala’s Pattanam to create a perception respectively, that a) Tamil civilization is older and different from Hindu civilization, and b) that Saint Thomas brought Christianity to Kerala even before Hinduism arrived. 

The latest instalment in this saga is a story that some ancient rice has been discovered in a dig in Tamil Nadu. This has been breathlessly turned into ‘proof’ that Tamils are different, and in effect not part of Indian or Hindu civilization. 

Just today I read about the new American ambassador-designate’s plans for India, which include vaguely-worded threats about inciting that mysterious animal, ‘civil society’. That’s a euphemism for creating and sustaining fault lines in Indian society. There was, for instance, an American named Gail Omvedt who lived (lives?) in India, and was systematically attempting balkanization under the rubric of human rights. 

The ambassador-designate, by some accounts, has messed up so badly as Los Angeles mayor that he has to lie low for a while and get rehabilitated. What better than to send him to India on an errand of ‘sub-national diplomacy’? Surely he’s going to threaten India with sanctions over the Russian S-400 missile system, as well as on other Democrat hot buttons, for instance Ilhan Omar’s new Islamophobia Bill.

It is downright insane that a politician is the US envoy to India, when a rising India surely needs a savvy businessman: India will likely grow its trade and manufacturing clout especially given the trend towards reducing China exposure. It shows Democrat animosity towards India, and is further proof that the Quad is dead, after being put on life-support by AUKUS. 

With the threat of war on the Tibet frontier, and of Omicron in the pandemic, 2022 looks like a year of living dangerously. The only consolation is that Bharat is rising, and that Kashi and Ayodhya have been reclaimed, though not in full measure, for Hindu civilization. 

1130 words, 17 December 2021

Note: no text, only the podcast. Please press the ‘play’ button above to listen.

Moksham praptirastu, General!

Farewell and godspeed. You were a good man.

Thanks for reading Shadow Warrior! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.