Shadow Warrior by Rajeev Srinivasan

Let me admit up front that I like Rishab Shetty. A lot. I’d probably go see anything he makes, and I wish him well, because he is an actor with terrific presence. To be honest, I was blown away by his performance in Kantara, both as protagonist and director/writer. I had no idea about the bhoota-kola of Tulunadu, although I have seen the similar theyyam of nearby Malabar, and was suitably impressed.

Therefore I was disappointed and underwhelmed by the prequel Kantara Chapter 1, for a variety of reasons. I understand this is not the universal reaction to the prequel: in particular, young people I spoke with liked the esthetics, the special effects, the big budget production, and the expansive canvas of the spice trade, a large kingdom, and good cast including veteran Jayaram as the weary king, and Rukmini Vasanth as a suitably gorgeous but sinister princess.

But to me it came across as an untidy mishmash of various genres, with the principal purpose of creating a franchise: surely we can expect Chapter 2, Chapter 3 and so on. I don’t begrudge Rishab Shetty and his producer their success, especially as the original Kantara was a sleeper success on a tiny budget.

Warning: spoilers ahead.

My problems were manifold. The first was that the original Kantara hit me with the force of a hurricane, when the coming-of-age tale of the wild-boar-hunting-and-carousing Shiva takes a sudden and unexpected turn and he becomes, reluctantly, the bhoota-kola oracle, taking on the role of his father who disappeared, and his cousin who was murdered.

It was a revelation: a moment when a man turns into the Divine, in a wholly believable and entirely autochthonous, Dharmic tradition, a celebration of the presence of benign powers all around, a manifestation of a pantheistic world-view. It was one of the few recent films that powerfully put across a wholly Hindu perspective, which unfortunately is unusual in India.

As a child, I remember devotional and patriotic films in Malayalam, which engendered a certain affection for the traditions of one’s forefathers. And often the story-lines, from well-known literary works, were rooted in the local milieu. Over time, this has been dissipated, and replaced by unremarkable films that are technically quite good, but for lack of a better word, lack ‘soul’.

In general, this has been true of the dominant Hindi/Urdu language films as well: the narrative is some kind of a global, ‘liberal’, westernized, ‘modernized’ and deracinated tale, where in particular Hindus get short shrift. For example, a recent, highly-rated Malayalam film mined Kottarathil Sankunny’s Aithihya-mala, but turned the protagonists into people of other religions. There was another named 19th Century in which the recently-invented (in the 2010s) fiction of a ‘breast-tax’ on lower-caste women was turned into ‘fact’.

This sort of digestion of, and worse, denigration of, native tradition has been true of Hindi/Urdu films for a long time as has been amply and devastatingly recorded by the efforts of ‘Gems of Bollywood’ on twitter. Therefore it is refreshing when a few films offer a Hindu point of view, eg. Kantara, Bahubali, or the shatteringly powerful Baramulla. This is one reason I am loath to criticize Rishab Shetty too much, but I do have my own complaints.

One is that the Kantara Chapter 1 seems like a mish-mash of various ideas, borrowed from various sources. The origin myth of the hero Berme, where he appears as an abandoned child on a bed of leaves (and the presence of the computer-generated white tiger) may be a nod to the Sabarimala legend: Lord Ayyappa is a foundling, and he is sent on an errand to fetch tiger’s milk by the evil queen who hopes that he will die in that quest.

Then there is the battle of the good vs bad, which reminded me of the battle scenes from Bahubali, and indeed the dark-skinned barbarians from that film got a reprise here with the black-cowled evil sorcerer Kadapa tribe. And I wondered in passing if the very name ‘Kadapa’ was a reference to the Telugu stronghold of the proselytizing Christian Reddys.

Then there is the untidy story of the port city that the Kantara folks want access to, so they can sell spices to white people with no middleman. They also dragged in a superfluous white trader. Yes, the West Coast has been trading with the Middle East and points west for millennia via the Spice Route, but that seems irrelevant to the deep-forest-dwelling Kantara villagers.

In addition, there were cliched memes about slavery (of tribals) and exploitation by the rich and powerful. These came across as nods to the prevailing dogma of woke victim narratives. The remarkable thing is that slavery was virtually unknown among Hindus: the first textual and/or epigraphic examples of slavery in India were by a Christian church in Kerala (the Tarisapalli copperplate, 849CE) and during the Muslim invasions.

The characters were also hit and miss. There were the picaresque companions from the original film, including a vidushaka type who was silly in the original, but annoying here; so was the prince’s kinkara. Neither of them added much to the film, and could easily have been written out. The prince was so typecast from the moment you laid eyes on him – clearly a dissolute, useless fellow – that you knew he was going to be dispatched summarily.

I did like the princess. She was apparently born with paralysis in her hands and legs, and she was handed over to the sorcerer Kadapas, who cured her, but also (it is implied) turned her into a wily seductress, whose efforts to distract the hero (Berme) from his quest were, fortunately, futile. The old king was rather good, too. Rishab Shetty impresses as always with his physical presence, as well as his signature primal roar.

I missed the glowing varaha and the superb Varaha-roopam song which was so electric in the original Kantara. (I hear there were some copyright claims from a band in Kerala, but it baffles me that an old traditional song or tune could be copyrighted by some upstart.) There was a little piglet in one scene, but that was not enough. The VFX of the Brahma-rakshas was unsatisfying, and should have been left to the viewer’s imagination.

All in all, the prequel was a disappointment after the original Kantara, which was refreshingly unpretentious: it did not preach, nor did it explain – it just was, and it forced you to accept the reality of the demigods Panjurli and Guliga. In effect, you went into an alternate reality, along with the bhoota-kola dancer. There was no such staggering insight in the prequel Kantara Chapter 1. If you were expecting a spiritual high, as I was, you’d be disappointed.

If on the other hand, you were looking for light entertainment on a big canvas, you’d be just fine.

Thus my dilemma about the prequel: yes, it does tell a Hindu tale, and I once again wish Rishabh Shetty the best, but I wish it had left me feeling spiritually moved as the original did.

1200 words, 16 Nov 2025

The AI-based Malayalam podcast on this by notebookLM from Google.

A version of this essay was published by the Deccan Herald at https://www.deccanherald.com/opinion/adani-s-under-fire-we-ve-seen-this-before-3783432

The repeated, withering attacks on the Adani group are getting to be tiresome, partly because they usually have no merit per se; and partly because the Western habit of weaponizing the narrative is now so evident. It is basically propaganda, with the pliant media manufacturing consent to support foreign policy.

In a recent column in the Financial Times, Janan Ganesh wrote: “Politics, not tech, makes the world go around”. He may have a point, but at the moment, it is the opposite: the breakneck generativeAI race, and China’s near-monopoly in rare earths, are fueling both trade wars and capitulation: for example, Trump said before meeting Xi that “the G2 will be convening shortly”. TACO, anyone?

I said during Biden’s days in “A US-China condominium dividing up the world between themselves”, that for the Deep State, a G2 would be a convenient (short-term) thing to do. Trump apparently has accepted that a) Chinese leverage is insurmountable, b) a division into spheres of influence would work best. Sadly, it would be disastrous for the US (and the Quad) in the medium term to make China Asia’s hegemon.

But it is happening. As BNP Paribas puts it in a research note quoted by the Financial Times, “[Washington]... is now dealing with a peer rival capable of imposing material economic harm on it — a relatively new position for the US and a development which, at least to us, confirms China’s ascendancy to global economic superpower status.”

It would be entirely rational for a G2 to prevent a third great power from rising, and India is the only candidate: Brazil, Russia, South Africa, the EU are handicapped in one way or the other, e.g. geography, resources, demographics, politics. Therefore the G2 are imposing a Thucydides Trap on India: wage economic (if not kinetic) war, and balkanize it.

Everybody has learned lessons from the recent past (“Confessions of an economic hit-man”, anyone?): how Japan was ruined via the Plaza Accord, how Britain lost its pre-eminence by debasing its currency, and how the US allowed itself to be systematically de-industrialized by China over the last 30 years. They are not going to let India grow, certainly not easily.

Thus Adani is a proxy for India. Mark Mobius, a legendary investor, said, “Investing in Adani is like investing in India”. That is not an exaggeration, because Adani has demonstrated the capability to deliver in more than one domain, especially in ports and airports (Disclaimer: I have a small position in Adani Ports). They have operations in Colombo, Haifa (Israel) and Abbot Point (Australia), which makes them a potentially major player in global shipping, not to mention their container ports at Mundhra and Vizhinjam (Trivandrum).

There have been several waves of attacks on the Adani group, the first in June 2021 alleging improprieties in investments by Mauritius-based funds; the second in January 2023 with the ‘bombshell’ Hindenburg (a short-seller) report alleging stock manipulation and accounting fraud; the third in November 2024, a US Dept of Justice allegation about bribery; the fourth in October 2025 by the Washington Post alleging the Indian government induced LIC to invest $3.9 billion in Adani firms.

When the Hindenburg report was publicized as the “largest con in corporate history” by pliant media like Reuters, FT and WSJ, I wrote that “The Adani Group may not be derailed by Hindenburg”. I also did a video conversation with Professor Narayanan Komerath on the topic.

In fact, in a “dog it was that died” outcome, it was Hindenburg that closed shop; Adani has recovered even after a second Hindenburg report accusing the SEBI chief as well.

Adani has been successful in their ports and energy businesses; they are doing well in airports; their efforts in green energy and in data centers (the new Google AI data center in Vishakhapatnam) may yet prove to be winners. Thus Adani has shown it can compete well in difficult infrastructure sectors. It is true that these need to align with government policies.

Which brings whispers of ‘crony capitalism’, which is rich coming from the US, where ‘robber barons’ like John D Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, J P Morgan and Cornelius Vanderbilt created enormous fortunes primarily through cronyism. Have you heard the dictum “What’s good for General Motors is good for America”? Boeing, the Koch Brothers, Goldman Sachs and Big Tech are current beneficiaries of State munificence.

India has had its share of crony capitalists who provided citizens with shoddy goods at high prices. I don’t dare name them, but you know who they are. Every country supports its national champions: Japan’s zaibatsu, Korea’s chaebol, China’s State Owned Companies.

And recently J P Morgan Chase announced it is investing $1.5 trillion in US industries such as critical minerals, pharma, semiconductors, energy, drones, cybersecurity, AI and so on. Surely this is after consultations with and a go-ahead from the US Government. Similarly, it is neither sinful nor unusual for the Indian State to support dominant, effective players. More power to Adani!

800 words, 31 October 2025

The third episode in the IITM Alumni Association Trivandrum’s live monthly Fireside Chats. Host Rajeev Srinivasan speaks with senior executive and academic Dr. Rajasree, the CEO of Trest Research Park, earlier VC of APJ Abdul Kalam Technological University and an IIT Madras alumna speaks on India’s semiconductor and electronics ecosystem, particularly addressing the India Semiconductor Mission and its goal of achieving self-reliance in the sector, spanning everything from design to manufacturing. Key topics explored include the nation’s strategy to focus on mature nodes (like 28nm chips) rather than cutting-edge technology, the Design Linked Incentive (DLI) program to support startups, and the potential for the growing electronics industry to offset job losses in the IT services sector due to factors like H1B visa fees and generative AI. Dr. Rajasree also shares insights into major investments by groups like the Tatas and projected timelines for the initial domestic chip production and packaging in India, expected around late 2025 to 2026.

AI-generated podcast on this fireside chat from notebookLM.google.com:

A version of this essay has been published by firstpost.com at https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/hindu-americans-political-vulnerability-violence-h1b-bias-13936122.html

Chandra Mouli Nagamalliah, a 50-year old motel manager in Dallas, Texas, was brutally hacked to death and beheaded by a Cuban criminal illegal alien, in front of his wife and son. The murderer kicked Chandra’s head around in the parking lot, before picking it up and dropping it in a garbage bin. All this because of an argument about a washing machine.

This extraordinary incident got no airplay in the US, partly because it coincided with the murder of a conservative broadcaster, Charlie Kirk. There have been other acts of extreme brutality in the US: Iryna Zarutska, a Ukrainian refugee, was stabbed to death by a psychotic killer in a train. In December, Debrina Kawam was burned alive in a New York subway.

Violence is not unusual, but it hits home when a ‘model minority’ Hindu is killed in such a dramatic manner. There was also the unexplained death of Suchir Balaji, a whistleblower who used to work for OpenAI, who may have been silenced. 633 Indian students have died abroad in 5 years, including 172 in Canada and 108 in the US, according to India Today.

I worry about what all this means for the 2-3 million Hindu-Americans. I specifically speak of Hindu-Americans for good reason. Non-Hindus from India have other networks: Muslims and Christians join existing mosque and church groups; some Sikhs project Khalistani memes, falsely alleging religious discrimination in India, seek asylum, and shun Indian connections. Zohran Mamdani, a PIO, has strong Islamist support in his run for NYC Mayor.

Second, anti-Hindu noise in the US has gone up substantially, especially the allegation that Hindus practise caste-based discrimination. There was the California Bill SB 403, sponsored by Afghan-American State Senator Aisha Wahab, which the Governor vetoed. Now there is a new Bill SB 509 that also targets Hindus, and which has also passed the California Senate and Assembly. It was co-authored by State Assembly Member Jasmeet Bains.

Then there are the lawsuits. There was the infamous suit against Cisco Systems alleging caste bias by two Hindu ‘upper-caste’ managers against a ‘lower-caste’ employee. After years of acrimonious hearings, the Federal Court penalized the California Civil Rights Department for faulty prosecution; CRD withdrew the case against the two managers; the case against Cisco continues in arbitration. But this has led to copy-cat suits and a malign narrative against Hindus.

Another major lawsuit was against the BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Temple in Robbinsville, NJ, the largest Hindu temple in the Western Hemisphere, again with accusations of caste-based discrimination. After years of wrangling, and accusations that an immigration lawyer had coerced some complainants, the DOJ and the US Attorney’s Office for New Jersey closed the criminal case on September 19th, finding no violations of federal law or worker exploitation. The civil case continues; the narrative against Hindus has been strengthened

There are leftists with Hindu names aplenty who are actively campaigning against Hindus and supporting people like the academic Audrey Truschke, a known anti-Hindu activist. This is true even among some people in India: for instance, Annapurna Roy won Best Director at the Venice Film Festival, and dedicated her win to women and “the children of Gaza”, never mind the Hindu women, children and men being severely oppressed in Bangladesh right next door.

There has been a massive spike in the anti-Hindu narrative online in the recent past; paradoxically because of their ‘model-minority’ nature: they work hard, obey the law, pay taxes, and get ahead in life. Hindu-Americans likely have the highest per-capita income of any ethno-religious group in the US (Indian-Americans at large do). This leads to envy, especially as the economy struggles and you need scapegoats.

That is reflected in attacks on the H1-B visa program, of which Indians are the biggest beneficiaries. There is the sudden imposition of a $100,000 “tax” on H1-B visas by President Trump. The net result of this is going to be an exodus to India and third countries, an echo of Idi Amin expelling Indians from Uganda.

On the one hand, a good bit of America’s competency in technology is supported by Indian engineers on H1-B visas (of course, there are Indian doctors and nurses and so on also on H1-B). On the other hand, US engineers don’t have much bargaining power (compared to, say, US doctors), so they have been complaining about foreign-born engineers for decades.

In addition to being part of the Trump Administration’s pressure tactics on trade, the H1-B noise harks back to early 20th century anti-Hindu and anti-Indian prejudice, when racism and religious bigotry combined to oppress immigrants. A century later, same wine, different bottle. I wrote in January about the compelling cases of Bhagat Singh Thind and Vaishno Das Bagai. They were, like Chandra Nagamalliah, real human beings, not just some statistics.

The murdered Charlie Kirk himself had explicitly called for reducing visas for “people from India”.

But there is a bigger, more general problem: Hindus generally seek wealth, not political power, ie the old Guns vs. Butter debate. The problem is that if you don’t have guns, the folks with the guns will take your butter. Hindus focused historically on wealth creation, and then were left flabbergasted when wave after wave of invaders came over the Khyber Pass or across the oceans, and just took the wealth.

It is the same in the US now: Hindus seek material advancement, not political power. Even the Hindu elected representatives said very little about Chandra’s tragic death. Vivek Ramaswamy, who had earlier emphasized his Hindu roots, was silent until prodded by online critics. Other prominent politicians were also quiet.

But other immigrant groups have made substantial progress in capturing political power. As an example, the entire city council in Hamtramck, Michigan, is Muslim. In the UK, Pakistani-origin people are in positions of power. In Dearborn, Michigan, the Muslim mayor, on September 9th, told a Christian priest that he was an Islamophobe and effectively urged him to leave the city.

Without political power, Hindus will be vulnerable. There will be sorry exoduses from various countries, and India should become the “nation of last resort” for PIOs. India should treat this as a version of the ‘1000 Talents’ program that China used to attract its diaspora, and create ways to utilize their skills to support economic growth. That needs a lot of planning and can be a win for the country, however traumatic it is for individuals.

Here is the AI-generated Malayalam version of this podcast, from notebookLM.google.com:

1000 words, 20 Sept 2025, updated 23 Sept 2025

A version of this essay was published by rediff.com at https://www.rediff.com/news/column/rajeev-srinivasan-us-farm-distress-real-reason-for-trumps-tariff-tantrums/20250916.htm

There is breaking news that the trade talks between the US and India are on again. This means I was probably right that the harrumphing by President Trump and company was an opening gambit meant to soften India up for a deal that was beneficial to the US.

The whole “India is funding Russia’s war effort by buying oil” meme sounded like a red herring right from the beginning, because of the very many reasons why it is not true. Now the real underlying reason behind the full-court press by Trump aides Navarro et al seems to have surfaced: it is to strong-arm India into rescuing the American farmer.

It was an off-hand comment by an aide that gave away the farm (so to speak): US Commerce Secretary Lutnick’s assertion that India does not buy any corn from the US, in a September 14th interview to a US TV channel called Axios. Now this puts a whole new spin on things, because there is a crisis in US farming.

No nation can afford to hurt its farmers, for both commercial, and perhaps more importantly, social and cultural reasons. We have seen how Japan subsidizes its uncompetitive rice farmers because rice is so central to its traditional culture. We have seen (at least in the days when I still used to read the magazine) the Economist commenting on “wine lakes” and “butter mountains”, that is, excessive production of agricultural products in Europe. Much the same in the US.

If you over-produce, you need to find a buyer. That is the crux of the matter right now: the US used to sell 24 million metric tons of soyabeans, for example, to China every year, but after the tariff threats against it, China entirely switched its purchases to Brazil. So there’s a “soy mountain” in the US, and bankruptcies are mounting.

This is serious. On the one hand, the US has lost its pre-eminence in industry to China through foolishly allowing the slipping away of its entire productive capacity to that country in the pursuit of the elusive “China price”. Now, it is on the brink of losing its pre-eminence in agriculture as well, and that can lead to the loss of food security, and a host of other, surprisingly large, side-effects. I summarized the whole problem in a tweet:

It is indeed a systemic problem with many unintended consequences. On farm distress, there are several indicators: increased bankruptcies and farm liquidations/auctions, reduced farm loan repayment rates, and lower values for farmland, although farm profits have gone up temporarily because of US Department of Agriculture ad-hoc aid, not higher prices.

There are several reasons for this collapse: but the biggest is buyer power. Because of over-production and global surpluses, prices have fallen for many crops; and as mentioned above, the wholesale move of Chinese demand away from the US has left overflowing silos with no prospect of sales in sight. Result: prices fall sharply.

I have often felt that buyer power (one of Michael Porter’s famed “Five Forces”) is underestimated by many. Here it is in action. India seems to not understand that it is a big buyer of many commodities, and that gives it market power; so exercise it. On the contrary, India seems to view itself as a supplicant to big sellers. Not quite.

What the US appears to be doing is to force India to be “the buyer of last resort”, on whom their products can be dumped: after all, I suspect the idea is, 1.4 billion people have to eat something, so why not eat American corn? There’s a certain perverse logic to this, especially if you remember the PL-480 days when American corn was indeed an emergency food supply to food-deficit India: cornflour is to this day called “American mav” in Kerala. But I am pretty sure Lutnick has no idea of all this.

What is exercising the Trump lot is the fact that most of the farms are in solidly-Republican midwestern states (Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, Wisconsin). I remember driving through many of them on a 4,000-mile Boston-San Francisco road trip: there’s nothing but cornfields for miles and miles. And they could be a disaster for Trump in the mid-term elections in 2026.

Conversely, it does not occur to Trump aides that no Indian politician can afford to alienate his small farmers by bringing in American farm products, not to mention the cultural sensitivity to dairy products from er… non-veg cows. In an India that is largely self-sufficient in foodgrains these days, there is very little benefit in buying large quantities of foreign products. As an example, imports of oilseeds from ASEAN has decimated coconut farmers in Kerala.

The Iowa governor has been in India twice, once in late 2024, and once just last weekend, trying to induce Indians to buy corn. Similarly, the governor of Nebraska was in Japan this month trying to sell them ethanol from corn. This is interesting: I wonder if the sudden enthusiasm in India for E20 ethanol blended petrol has something to do with US pressure.

I am not a fan of ethanol blended petrol, because I think hybrid electric-petrol vehicles are a safer, better-tested alternative. But if the GoI is intent on E20, it may be better to buy corn ethanol from the US than to over-exploit water resources in India to grow sugarcane for the same. And maybe, just maybe, it will get Trump to back off from the shrill tariff cacophony.

But to go back to my tweet above, there are a lot of other reasons for India to be wary of American farm products. The gigantic subsidies in the US Farm Bill (of the order of $20 billion a year) encourages farmers to over-produce (corn mountains for example). This ends up being converted to High-Fructose Corn Syrup, which is then added to virtually every food product: just read the labels in US supermarkets.

I personally have seen the obesity epidemic in the US from the 1970s: people have become grossly fat, and diabetes levels, especially in inner-city ghettos of black and brown people, have gone through the roof as a result of all this sugar. #BigFood, that is all the packaged-food companies and fast-food companies, have engendered this transition, partly because of grossly manipulated "scientific" studies that blamed saturated fat and cholesterol.

The culprit, it turns out, was always excessive sugar in the diet. But in the meantime #BigMedicine and #BigPharma took full advantage by selling statins as cholesterol-lowering drugs, and now the new panacea is Ozempic-class weight-loss drugs. However, objective studies show that despite the US spending enormous amounts on healthcare (about 20% of GDP), the health outcomes are mediocre, and often worse than other high-income countries.

None of this makes it a good idea to import US farm products wholesale. What is worse, though, is the agricultural ecosystem which includes Genetically Modified Organisms. It depends on large-scale use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. The Terminator Seed is terrifying: a Monsanto can turn off next year’s crop by refusing to sell new seeds, which is literally the “kill switch”. What you harvested this year will not germinate! Fiendishly clever, indeed!

Given all this, and despite the critical importance of agri-products in both US politics and economics, it is a bad idea for India to be bullied into taking the stuff on board. India would be buying new problems, and its native intellectual property is what needs to be husbanded.

There has already been tremendous erosion or digestion without recompense of these valuable IPs. A lot of traditional Indian rice variants have been spirited away to the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines; similarly A2 zebu, humped Indian cattle, have been decimated in India by Amul and others importing A1 Jersey-type cattle. Ironically zebu breeds like Bramah are thriving in Texas, Brazil etc. No need to let IP loss happen again.

It remains my belief that agricultural and dairy products are a red line for India that no Indian politician can cross. Sorry, Secretary Lutnick.

Here is the AI-generated Malayalam podcast from notebookLM.google.com:

1375 words, 15 Sept 2025 updated 16 Sept 2025

A version of this essay was published by firstpost.com at https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/what-fuels-anti-india-hate-in-the-west-13932053.html

I am personally very pro-America, yet I too have been baffled by the noises emanating from the Trump administration regarding India, particularly from one aide. Peter Navarro, apparently some trade muckity-muck, has had a field day accusing India of various sins. Apart from the entertainment value, this leads to a serious question: Why? And why now?

There is reason to believe, by connecting the dots, that there is indeed a method behind this madness. It is not a pure random walk: there is a plan, and there are good reasons why the vicious attack on India has been launched at this time and in this manner. Of course, this is based on open source and circumstantial evidence: I have no inside information whatsoever.

In this context, consider what is arguably the greatest political thriller of all time: "Z" (1969) by Costa-Gavras. It is based on a real-life political murder in Greece, where a popular left-leaning candidate for President was covertly assassinated by the ruling military junta.

The way the plot unravels is when the investigating magistrate, masterfully played by Jean-Louis Trintignant, notices a curious phenomenon: the use of a single phrase "lithe and fierce like a tiger", used verbatim by several eye-witnesses. He realizes that there was a criminal conspiracy to get rid of the inconvenient candidate, with plausible deniability. Words and phrases have subtle meanings, and they reveal a great deal.

Thus, let me bring to your notice the following tweets:

* “India could end the Ukraine war tomorrow: Modi needs to pick a side” (August 5)

* “Europeans love to whinge about Trump and to claim he is soft on Russia. But after 3 years it is Donald J Trump who has finally made India pay a price for enabling Putin’s butchery.” (August 6)

* Speaker: “[the American taxpayer] gotta fund Modi’s war”. TV Anchor (confused): “You mean Putin’s war?”. Speaker: “No, I mean Modi’s war”. (August 28)

Do you, gentle reader, notice a pattern?

Now let me tell you who the authors of these posts are. The first quoted an article by an officer in the British Special Forces, which means their covert, cloak-and-dagger military people.

The second was by Boris Johnson, former British Prime Minister. Johnson, incidentally, has been accused of single-handedly spiking ceasefire talks between Russia and Ukraine in 2022, when there was a possibility that the whole sorry spectacle of the war could have been settled/brought to a close.

The third is by the aforementioned Peter Navarro on an American TV channel, Bloomberg Television.

I don't know about you, but it seems to me that these three statements are lineal descendants of each other, one leading seamlessly to the next.

This is how narratives are built, one brick in the wall after another. In reality, India has not contravened any sanctions in buying oil from Russia, and in fact has helped maintain a cap on oil prices, which were rising because of the Ukraine-Russia war. But then who needs truth if narrative will suffice?

My hypothesis is that the anti-India narrative – as seen above – has been created by the British Deep State, otherwise known as Whitehall. First from the spooks, then from the former Prime Minister, and then virally transmitted to the American Deep State. It is my general belief that the British are behind much mischief (sort of the last gasp of Empire) and have been leading the Americans by the nose, master-blaster style.

Britain has never tasted defeat at the hands of Russia; while France (Napoleon) and Germany (Hitler) have. Plus the US Military Industrial Complex makes a lot of money from war.

A malignant British meme, intended to hurt Russia, is now turned on to India, which is, for all intents and purposes, an innocent bystander. Britain has had a thing about both Russia (“The Great Game”) and now India, and it was precisely why it created ‘imperial fortress’ Pakistan, with which to trouble, and if possible, hurt both.

Then there was the second set of tweets that took things one step further. Navarro, all warmed up, blamed “Brahmins” for “profiteering by buying Russian oil at the cost of the Indian people” in a broadcast on September 1. Why he would be bothered about the “Indian people” is a good question. But what was far more interesting, indeed hilarious, was the near-simultaneous, and absurdly wrong, set of tweets by a whole group of INDI Alliance mavens.

They ‘explained’, in almost identical words, that what Navarro meant was not “Brahmins”, but “Boston Brahmins”, a term coined in 1860 by Oliver Wendell Holmes, a doctor/essayist, to refer to traditional US East Coast elites, generally WASPs (White Anglo Saxon Protestants) who dominate the corridors of power in the US. Many claim to be descended from the original Pilgrims, Puritan extremists from Britain, who arrived in Plymouth on the Mayflower in 1620.

They go to private (‘prep’) schools like Philips Exeter Academy, then Harvard or Yale, then Goldman Sachs, then Harvard Business School, and generally end up running the country as a hereditary, endogamous caste. It is very difficult for outsiders to marry into or enter this circle, although money helps. For example the Irish Catholic Kennedy clan is part of this caste because they made big bucks (partly by smuggling liquor during the Prohibition era), even though the Irish are generally looked down upon.

I have long claimed that America is full of castes like this, which include the investment-banker caste, the lawyer caste, the doctor caste: all go to the same schools, the same colleges, marry each other, etc. In fact they do form the kind of exclusionary group that the western narrative imputes to India jati-varna. Anyway that’s a long story, and that’s not the point: it is the tweets by, for example, Karti Chidambaram, Sagarika Ghose, Saket Gokhale, et al.

They were so ‘spontaneous’, so near-identical, and so outright idiotic that it is impossible that they came from anything other than a ‘toolkit’ supplied by the usual suspects: the regime-change specialists. And their claim was not even accurate: Navarro was indeed targeting Hindus and Brahmins, as is evident from the following tweet. There is no earthly reason for him to choose this image of Modi, other than that he was coached into doing so.

So we go back to the original question: why? Who hates Hindus so much?

There are a number of other incidents where Indians (in particular Hindus) have been targeted in various countries: Ireland recently; Australia some time ago and again now, see below an anti-immigration (particularly anti-Indian) rally on August 31st; Canada with its Khalistanis running amok (lest we forget, 40 years ago, they downed Air India Kanishka).

Let us note the curious coincidence that these are all countries where the British have influence: Canada and Australia are in effect their vassals. Ireland is not, and I suspect the British are hated there, but somehow in the last few weeks, this British prejudice has spilled over with “Irish teenagers” physically attacking Indians (including women and children). I wonder if the “Irish teenagers” are really British agents provocateurs.

So let’s put two and two together: who hates Indians, Hindus and Brahmins? Why, Pakistanis, of course. And they have been burned a little by Operation Sindoor. Pahalgam didn’t quite turn out the way they thought it would, considering it was scheduled during the India visit of J D Vance accompanied by his Indian/Hindu-origin wife, Usha Chilukuri Vance. That might explain why there’s a sudden explosion of social-media hatred by ISI and CCP bots against Indians.

Pahalgam was Phase 2 of the regime-change operation. By so visibly targeting and murdering Hindus in Pahalgam, the Pakistanis calculated they could induce massive rioting by Hindus against Muslims, which would be an excuse for “the rules-based liberal international order” to step in, exile Modi, and um… restore order, as in Bangladesh. The usual playbook.

Alas, “the best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley”, and Pakistan got a whipping instead, and some of their (US or China-supplied?) nuclear assets apparently went up in smoke. But make no mistake, the regime-change gang will redouble its efforts.

Phase 1 had been the 2024 elections where there were surprising losses by the BJP. Phase 3 is the ‘vote-chori’ wailing by the INDI Alliance: odd, considering nobody knows which passport(s) Rahul Gandhi holds. Phase 4 is the ongoing ‘Project 37’ in which renegade BJP MPs are supposed to bring down the central government.

Pakistan, and its various arms, including the Khalistan project, participate with great enthusiasm in these various phases. And for all intents and purposes, the UK has now become a Pakistani colony. Recursive master-blaster, as I conjectured: Pakistani-Britons control Whitehall, Whitehall controls the US Deep State. Here’s Britain’s new Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, in the words of a suddenly-awake Briton on September 6th.

An Emirati strategist, Amjad Taha, asked a valid question: why is there more terrorism in the UK than in the Middle East?

Wait, there’s more. Here’s a loudmouth Austrian who wants to dismantle India, long a Pakistani dream. And the map is by some Jafri, which sounds like a Pakistani surname. The Austrian also wants Rahul Gandhi to be the next Prime Minister.

Pakistan is itself unraveling, as can be seen in Balochistan which is in open rebellion. Their Khalistani dream is new, but Kerala and the Northeast as Islamist entities were standard memes even from Chaudhury Rehmat Ali who dreamt up Pakistan in the first place in the 1930s.

Pakistan just got a boost, however, with OSINT identifying a US C-17 (a giant military cargo plane) arriving to resupply Nur Khan Airbase. This raises the question again: were US personnel and assets decimated there by Indian missiles during Operation Sindoor? Is that why the US got so upset? Did Trump read the riot act to Modi, which led to the ‘ceasefire’?

Now did they replenish the F-16s etc that were blown up? See, no Pakistani losses!

I imagine this goes well with the newly announced “US Department of War”. I only hope the war target here is China, not India.

Speaking of US internal politics, it was utterly laughable to see Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s NSA, coming to the defense of India in Foreign Affairs. He directly engineered the vicious regime change in Bangladesh, but now he’s full of solicitous concern! Nice little U-turn!

From a global perspective, I believe that both China and the US are intent on knee-capping India. That is the logical response from an incumbent power when there is a rising insurgent power: the Thucydides Trap idea. It is a back-handed compliment to India that it is in splendid isolation, and has to pretend to rush into the arms of China because of Trump’s withering assault.

India will survive the hate; but Indian-Americans may find themselves in some jeopardy as the MAGA types are now focusing their ire on them.

It is, as I said, the Abhimanyu Syndrome: India is completely alone (the RIC lovefest is just marketing). That is the bad news, and also the good news. If everyone (the US Deep State, Whitehall, CCP, ISI, Soros) is against India, it means India matters. Someone said India is the ultimate swing state. No: India is the incipient superpower, the only one that can make it a G3 rather than a G2. Naturally, the G2 is not very happy to let one more into their cozy club.

1910 words, 7 Sept 2025

The second episode in the IITM Alumni Association Trivandrum's live monthly Fireside Chats. Senior executive Sri CMA, formerly VP at Alstom T&D France and Board Member, Alstom India and Areva India, has been in charge of setting up factories in several countries, and has first-hand knowledge of geo-economics and manufacturing. He is also actively involved in analyzing international relations and geo-politics. In this live conversation, he provides insights into the (unintended) consequences of President Trump's tariffs, and answers specific questions from the audience. He considers the repercussions on India both tactically and strategically, and how the nation might respond, with diversification of markets, case-by-case analysis of sectors, and creating leverage with its own core competencies.

Here is the AI-generated podcast about this live chat:

An edited version of this essay was published by Deccan Herald at https://www.deccanherald.com/opinion/decoding-trump-s-tariff-tantrums-3694626, as the editor downplayed the ‘vote chori’ INDI alliance story and the atrocities by Tipu on Hindu Kerala.

Last month, I wrote here about India’s splendid diplomatic isolation, but my prediction became fact sooner than I expected, with President Trump’s withering attacks on India. Biden drove Russia into China’s arms over Ukraine; Trump seems intent on driving India into China’s arms; and Ukraine isn’t even Asia’s problem, but a likely Chinese invasion of Taiwan would be

There are at least four different ways in which one could rationalize the Trump position:

* A negotiating opening gambit to soften up India

* Frustration from the lack of leverage against Presidents Putin and Xi

* Part of a regime-change operation planned by the Deep State

* A desire to force manufacturing and investment to move back to the US

I hope it is a combination of 1 and 2, and that better sense will prevail before a mutually-beneficial Indo-US relationship is damaged beyond repair. However, there is a non-trivial chance that, with prompting by Britain’s Whitehall (which created Pakistan in the first place to keep India in check), the US Deep State has decided to target India.

I wrote a couple of years ago that the Deep State, intimidated by China’s rise, might accept a condominium with it, giving each a sphere of influence. China gets Asia and the Indian Ocean; the US gets the Americas, Europe and the Atlantic; and they share the Pacific. India, Japan, Australia (i.e. the Quad), and ASEAN become Chinese vassals. So like the Vatican-brokered Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494 that divided the world between Spain and Portugal!

There is also the anti-Thucydides Trap, wherein the incumbent power (the US), instead of resisting the rise of the challenger (China), helped it grow, deluding themselves that China would be benign. However, both are now employing all possible means against new challenger India’s rise, including trying to balkanize the latter.

That is Scenario 3, the Deep State playbook of ‘color revolutions’ against governments they don’t like for whatever reason. The continuous INDI Alliance efforts to stir up linguistic or caste-based divisions in India, along with the recent ‘Vote Chori’ fuss to delegitimize India’s democracy, are part of the toolkit: declare a regime undesirable, then topple it. In 2024 they almost succeeded, but not quite. They will keep trying.

Scenario 4 makes a strange sort of sense. Trump realizes the US erred badly in relinquishing manufacturing to China, and wants to pull it back; also he has no interest in India becoming a new manufacturing power. Similarly, the ‘deals’ forcing Japan, the EU, Korea et al to invest billions of dollars in the US (and Ukraine, which lives on charity, has promised to spend $100 billion in the US!) are extortionate: a sort of neo-imperialism.

The effort to browbeat India into buying more US weapons is part of this: Trump aide Peter Navarro grumbled that India buys 36% of its armaments from Russia. He omitted to mention that this is down from 70+% a decade ago. Sadly, US armaments and aerospace products (e.g. the F-35 and Boeing 787s) are now seen as not so reliable.

The moral posturing about India’s purchases of Russian oil leading to deaths of Ukrainians is downright bizarre. It’s just business, Trump aide Scott Bessent, why repeat INDI’s Ambani-Adani mantra? Remember your own ‘robber barons’ and “What’s good for General Motors is good for America”? There are many examples of profit above morals.

One is the 1973 oil price crisis, when OPEC suddenly quadrupled crude oil prices, forcing a massive transfer of wealth from developing countries, quite likely causing starvation deaths. The US could have persuaded (or bullied) OPEC into preventing the price rise. But it didn’t. Why? Because those petro-dollars were recycled into buying American weapons. The Military Industrial Complex prospered. No morality there.

There is an earlier parallel. Tipu Sultan invaded Kerala in the 1780s with a reign of terror, massacres, loot of Hindu temples, pillage, forced conversions and so on. The British did nothing, despite a treaty with Travancore. After Tipu had amassed all the looted treasure in one place, the British killed him, and stole all of it themselves. The British came out smelling of roses because they killed a tyrant, and they had the loot. Two birds, one stone. No morality there, either.

Given all this, there’s one thing India needs to do urgently: gain leverage, a bargaining chip. China has rare earths, OPEC has oil. India should use the 100,000 H1-B folks who are likely to be forced out from the US to gain leverage through first-class software products.

760 words, 20 Aug 2025, updated 21 Aug 2025

A version of this essay has been published by firstpost.com at https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/shadow-warrior-from-crisis-to-advantage-how-india-can-outplay-the-trump-tariff-gambit-13923031.html

A simple summary of the recent brouhaha about President Trump’s imposition of 25% tariffs on India as well as his comment on India’s ‘dead economy’ is the following from Shakespeare’s Macbeth: “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”. Trump further imposed punitive tariffs totalling 50% on August 6th allegedly for India funding Russia’s war machine via buying oil.

As any negotiator knows, a good opening gambit is intended to set the stage for further parleys, so that you could arrive at a negotiated settlement that is acceptable to both parties. The opening gambit could well be a maximalist statement, or one’s ‘dream outcome’, the opposite of which is ‘the walkway point’ beyond which you are simply not willing to make concessions. The usual outcome is somewhere in between these two positions or postures.

Trump is both a tough negotiator, and prone to making broad statements from which he has no problem retreating later. It’s down-and-dirty boardroom tactics that he’s bringing to international trade. Therefore I think Indians don’t need to get rattled. It’s not the end of the world, and there will be climbdowns and adjustments. Think hard about the long term.

I was on a panel discussion on this topic on TV just hours after Trump made his initial 25% announcement, and I mentioned an interplay between geo-politics and geo-economics. Trump is annoyed that his Ukraine-Russia play is not making much headway, and also that BRICS is making progress towards de-dollarization. India is caught in this crossfire (‘collateral damage’) but the geo-economic facts on the ground are not favorable to Trump.

I am in general agreement with Trump on his objectives of bringing manufacturing and investment back to the US, but I am not sure that he will succeed, and anyway his strong-arm tactics may backfire. I consider below what India should be prepared to do to turn adversity into opportunity.

The anti-Thucydides Trap and the baleful influence of Whitehall on Deep State

What is remarkable, though, is that Trump 2.0 seems to be indistinguishable from the Deep State: I wondered last month if the Deep State had ‘turned’ Trump. The main reason many people supported Trump in the first place was the damage the Deep State was wreaking on the US under the Obama-Biden regime. But it appears that the resourceful Deep State has now co-opted Trump for its agenda, and I can only speculate how.

The net result is that there is the anti-Thucydides Trap: here is the incumbent power, the US, actively supporting the insurgent power, China, instead of suppressing it, as Graham Allison suggested as the historical pattern. It, in all fairness, did not start with Trump, but with Nixon in China in 1971. In 1985, the US trade deficit with China was $6 million. In 1986, $1.78 billion. In 1995, $35 billion.

But it ballooned after China entered the WTO in 2001. $202 billion in 2005; $386 billion in 2022.

In 2025, after threatening China with 150% tariffs, Trump retreated by postponing them; besides he has caved in to Chinese demands for Nvidia chips and for exemptions from Iran oil sanctions if I am not mistaken.

All this can be explained by one word: leverage. China lured the US with the siren-song of the cost-leader ‘China price’, tempting CEOs and Wall Street, who sleepwalked into surrender to the heft of the Chinese supply chain.

Now China has cornered Trump via its monopoly over various things, the most obvious of which is rare earths. Trump really has no option but to give in to Chinese blackmail. That must make him furious: in addition to his inability to get Putin to listen to him, Xi is also ignoring him. Therefore, he will take out his frustrations on others, such as India, the EU, Japan, etc. Never mind that he’s burning bridges with them.

There’s a Malayalam proverb that’s relevant here: “angadiyil thottathinu ammayodu”. Meaning, you were humiliated in the marketplace, so you come home and take it out on your mother. This is quite likely what Trump is doing, because he believes India et al will not retaliate. In fact Japan and the EU did not retaliate, but gave in, also promising to invest large sums in the US. India could consider a different path: not active conflict, but not giving in either, because its equations with the US are different from those of the EU or Japan.

Even the normally docile Japanese are beginning to notice.

Beyond that, I suggested a couple of years ago that Deep State has a plan to enter into a condominium agreement with China, so that China gets Asia, and the US gets the Americas and the Pacific/Atlantic. This is exactly like the Vatican-brokered medieval division of the world between Spain and Portugal, and it probably will be equally bad for everyone else. And incidentally it makes the Quad infructuous, and deepens distrust of American motives.

The Chinese are sure that they have achieved the condominium, or rather forced the Americans into it. Here is a headline from the Financial Express about their reaction to the tariffs: they are delighted that the principal obstacle in their quest for hegemony, a US-India military and economic alliance, is being blown up by Trump, and they lose no opportunity to deride India as not quite up to the mark, whereas they and the US have achieved a G2 detente.

Two birds with one stone: gloat about the breakdown in the US-India relationship, and exhibit their racist disdain for India yet again.

They laugh, but I bet India can do an end-run around them. As noted above, the G2 is a lot like the division of the world into Spanish and Portuguese spheres of influence in 1494. Well, that didn’t end too well for either of them. They had their empires, which they looted for gold and slaves, but it made them fat, dumb and happy. The Dutch, English, and French capitalized on more dynamic economies, flexible colonial systems, and aggressive competition, overtaking the Iberian powers in global influence by the 17th century. This is a salutary historical parallel.

I have long suspected that the US Deep State is being led by the nose by the malign Whitehall (the British Deep State): I call it the ‘master-blaster’ syndrome. On August 6th, there was indirect confirmation of this in ex-British PM Boris Johnson’s tweet about India. Let us remember he single-handedly ruined the chances of a peaceful resolution of the Ukraine War in 2022. Whitehall’s mischief and meddling all over, if you read between the lines.

Did I mention the British Special Force’s views? Ah, Whitehall is getting a bit sloppy in its propaganda.

Wait, so is India important (according to Whitehall) or unimportant (according to Trump)?

Since I am very pro-American, I have a word of warning to Trump: you trust perfidious Albion at your peril. Their country is ruined, and they will not rest until they ruin yours too.

I also wonder if there are British paw-prints in a recent and sudden spate of racist attacks on Indians in Ireland. A 6-year old girl was assaulted and kicked in the private parts. A nurse was gang-raped by a bunch of teenagers. Ireland has never been so racist against Indians (yes, I do remember the sad case of Savita Halappanavar, but that was religious bigotry more than racism). And I remember sudden spikes in anti-Indian attacks in Australia and Canada, both British vassals.

There is no point in Indians whining about how the EU and America itself are buying more oil, palladium, rare earths, uranium etc. from Russia than India is. I am sorry to say this, but Western nations are known for hypocrisy. For example, exactly 80 years ago they dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, but not on Germany or Italy. Why? The answer is uncomfortable. Lovely post-facto rationalization, isn’t it?

Remember the late lamented British East India Company that raped and pillaged India?

Applying the three winning strategies to geo-economics

As a professor of business strategy and innovation, I emphasize to my students that there are three broad ways of gaining an advantage over others: 1. Be the cost leader, 2. Be the most customer-intimate player, 3. Innovate. The US as a nation is patently not playing the cost leader; it does have some customer intimacy, but it is shrinking; its strength is in innovation.

If you look at comparative advantage, the US at one time had strengths in all three of the above. Because it had the scale of a large market (and its most obvious competitors in Europe were decimated by world wars) America did enjoy an ability to be cost-competitive, especially as the dollar is the global default reserve currency. It demonstrated this by pushing through the Plaza Accords, forcing the Japanese yen to appreciate, destroying their cost advantage.

In terms of customer intimacy, the US is losing its edge. Take cars for example: Americans practically invented them, and dominated the business, but they are in headlong retreat now because they simply don’t make cars that people want outside the US: Japanese, Koreans, Germans and now Chinese do. Why were Ford and GM forced to leave the India market? Their “world cars” are no good in value-conscious India and other emerging markets.

Innovation, yes, has been an American strength. Iconic Americans like Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Steve Jobs led the way in product and process innovation. US universities have produced idea after idea, and startups have ignited Silicon Valley. In fact Big Tech and aerospace/armaments are the biggest areas where the US leads these days.

The armaments and aerospace trade

That is pertinent because of two reasons: one is Trump’s peevishness at India’s purchase of weapons from Russia (even though that has come down from 70+% of imports to 36% according to SIPRI); two is the fact that there are significant services and intangible imports by India from the US, of for instance Big Tech services, even some routed through third countries like Ireland.

Armaments and aerospace purchases from the US by India have gone up a lot: for example the Apache helicopters that arrived recently, the GE 404 engines ordered for India’s indigenous fighter aircraft, Predator drones and P8-i Poseidon maritime surveillance aircraft. I suspect Trump is intent on pushing India to buy F-35s, the $110-million dollar 5th generation fighters.

Unfortunately, the F-35 has a spotty track record. There were two crashes recently, one in Albuquerque in May, and the other on July 31 in Fresno, and that’s $220 million dollars gone. Besides, the spectacle of a hapless British-owned F-35B sitting, forlorn, in the rain, in Trivandrum airport for weeks, lent itself to trolls, who made it the butt of jokes. I suspect India has firmly rebuffed Trump on this front, which has led to his focus on Russian arms.

There might be other pushbacks too. Personally, I think India does need more P-8i submarine hunter-killer aircraft to patrol the Bay of Bengal, but India is exerting its buyer power. There are rumors of pauses in orders for Javelin and Stryker missiles as well.

On the civilian aerospace front, I am astonished that all the media stories about Air India 171 and the suspicion that Boeing and/or General Electric are at fault have disappeared without a trace. Why? There had been the big narrative push to blame the poor pilots, and now that there is more than reasonable doubt that these US MNCs are to blame, there is a media blackout?

Allegations about poor manufacturing practices by Boeing in North Charleston, South Carolina by whistleblowers have been damaging for the company’s brand: this is where the 787 Dreamliners are put together. It would not be surprising if there is a slew of cancellations of orders for Boeing aircraft, with customers moving to Airbus. Let us note Air India and Indigo have placed some very large, multi-billion dollar orders with Boeing that may be in jeopardy.

India as a consuming economy, and the services trade is hugely in the US’ favor

Many observers have pointed out the obvious fact that India is not an export-oriented economy, unlike, say, Japan or China. It is more of a consuming economy with a large, growing and increasingly less frugal population, and therefore it is a target for exporters rather than a competitor for exporting countries. As such, the impact of these US tariffs on India will be somewhat muted, and there are alternative destinations for India’s exports, if need be.

While Trump has focused on merchandise trade and India’s modest surplus there, it is likely that there is a massive services trade, which is in the US’ favor. All those Big Tech firms, such as Microsoft, Meta, Google and so on run a surplus in the US’ favor, which may not be immediately evident because they route their sales through third countries, e.g. Ireland.

These are the figures from the US Trade Representative, and quite frankly I don’t believe them: there are a lot of invisible services being sold to India, and the value of Indian data is ignored.

In addition to the financial implications, there are national security concerns. Take the case of Microsoft’s cloud offering, Azure, which arbitrarily turned off services to Indian oil retailer Nayara on the flimsy grounds that the latter had substantial investment from Russia’s Rosneft. This is an example of jurisdictional over-reach by US companies, which has dire consequences. India has been lax about controlling Big Tech, and this has to change.

India is Meta’s largest customer base. Whatsapp is used for practically everything. Which means that Meta has access to enormous amounts of Indian customer data, for which India is not even enforcing local storage. This is true of all other Big Tech (see OpenAI’s Sam Altman below): they are playing fast and loose with Indian data, which is not in India’s interest at all.

Data is the new oil, says The Economist magazine. So how much should Meta, OpenAI et al be paying for Indian data? Meta is worth trillions of dollars, OpenAI half a trillion. How much of that can be attributed to Indian data?

There is at least one example of how India too can play the digital game: UPI. Despite ham-handed efforts to now handicap UPI with a fee (thank you, brilliant government bureaucrats, yes, go ahead and kill the goose that lays the golden eggs), it has become a contender in a field that has long been dominated by the American duopoly of Visa and Mastercard. In other words, India can scale up and compete.

It is unfortunate that India has not built up its own Big Tech behind a firewall as has been done behind the Great Firewall of China. But it is not too late. Is it possible for India-based cloud service providers to replace US Big Tech like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure? Yes, there is at least one player in that market: Zoho.

Second, what are the tariffs on Big Tech exports to India these days? What if India were to decide to impose a 50% tax on revenue generated in India through advertisement or through sales of services, mirroring the US’s punitive taxes on Indian goods exports? Let me hasten to add that I am not suggesting this, it is merely a hypothetical argument.

There could also be non-tariff barriers as China has implemented, but not India: data locality laws, forced use of local partners, data privacy laws like the EU’s GDPR, anti-monopoly laws like the EU’s Digital Markets Act, strict application of IPR laws like 3(k) that absolutely prohibits the patenting of software, and so on. India too can play legalistic games. This is a reason US agri-products do not pass muster: genetically modified seeds, and milk from cows fed with cattle feed from blood, offal and ground-up body parts.

Similarly, in the ‘information’ industry, India is likely to become the largest English-reading country in the world. I keep getting come-hither emails from the New York Times offering me $1 a month deals on their product: they want Indian customers. There are all these American media companies present in India, untrammelled by content controls or taxes. What if India were to give a choice to Bloomberg, Reuters, NYTimes, WaPo, NPR et al: 50% tax, or exit?

This attack on peddlers of fake information and manufacturing consent I do suggest, and I have been suggesting for years. It would make no difference whatsoever to India if these media outlets were ejected, and they surely could cover India (well, basically what they do is to demean India) just as well from abroad. Out with them: good riddance to bad rubbish.

What India needs to do

I believe India needs to play the long game. It has to use its shatrubodha to realize that the US is not its enemy: in Chanakyan terms, the US is the Far Emperor. The enemy is China, or more precisely the Chinese Empire. Han China is just a rump on their south-eastern coast, but it is their conquered (and restive) colonies such as Tibet, Xinjiang, Manchuria and Inner Mongolia, that give them their current heft.

But the historical trends are against China. It has in the past had stable governments for long periods, based on strong (and brutal) imperial power. Then comes the inevitable collapse, when the center falls apart, and there is absolute chaos. It is quite possible, given various trends, including demographic changes, that this may happen to China by 2050.

On the other hand, (mostly thanks, I acknowledge, to China’s manufacturing growth), the center of gravity of the world economy has been steadily shifting towards Asia. The momentum might swing towards India if China stumbles, but in any case the era of Atlantic dominance is probably gone for good. That was, of course, only a historical anomaly. Asia has always dominated: see Angus Maddison’s magisterial history of the world economy, referred to below as well.

I am reminded of the old story of the king berating his court poet for calling him “the new moon” and the emperor “the full moon”. The poet escaped being punished by pointing out that the new moon is waxing and the full moon is waning.

This is the long game India has to keep in mind. Things are coming together for India to a great extent: in particular the demographic dividend, improved infrastructure, fiscal prudence, and the increasing centrality of the Indian Ocean as the locus of trade and commerce.

India can attempt to gain competitive advantage in all three ways outlined above:

* Cost-leadership. With a large market (assuming companies are willing to invest at scale), a low-cost labor force, and with a proven track-record of frugal innovation, India could well aim to be a cost-leader in selected areas of manufacturing. But this requires government intervention in loosening monetary policy and in reducing barriers to ease of doing business

* Customer-intimacy. What works in highly value-conscious India could well work in other developing countries. For instance, the economic environment in ASEAN is largely similar to India’s, and so Indian products should appeal to their residents; similarly with East Africa. Thus the Indian Ocean Rim with its huge (and in Africa’s case, rapidly growing) population should be a natural fit for Indian products

* Innovation. This is the hardest part, and it requires a new mindset in education and industry, to take risks and work at the bleeding edge of technology. In general, Indians have been content to replicate others’ innovations at lower cost or do jugaad (which cannot scale up). To do real, disruptive innovation, first of all the services mindset should transition to a product mindset (sorry, Raghuram Rajan). Second, the quality of human capital must be improved. Third, there should be patient risk capital. Fourth, there should be entrepreneurs willing to try risky things. All of these are difficult, but doable.

And what is the end point of this game? Leverage. The ability to compel others to buy from you.

China has demonstrated this through its skill at being a cost-leader in industry after industry, often hollowing out entire nations through means both fair and foul. These means include far-sighted industrial policy including the acquisition of skills, technology, and raw materials, as well as hidden subsidies that support massive scaling, which ends up driving competing firms elsewhere out of business. India can learn a few lessons from them.

One possible lesson is building capabilities, as David Teece of UC Berkeley suggested in 1997, that can span multiple products, sectors and even industries: the classic example is that of Nikon, whose optics strength helps it span industries such as photography, printing, and photolithography for chip manufacturing. Here is an interesting snapshot of China’s capabilities today.

2025 is, in a sense, a point of inflection for India just as the crisis in 1991 was. India had been content to plod along at the Nehruvian Rate of Growth of 2-3%, believing this was all it could achieve, as a ‘wounded civilization’. From that to a 6-7% growth rate is a leap, but it is not enough, nor is it testing the boundaries of what India can accomplish.

1991 was the crisis that turned into an opportunity by accident. 2025 is a crisis that can be carefully and thoughtfully turned into an opportunity.

The Idi Amin syndrome and the 1000 Talents program with AI

There is a key area where an American error may well be a windfall for India. This is based on the currently fashionable H1-B bashing which is really a race-bashing of Indians, and which has been taken up with gusto by certain MAGA folks. Once again, I suspect the baleful influence of Whitehall behind it, but whatever the reason, it looks like Indians are going to have a hard time settling down in the US.

There are over a million Indians on H1-Bs, a large number of them software engineers, let us assume for convenience there are 250,000 of them. Given country caps of exactly 9800 a year, they have no realistic chance of getting a Green Card in the near future, and given the increasingly fraught nature of life there for brown people, they may leave the US, and possibly return to India..

I call this the Idi Amin syndrome. In 1972, the dictator of Uganda went on a rampage against Indian-origin people in his country, and forcibly expelled 80,000 of them, because they were dominating the economy. There were unintended consequences: those who were ejected mostly went to the US and UK, and they have in many cases done well. But Uganda’s economy virtually collapsed.

That’s a salutary experience. I am by no means saying that the US economy would collapse, but am pointing to the resilience of the Indians who were expelled. If, similarly, Trump forces a large number of Indians to return to India, that might well be a case of short-term pain and long-term gain: urvashi-shapam upakaram, as in the Malayalam phrase.

Their return would be akin to what happened in China and Taiwan with their successful effort to attract their diaspora back. The Chinese program was called 1000 Talents, and they scoured the globe for academics and researchers of Chinese origin, and brought them back with attractive incentives and large budgets. They had a major role in energizing the Chinese economy.

Similarly, Taiwan with Hsinchu University attracted high-quality talent, among which was the founder of TSMC, the globally dominant chip giant.

And here is Trump offering to India on a platter at least 100,000 software engineers, especially at a time when generativeAI is decimating low-end jobs everywhere. They can work on some very compelling projects that could revolutionize Indian education, up-skilling and so on, and I am not at liberty to discuss them. Suffice to say that these could turbo-charge the Indian software industry and get it away from mundane, routine body-shopping type jobs.

Conclusion

The Trump tariff tantrum is definitely a short-term problem for India, but it can be turned around, and turned into an opportunity, if only the country plays its cards right and focuses on building long-term comparative advantages and accepting the gift of a mis-step by Trump in geo-economics.

In geo-politics, India and the US need each other to contain China, and so that part, being so obvious, will be taken care of more or less by default.

Thus, overall, the old SWOT analysis: strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. On balance, I am of the opinion that the threats contain in them the germs of opportunities. It is up to Indians to figure out how to take advantage of them. This is your game to win or lose, India!

4150 words, 9 Aug 2025

A version of this essay was published by Deccan Herald at https://www.deccanherald.com/opinion/the-abhimanyu-syndrome-india-and-its-isolation-3650402

Recent events have made it increasingly clear that India is utterly alone. I call this the Abhimanyu Syndrome, in honor of the teenaged Abhimanyu, who only knew how to enter the impregnable Chakravyuha, and who was then murdered, alone, against all Dharmic principles, by several powerful Maharathis.

India's possible rise as an economic and military power is being resisted tooth and nail by the incumbent major powers. This is natural: all 'insurgent' powers face this problem. India's rise will need some paradigm shifts, which may or may not happen.

China's rise was helped by two things: an industrial policy and inadvertent help by the US's managers and Wall Street who were seduced by the short-term appeal of the lower-cost 'China price'.

The ruthless industrial policy is a result of China's civil services being full of engineers who understand the near term. In the long run, it may or may not succeed because of second-order effects such as population implosion, environmental ruin and skewed investment decisions.

The US is now facing decline (and the EU has already begun a steep decline) for a variety of reasons, including natural cycles and the loss of comparative advantage in weaponry.

In this context, I wish I knew what paradigm shift, if any, will propel India to a G3 slot, but the general global churn, new technologies, etc might create an opportunity. In the meantime, India has to struggle alone, against a mass of hostile powers.

I read an article in a Sri Lankan newspaper that painted India as a tyrant, but China as a benevolent friend dispensing largesse. Yes, the same China that has grabbed Hambantota! And it called for a new SAARC, one minus India. This is the kind of propaganda that China and Pakistan are rolling out in the Indian subcontinent.

China has every reason to want to kneecap India, the only Asian power that can (and hopefully will) challenge its hegemonistic pretensions. Even the US doesn't: Obama anointed China as the guardian/manager, if not owner, of 'South Asia'. Spheres of influence, you see.

The US, in general, has been a disappointment. Many Indians expected, after Biden's antics with Yunus in Bangladesh, that Trump would be more in tune with Indian interests, partly because the US and India both need to keep China in check, and Trump wants to move more manufacturing out of China.

But that has clearly not happened. Instead, India has been in Trump's gunsights over trade (although India's surplus is small, and agricultural items that the US wants to sell are a serious no-no for India). Their embrace of Pakistan during and after Operation Sindoor has been inexplicable unless Trump has adopted pure Deepstate policy.

India cannot be a Chinese vassal (although it is in BRICS) and it doesn't want to be an American vassal though it’s in the Quad (its ties with Russia and strategic autonomy are too important). Thus India is squeezed; for instance, the recent threat by some NATO muckity-muck to impose Russia-related sanctions was sinister.

This could be both good and bad. Let’s face it, nobody likes a rising power (see Thucydides Trap). While the Sri Lankan paper glorifies China, let us remember that China has territorial disputes with literally every one of its neighbors, and most of ASEAN is deathly scared of them. That comes from hard power. If SAARC or G20 or somebody is worried about India, that is a good sign that home-grown military power is noticeable.

Everyone complains that India is not loyal to them. BRICS boosters grumble that India is a Western ‘mole’ that is preventing them from toppling the dollar and making the US irrelevant. Conversely, the Anglosphere complains that India is not sufficiently committed to them, as in not toeing their Ukraine line. This is as it should be: multi-alignment means India is not beholden to anybody, but will pursue its selfish interests first and foremost.

This is qualitatively different from the late lamented ‘non-alignment’ of Nehruvian days, which meant everybody disliked India for its moral posturing. Multi-alignment means India will engage with everybody, on its own terms. With the US, for technology and trade. With Russia, for weapons and oil. Even with China, despite China being India’s staunchest enemy, for electronic components. And even with perfidious Britain, as in the just-concluded FTA, which I personally consider pointless.

Thus the splendid isolation is a back-handed compliment: the rest of the world is anticipating the rise of India as a superpower; and superpowers have no friends, only interests. And remember, Abhimanyu died, yes, but his side won overwhelmingly.

780 words, 22 Jul 2025 updated 25 Jul 2025