US President Donald Trump recently imposed substantial tariffs on Indian goods, explicitly in response to India’s continued purchase of Russian oil during the ongoing Ukraine conflict. These penalties, reaching an unprecedented cumulative rate of 50% on targeted Indian exports, have been described by Trump as a response to what his administration has called an “unusual and extraordinary threat” posed by India’s trade relations with Russia. The official rationale for these measures centres on national security and foreign policy priorities and their design is to coerce India into aligning with US policy goals vis-à-vis the Russia-Ukraine war.
The enforcement of these tariffs is notable among other things for its selectivity. While India faces acute economic repercussions, other major importers of Russian oil such as China and Turkey have thus far not been subjected to equivalent sanctions. The impact is also likely to be immediate and severe since almost half of Indian exports to the US, which is in fact India’s most significant export market, now encounter sharply higher costs, threatening widespread disruption in sectors such as textiles, automobile parts, pharmaceuticals, and electronics. Thus the tariffs have provoked a strong diplomatic response from the Government of India, which has characterised the US’s actions as “unfair, unjustified, and unreasonable,” while also asserting its primary responsibility to protect the country’s energy security.
This fracas is reminiscent of US-India relations in the early 1990s regarding the former’s denial of cryogenic engine technology. In this period, the US government actively intervened to block the transfer of cryogenic rocket engines and associated technologies from Russia’s Glavkosmos to ISRO by invoking the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) as justification. The MTCR was established in 1987 and was intended to prevent the proliferation of missile delivery systems capable of carrying weapons of mass destruction. In 1992, citing non-proliferation concerns, the US imposed sanctions on both ISRO and Glavkosmos, effectively stalling a deal that would have allowed India to acquire not only fully assembled engines but also the vital expertise for indigenous production in a much shorter timeframe than what transpired.
The stated US concern was that cryogenic technology could potentially be adapted for intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). However experts had been clear that cryogenic engines are unsuitable for ICBMs because they’re complex, difficult to operate, and can’t be deployed on short notice. In fact, critics as well as historical analyses that followed later have said that the US’s strategic objective was less concerned with preventing missile proliferation and more with restricting advances in India’s ability to launch heavy satellites, thus protecting American and allied commercial and strategic interests in the global space sector.
The response in both eras, economic plus technological coercion, suggests a pattern of American policy: punitive action when India’s sovereign decisions diverge from perceived US security or geoeconomic imperatives. The explicit justifications have also shifted from non-proliferation in the 1990s to support for Ukraine in the present, yet in both cases the US has singled India our for selective enforcement while comparable actions by other states have been allowed to proceed largely unchallenged.
Thus, both actions have produced parallel outcomes. India faced immediate setbacks: export disruptions today; delays in its space launch programme three decades ago. There is an opportunity however. The technology denial in the 1990s catalysed an ambitious indigenous cryogenic engine programme, culminating in landmark achievements for ISRO in the following decades. Similarly, the current trade rift could accelerate India’s efforts to diversify its partnerships and supply chains if it proactively forges strategic trade agreements with emerging and established economies, invests in advanced domestic manufacturing capabilities, incentivises innovation across critical sectors, and fortifies logistical infrastructure.
Diplomatically, however, each episode has strained US-India relations even as their mutual interests have at other times fostered rapprochement. Whenever India’s independent strategic choices appear to challenge core US interests, Washington has thus far used the levers of market access and technology transfers as the means of compulsion. But history suggests that these efforts, rather than yield compliance, could prompt adaptive strategies, whether through indigenous technology development or by recalibrating diplomatic and economic alignments.
Featured image: I don’t know which rocket that is. Credit: Perplexity AI.
Rahul Gandhi is free to voice himself but on the question of the Election Commission “stealing votes”, as he has been claiming to the press, he needs to offer the proof he claims he has right away. By repeatedly claiming the Commission has been “stealing votes” for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), most recently on August 2 and before that on August 1, as well as that his Congress party has proof of this alleged theft yet never actually turning up that proof whether to the Commission or to the courts, Gandhi is acting in bad faith. The effects of his words are likely to keep suspicion of the Commission’s conduct alive even when they may not actually be warranted and to sow in the public sphere doubts about the terms on which the BJP is winning elections.
If the Commission and/or the BJP are really cheating, as Gandhi is implying, duty demands that he and his fellow party members immediately place evidence of that in the public domain, endeavour to stamp out the menace, and agitate for restitutive action.
On August 2, Gandhi said:
“Prime Minister of India is Prime Minister with a very slim majority. If 10-15 seats were rigged, it would have been possible. Although our suspicion is closer to 70, 80, 100 seats. We are going to prove to you in the coming few days how that Lok Sabha election can be rigged and was rigged.”
And on August 1:
“I want to say that the persons in the EC doing this — right from the top to the bottom — we won’t spare. You are working against India and this is treason. Not matter where you are, retired or otherwise, we will find you.” …
He claimed his party had suspicions of irregularities in the Madhya Pradesh Assembly election in 2023 and in the Lok Sabha election last year, and this went further in Maharashtra.
“We believe that vote theft has happened at the State level (in Maharashtra). Voter revision had happened and one crore voters were added. Then we went into detail, and with the EC not helping, decided to dig deep into this. We got our own investigation done, it took six months and what we found is an atom bomb. When it explodes, the EC would have no place to hide anywhere in the country,” he added.
On the same day, Gandhi also said his party would reveal what evidence it has of “outrageous rigging of voter rolls” by the Election Commission of Karnataka on August 5. Congress general secretary K.C. Venugopal also said party members would organise a protest in Bengaluru on the same day. But considering the party has claimed to have evidence of electoral fraud in other State elections as well, the reasons for revealing the evidence as it pertains to Karnataka alone are hard to fathom.
Importantly, such evidence should be conclusive rather than founded on opinion and speculation. This means, for example, dispositive proof of collusion supported by official documents containing the relevant statements. Only evidence of this nature would constitute an “open and shut case” — which Gandhi has said he possesses — in a courtroom, which is the only place where the Commission’s guilt, such as it is, can be determined.
In July 2025, in the context of the special intensive revision of electoral rolls in Bihar, Gandhi and opposition parties alleged that the exercise was aimed at “disenfranchising voters” ahead of the Bihar Assembly elections and accused the Commission and the BJP of seeking to “steal votes”. He also claimed the Commission had been caught “red-handed” stealing votes during this exercise.
Perhaps Gandhi’s first public, high-profile accusation was made at a press conference in February 2025, when he said that the Commission had overlooked substantial voter list inflation in Maharashtra, a surplus of 1.6 million relative to the most recent Census figures (2011), and that more voters had been added to the lists in the five months between the Lok Sabha and Maharashtra Assembly polls than in the preceding five years. He also claimed that this discrepancy had been engineered to favour the BJP and called for a formal investigation. However, The Hindu’s data team was able to analyse Election Commission data to check at least the second of Gandhi’s claims and found that it wasn’t unusual:
The spurt in electors in Maharashtra became a subject of controversy after the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, Rahul Gandhi, raised the issue at a recent press conference. In Maharashtra, between the Lok Sabha polls held on April 19, 2024, and the Assembly elections held on November 20, 2024 — a period of 215 days — there was a net addition of 39.6 lakh electors.
However, between the Assembly elections on October 21, 2019, and the Lok Sabha polls in April 2024 — a period of 1,642 days — there was a net addition of only 32.2 lakh electors. “Why did the Election Commission add more voters in Maharashtra in five months than it did in five years,” Mr. Gandhi asked.
Data show that the net addition of 39.6 lakh electors in 215 days is not unusually high. Between the Lok Sabha polls on April 20, 2004, and the Assembly elections on October 13, 2004 — a period of 176 days — there was a net addition of 29.5 lakh electors. A similar analysis of 2009, 2014, and 2019 shows net additions of 30 lakh, 27.2 lakh, and 11.6 lakh electors, respectively.
In fact, if the increases are expressed as electors added per day, the context becomes clearer. The net addition of 39.6 lakh electors in 215 days amounts to 18,434 net electors added per day. This figure is not a far cry from the 16,782 net electors added per day in the 176 days in 2004. A similar analysis for 2009 and 2014 shows that 16,746 and 14,519 net electors were added per day, respectively.
Last year, Gandhi, along with Congress members and opposition parties, had alleged large-scale manipulation of voter rolls during the Lok Sabha elections, suggesting the Election Commission was actively aiding the BJP in disenfranchising opposition voters. These accusations continued into 2025.
In almost all these instances, the Election Commission has refuted the allegations and denied that it has been engaged in electoral fraud. However, this democratic institution has lost its independent character over the last few years due to its preferential treatment of the BJP, including when preparing election timetables and sanctioning BJP leaders for breaches of the Model Code of Conduct. The BJP has compounded this impression for its part by modifying the process by which Election Commissioners are appointed to magnify the prime minister’s input and by appointing former Commissioners in cushy government positions shortly after their term at the helm has ended. The Commission’s denials thus don’t hold much water.
In fact, its increasingly diminished reputation lends a soft credence to Gandhi’s claims — i.e. that they are not all implausible — and that is precisely why the evidence needs to be available to all electors right away. Otherwise, Gandhi risks injuring his own reputation, and, more importantly, that will only undermine public resistance to the BJP’s efforts to completely ‘capture’ the Election Commission.
The threats to reveal the alleged fraud are further enfeebled by claims that the Commission’s electronic voting machines (EVMs) are illicitly recording more votes for BJP candidates, an allegation that the Congress and other parties have raised vis-à-vis both Assembly and Parliamentary elections. The problems with the claims here are slightly different, and two pronged. First, the alleged mechanism by which EVMs reapportion votes for BJP candidates remain thwartable by the processes the Election Commission has been following, that too with the satisfied participation of representatives from all political parties. Second, not all the technical steps in the process by which the Commission verifies the integrity of its EVMs are interference-proof, however. Yet the Commission has steadfastly refused to submit its devices to independent verification, with the occasional support of a higher court that has failed to appreciate all the methods available to perform these checks without compromising the devices in any way.
Against the backdrop of both allegations — voter-list inflation and EVM-rigging — it is possible Gandhi’s posturing is a form of deterrence, a signal to the BJP that its actions are not passing unwatched, and an attempt to build a Panopticon of public scrutiny of how the Election Commission conducts itself. Yet this can be done without also sowing doubt and while keeping the focus on transparency and propriety, which in fact the democracy has demonstrably lost. In fact, I hope Gandhi isn’t striking the poses he is because these losses are harder to build public support around than “vote theft”.
Right now, Shubhanshu Shukla is on his way back to Earth from the International Space Station. Am I proud he’s been the first Indian up there? I don’t know. It’s not clear.
The whole thing seemed to be stage-managed. Shukla didn’t say anything surprising, nothing that popped. In fact he said exactly what we expected him to say. Nothing more, nothing less.
Fuck controversy. It’s possible to be interesting in new ways all the time without edging into the objectionable. It’s not hard to beat predictability — but there it was for two weeks straight. I wonder if Shukla was fed all his lines. It could’ve been a monumental thing but it feels… droll.
“India’s short on cash.” “India’s short on skills.” “India’s short on liberties.” We’ve heard these refrains as we’ve covered science and space journalism. But it’s been clear for some time now that “India’s short on cash” is a myth.
We’ve written and spoken over and over that Gaganyaan needs better accountability and more proactive communication from ISRO’s Human Space Flight Centre. But it’s also true that it needs even more money than the Rs 20,000 crore it’s already been allocated.
One thing I’ve learnt about the Narendra Modi government is that if it puts its mind to it, if it believes it can extract political mileage from a particular commitment, it will find a way to go all in. So when it doesn’t, the fact that it doesn’t sticks out. It’s a signal that The Thing isn’t a priority.
Looking at the Indian space programme through the same lens can be revealing. Shukla’s whole trip and back was carefully choreographed. There’s been no sense of adventure. Grit is nowhere to be seen.
But between Prime Minister Modi announcing his name in the list of four astronaut-candidates for Gaganyaan’s first crewed flight (currently set for 2027) and today, I know marginally more about Shukla, much less about the other three, and nothing really personal to boot. Just banal stuff.
This isn’t some military campaign we’re talking about, is it? Just checking.
Chethan Kumar at ToI and Jatan Mehta have done everyone a favour: one by reporting extensively on Shukla’s and ISRO’s activities and the other by collecting even the most deeply buried scraps of information from across the internet in one place. The point, however, is that it shouldn’t have come to this. Their work is laborious, made possible by the fact that it’s by far their primary responsibility.
It needed to be much easier than this to find out more about India’s first homegrown astronauts. ISRO itself has been mum, so much so that every new ISRO story is turning out to be an investigative story. The details of Shukla’s exploits needed to be interesting, too. The haven’t been.
So now, Shukla’s returning from the International Space Station. It’s really not clear what one’s expected to be excited about…
There’s no denying that there currently prevails a public culture in India that equates criticism, even well-reasoned, with pooh-poohing. It’s especially pronounced in certain geographies where the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) enjoys majority support as well as vis-à-vis institutions that the subscribers of Hindu politics consider to be ripe for international renown, especially in the eyes of the country’s former colonial masters. The other side of the same cultural coin is the passive encouragement it offers to those who’d play up the feats of Indian enterprises even if they lack substantive evidence to back their claims up. While these tendencies are pronounced in many enterprises, I have encountered them most often in the spaceflight domain.
Through its feats of engineering and administration over the years, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has cultivated a deserved reputation of setting a high bar for itself and meeting them. Its achievements are the reason why India is one of a few countries today with a functionally complete space programme. It operates launch vehicles, conducts spaceflight-related R&D, has facilities to develop as well as track satellites, and maintains data-processing pipeliness to turn the data it collects from space into products usable for industry and academia. It is now embarking on a human spaceflight programme as well. ISRO has also launched interplanetary missions to the moon and Mars, with one destined for Venus in the works. In and of itself the organisation has an enviable legacy. Thus, unsurprisingly, many sections of the Hindutva brigade have latched onto ISRO’s achievements to animate their own propaganda of India’s greatness, both real and imagined.
The surest signs of this adoption are most visible when ISRO missions fail or succeed in unclear ways. The Chandrayaan 2 mission and the Axiom-4 mission respectively are illustrative examples. As if to forestall any allegations that the Chandrayaan 2 mission failed, then ISRO chairman K. Sivam said right after its Vikram lander crashed on the moon that it had been a “98% success”. Chandrayaan 2 was a technology demonstrator and it did successfully demonstrate most of those onboard very well. The “98%” figure, however, was so disproportionate as to suggest Sivan was defending the mission less on its merits than on its ability to fit into reductive narratives of how good ISRO was. (Recall, similarly, when former DCGI V.G. Somani claimed the homegrown Covaxin vaccine was “110% safe” when safety data from its phase III clinical trials weren’t even available.)
On the other hand, even as the Axiom-4 mission was about to kick off, neither ISRO nor the Department of Space (DoS) had articulated what Indian astronaut Shubhanshu Shukla’s presence onboard the mission was expected to achieve. If these details didn’t actually exist before the mission, to participate in which ISRO had paid Axiom Space more than Rs 500 crore, both ISRO and the DoS were effectively keeping the door open to picking a goalpost of their choosing to kick the ball through as the mission progressed. If they did have these details but had elected to not share them, their (in)actions raised — or ought to have — difficult questions about the terms on which these organisations believed they were accountable in a democratic country. Either way, the success of the Axiom-4 mission vis-à-vis Shukla’s participation was something of an empty vessel: a ready receptacle for any narrative that could be placed inside ex post facto.
At the same time, raising this question has often been construed in the public domain, but especially on social media platforms, in response to arguments presented in the news, and in conversations among people interested in Indian spaceflight, as naysaying Shukla’s activities altogether. By all means let’s celebrate Shukla’s and by extension India’s ‘citius, altius, fortius’ moment in human spaceflight; the question is: what didn’t ISRO/DoS share before Axiom-4 lifted off and why? (Note that what journalists have been reporting since liftoff, while valuable, isn’t the answer to the question posed here.) While it’s tempting to think this pinched communication is a strategy developed by the powers that be to cope with insensitive reporting in the press, doing so would also ignore the political capture institutions like ISRO have already suffered and which ISRO arguably has as well, during and after Sivan’s term as chairman.
For just two examples of institutions that have historically enjoyed a popularity comparable in both scope and flavour to that of ISRO, consider India’s cricket administration and the Election Commission. During the 2024 men’s T20 World Cup that India eventually won, the Indian team had the least amount of travel and the most foreknowledge on the ground it was to play its semifinal game on. At the 2023 men’s ODI World Cup, too, India played all its matches on Sundays, ensuring the highest attendance for its own contests rather than be able to share that opportunity with all teams. The tournament is intended to be a celebration of the sport after all. For added measure, police personnel were also deployed at various stadia to take away spectators’ placards and flags in support of Pakistan in matches featuring the Pakistani team. The stage management of both World Cups only lessened, rather than heightened, the Indian team’s victories.
It’s been a similar story with the Election Commission of India, which has of late come under repeated attack from the Indian National Congress party and some of its allies for allegedly rigging their electronic voting machines and subsequently entire elections in favour of the BJP. While the Congress has failed to submit the extraordinary evidence required to support these extraordinary claims, doubts about the ECI’s integrity have spread anyway because there are other, more overt ways in which the once-independent institution of Indian democracy favours the BJP — including scheduling elections according to the availability of party supremo Narendra Modi to speak at rallies.
Recently, a more obscure but nonetheless pertinent controversy erupted in some circles when in an NDTV report incumbent ISRO chairman V. Narayanan seemed to suggest that SpaceX called one of the attempts to launch Axiom-4 off because his team at ISRO had insisted that the company thoroughly check its rocket for bugs. The incident followed SpaceX engineers spotting a leak on the rocket. The point of egregiousness here is that while SpaceX had built and flown that very type of rocket hundreds of times, Narayanan and ambiguous wording in the NDTV report made it out to be that SpaceX would have flown the rocket if not for ISRO’s insistence. What’s more likely to have happened is NASA and SpaceX engineers would have consulted ISRO as they would have consulted the other agencies involved in the flight — ESA, HUNOR, and Axiom Space — about their stand, and the ISRO team on its turn would have clarified its position: that SpaceX recheck the rocket before the next launch attempt. However, the narrative “if not for ISRO, SpaceX would’ve flown a bad rocket” took flight anyway.
Evidently these are not isolated incidents. The last three ISRO chairmen — Sivan, Somanath, and now Narayanan — have progressively curtailed the flow of information from the organisation to the press even as they have maintained a steady pro-Hindutva, pro-establishment rhetoric. All three leaders have also only served at ISRO’s helm when the BJP was in power at the Centre, wielding its tendency to centralise power by, among others, centralising the permissions to speak freely. Some enterprising journalists like Chethan Kumar and T.S. Subramanian and activists like r/Ohsin and X.com/@SolidBoosters have thus far kept the space establishment from resembling a black hole. But the overarching strategy is as simple as it is devious: while critical arguments become preoccupied by whataboutery and fending off misguided accusations of neocolonialist thinking (“why should we measure an ISRO mission’s success the way NASA measures its missions’ successes?”), unconditional expressions of support and adulation spread freely through our shared communication networks. This can only keep up a false veil of greatness that crumbles the moment it brooks legitimate criticism, becoming desperate for yet another veil to replace itself.
But even that is beside the point: to echo the philosopher Bruno Latour, when criticism is blocked from attending to something we have all laboured to build, that something is deprived of the “care and caution” it needs to grow, to no longer be fragile. Yet that’s exactly what the Indian space programme risks becoming today. Here’s a brand new case in point, from the tweets that prompted this post: according to an RTI query filed by @SolidBoosters, India’s homegrown NavIC satellite navigation constellation is just one clock failure away from “complete operational collapse”. The issue appears to be ISRO’s subpar launch cadence and the consequently sluggish replacement of clocks that have already failed.
6/6 Root Cause Analysis for atomic clock failures has been completed but classified under RTI Act Section 8 as vital technical information. Meanwhile public transparency is limited while the constellation continues degrading. #NavIC#ISRO#RTI
Granted, rushed critiques and critiques designed to sting more than guide can only be expected to elicit defensive posturing. But to minimise one’s exposure to all criticism altogether, especially those from learned quarters and conveyed in respectful language, is to deprive oneself of the pressure and the drive to solve the right problems in the right ways, both drawing from and adding to India’s democratic fabric. The end results are public speeches and commentary that are increasingly removed from reality as well as, more importantly, thicker walls between criticism and The Thing it strives to nurture.
NASA/SpaceX/Axiom will make their next attempt to launch the Axiom-4 mission to the International Space Station on June 11. Axiom Space’s tagline for the mission is “Realizing the Return”, alluding to three of the mission’s four crew members, including India’s Shubhanshu Shukla, will be taking their respective countries back to orbit after at least four decades (figuratively speaking).
Shukla of course has a greater mission to look forward to beyond Axiom-4: ISRO had purchased Shukla’s seat on the flight for a princely Rs 548 crore reportedly to expose him to the operational aspects of a human spaceflight mission ahead of Gaganyaan’s first crewed flight in 2027. So obviously there’s been a lot of hoopla over the Axiom-4 launch in India on TV channels and social media platforms.
Of course, the energy levels aren’t anywhere near what they were for Chandrayaan-3 and that’s good. In fact I’m also curious why there’s any energy vis-a-vis Shukla’s flight at all, at least beyond the nationalist circles. Axiom-4 is all NASA, Axiom, and SpaceX. Following Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s state visit to the US in early 2023, the White House issued a statement in which it said the two countries would strengthen “cooperation on human spaceflight, including establishing exchanges that will include advanced training for an Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO)/Department of Space astronaut at NASA Johnson Space Center”.
This astronaut turned out to be Shukla, and he will be joined by Prashant Nair — another of the four astronaut-candidates — as one of the two back-up crew members on Axiom-4. However, I don’t understand why this required Prime Minister Modi to meet US President Joe Biden. ISRO could have set Shukla and Nair up with the same opportunity by directly engaging with NASA, the way its Human Space Flight Centre did with Russia’s Glavcosmos in 2019 itself. More importantly, it’s not clear how Shukla’s participation in the Axiom-4 mission entails “cooperation on human spaceflight” between the US and India, which many commentators in India have been billing it as.
India has done nothing here other than purchase the seat on Axiom Space’s flight and fly Shukla and Nair over. In the same vein neither ISRO nor the overarching Department of Space, which is overseeing Gaganyaan’s development, have said what exactly Shukla (and Nair) stand to learn from Axiom-4, i.e. the justification for spending Rs 548 crore of the people’s money and how this particular mission was judged to be the best way to acquire the skills and knowledge Shukla (and Nair) reputedly will.
I’ve been following spaceflight news as a journalist as well as have held managerial jobs for a long time now to understand that Axiom-4 represents the sort of opportunity where one is very likely to learn something if one becomes involved and that Axiom-4 offers something to learn at all because of the articles I’ve read and lectures I’ve heard about why NASA and Roscosmos human spaceflight protocols are the way they are.
However, what exactly is it that the two astronaut-candidates will learn that isn’t post facto (so that there is a rationale for the Rs 548 crore), why was it deemed important for them to have to learn that (and who deemed it so), how will they apply it to Gaganyaan, and how exactly does the Axiom-4 mission represent India-US “cooperation”?
India’s space establishment hasn’t provided the answers, and worse yet seems to be under the impression that they’re not necessary to provide. The public narrative at this time is focused on Shukla and how his time has come. I sincerely hope the money represented more than a simple purchase, and I’m disappointed that it’s come down to hope to make sense of ISRO’s and the Department of Space’s decisions.
I recently came across an initiative called “Industrial47”. Someone had shared a link to it on a group I’m part of, and when its card loaded, the image was of a nuclear weapon going off.
I found on LinkedIn that “Industrial47” is a fund with the aim of “backing the forerunners of India’s Industrial Revolution”. I must say it’s quite dubious to read about a country-specific “industrial revolution” more than two centuries into a global post-industrial era. But maybe historical accuracy isn’t the point here so much as the josh elicited by those words. By this time, another member of the group had pointed out that all of India’s nuclear tests had been underground and that the one in the image depicts an American test.
Source: WhatsApp
Where technology meets people
According to its official website, Industrial47 currently funds companies developing technologies of the future. Why then did it have the image of a nuclear weapon going off? And why is there to be an Indian “industrial revolution”? *scrolls down the website* Here’s an answer — what looks like a mission statement. Let me annotate it.
We believe India’s moment is now.
Okay.
Our engineers aren’t just coding software anymore – they’re designing satellites, building robots, revolutionising agriculture, reimagining defence and rethinking energy.
There are five items listed here. The first two are factually accurate, the last two are unfalsifiable, and the third one is misleading. There’s no agricultural revolution. Let’s talk when it happens.
They’re tackling challenges that will define the next century of human progress.
Okay.
The problems we solve here will ripple across eons. The companies we build here will transform billions of lives.
The technologies we pioneer here will reshape what’s possible.
It’s not clear where “here” is, but okay. Also there’s a grammatical problem: “The problems we solve here will ripple across eons” seems to say the problems will ripple across eons, not the solutions.
This is more than a story of one nation’s rise. This is about humanity’s next giant leap.
…
When software meets steel, when code meets craft, when bits meet atoms – therein the future is forged.
And Industrial India will build out the next century.
See, now there’s a problem.
Since listening to a talk by Gita Chadha in 2020, I’ve been wary of the idea of “genius”. Among other things, I’ve noticed that there aren’t nearly as many “geniuses” in the social sciences and humanities as there are in the natural sciences. All these enterprises are littered with very difficult problems waiting to be solved but the idea of “genius” — as and when it is invoked — seems to apply only to those in the natural sciences. Even in the popular imagination, a “child prodigy” is expected to become a gifted mathematician or scientist, not a gifted poet or anthropologist. Great intellectual ability is preordained to be devoted to problems in science. Sometimes I amuse myself with the idea that problems in the social sciences and humanities simply overwhelm this “genius”.*
If the “future” of a country is to be “forged” at the moment “when software meets steel, when code meets craft, when bits meet atoms”, and without room for where technologies meet people — which technologies, which people, when, how — it sounds like a project that expects the socio-economic and the political pieces of the “future” to fall in place in accordance with the engineering goals alone.
You’re reading it wrong, you say. The fund only claims the future will also be forged in the solutions to engineering problems. We shouldn’t overlook these problems. I reply: Are you sure? Because I don’t see a fund to solve problems like increasing people’s trust in EVMs, improving MSPs for farmers or ensuring machines, not people, clean sewers (and I mean everywhere and in practice, not just in isolated pilot projects). How about putting the best minds together to work on the problem of developing a socio-political ideology to ultimately restore a politics of dignity and common welfare? It’s nasty, arduous, wicked work but it’s also the ultimate challenge — one that, if it succeeds, would obviate the need for most of these other interventions. But if you’d rather begin with a specific one: did you know there still isn’t a smokeless stove for rural India’s millions, leaving the country the world’s largest consumer of fuelwood for household use? Here’s a summary of Shankar Nair’s pertinent comment in The Hindu in February 2023 by ChatGPT; I hope it encourages you to read the whole thing:
The launch of Indian Oil Corporation’s solar cook-stove at India Energy Week 2023 casts a harsh light on India’s ongoing efforts to transform household energy consumption. While promoted as a low-carbon innovation poised to reach three crore households and save costs, its steep price of ₹15,000 raises concerns about accessibility. This initiative echoes past efforts like the National Physical Laboratory’s solar cooker in the 1950s and the 1980s’ “improved chulhas” program, both of which failed due to poor design, high costs, and ineffective implementation despite government subsidies. The historical parallels underscore a recurring gap between state-led energy innovations and practical adoption, as well as the lack of focus on improving rural incomes, which strongly influence energy choices.
This post benefited from feedback from Srividya Tadepalli.
Social ignorance is social harm
Projects that offer new technological solutions these days to old problems almost never account for their social dimensions. They are instead left to the state. Isn’t this cynical? Last year’s controversy about using satellite data to track farm fires offers another good example — as does the overarching endeavour to stamp these fires out. When a new project starts up, it may advance the technology, have some companies make money, and they all move on. The socio-political and socio-economic needles almost never move. The problem of scale matters as well because of the financial implications inherent to the economic relationships between people and their technologies. At this stage of development, it is hard to give every new scheme and fund the benefit of the doubt when it ignores the question of minimising social harm and maximising social welfare. In fact, it seems like an expedient exclusion.**
Air-purifiers come to mind. Researchers have found links between air pollution on one hand and biological and psychological development on the other. (Update, 9.10 am on January 15, 2024: Nature has just published a news feature entitled ‘Air pollution and brain damage: what the science says’.) In New Delhi (or any city with foul air for that matter), clean air is becoming increasingly vouchsafed for those with air-purifiers, which cost a good deal of money, require constant power supply, and of course owners that can pay these bills. The better and the more numerous the air-purifiers around you, the cleaner the air around you is, and the lower your risk of impaired biological and/or psychological development. Over time, people that can afford these living conditions — typically the “upper class” and, almost inevitably, “upper caste” lot — accumulate the benefits of clean air whereas those that can’t accumulate the ill-effects, and thus the gap between their fortunes slowly but inexorably widens. Every time the AQI crosses some headline-worthy threshold, New Delhi breaks out the “smog towers” and the “mist cannons” and home-appliance companies advertise newfangled air-conditioners and air-purifiers whereas state-led attempts to move towards a future in which no one needs air-purifiers flop. If I’m cynical to doubt initiatives like Industrial47, what would you call this?
Technologisation isn’t implicitly virtuous: to succeed in the fullest sense of improving the quality of life of all Indians, it needs specific social and political conditions as well. “1947 marked our political independence, 2047 will mark our technological sovereignty,” Rahul Seth, the person behind the Industrial47 fund and “an Infantry Officer with the Indian Army Reserves” with the rank of major, wrote in a LinkedIn post (whose card displayed the nuke test). His comment and its rapturous reception assume a clean break between political and technological achievement when in fact there’s no such thing.
Indeed, the comment is reminiscent of China’s rise as a “scientific superpower”. Part of this supposed achievement is founded on the slew of sophisticated and expensive scientific experiments it has executed, often in collaboration with other countries; its accelerating space programme; and its rapid industrialisation of the energy sector. The country is now planning to build the world’s largest hydroelectric-power dam on the Yarlung Tsangpo river, which becomes the Brahmaputra when it subsequently enters India. Until this new dam takes shape, China’s Three Gorges dam will continue to hold the torch of physical magnitude. I hope by now the dangers of building dams in the Himalaya should be clear enough to discourage unbridled enthusiasm for projects of this nature. This said, many have marvelled at the Three Gorges dam and what they claim it says about China’s ability to plan and execute such projects: as if flawlessly.
But the country’s surveillance and censorship apparatus hampers us from knowing how people on the ground suffered as they were forced to make way for the monstrous facility. Attesting to such concerns are anecdotes that have managed to escape plus informed scholarship (see here and here, for example). Frankly, I prefer the amount of friction local movements in India have brought to bear on new “development” projects in the country. Friction is good: it ensures project proponents think twice about what they’re doing if they already haven’t. And increasingly often, they haven’t, and why should they when the current national government seems to be doing its damnedest to dilute the friction? The LinkedIn post goes: “You can be the right person, in the right place, at the right time – and yet have a few key pieces missing. Leonardo da Vinci had Lorenzo de’ Medici. Walchand Hirachand had the Kingdom of Mysore. Chandragupta Maurya had Chanakya.”* To this I’d add: India once had friction, then squandered it.
Source: Google search
When do we become scared?
The quip about “technological sovereignty” rankles in this regard. On any day ‘sovereignty’ is a powerful word, not one to be invoked in vain. Here, the term fantasises a future in which technology reigns supreme, but its framing also leaves open the question of India’s place in the comity of nations, which the country has worked hard to attain, continues to build on even today, and will for the foreseeable future. Recall that obnoxious piece on NASA Watch where a former JPL science-worker called NASA’s decision to downsize JPL’s workforce — due in part to budget overruns by the Mars Sample Return mission — the “fall of a civilisation”. It was reckless fear-mongering: among other things, NASA, and the US by extension, are currently more beneficiaries of an international collaboration than patrons of the spacefaring world. “In this milieu, harping on sole leadership because it’s the ‘American way’,” as the science-worker insisted it was, “is distasteful” (source). In the same vein, consider the example of ISRO’s forthcoming space station and Indian-on-the-moon plans. Its scientists and engineers are working hard but what are they working towards? Prime Minister Narendra Modi issued orders from on high to ISRO to build the ‘Bharatiya Antariksh Station’ by year X and land an Indian on the moon by year Y. And then what? We wait for the next diktat?
Imagine a future 50 years from now when it’s possible there are a few space stations in orbit around Earth and maybe even the moon, and when it’s plausibly (and relatively) more affordable, and not just in economic terms, to send people to stay and work there than to build a station of one’s own. Imagine if India owned and operated one of these stations instead of Indians having to lease time on another, you say. I reply: Sounds good, but where’s the cost-benefit analysis to this plan? Because unless you can demonstrate the benefit, we’re riding the coattails of speculation here and, importantly, you’re motivated by little more than the idea of Indian leadership rather than a proof of leadership de facto.
It’s reminiscent in turn of the International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy in 1955: it was chaired by Homi Bhabha, a representative from India, then a country that didn’t have nuclear power of its own. Conferences are not countries, you say. And leadership doesn’t demand “steel”, “craft” or “atoms”, I reply. This is in fact what the comity of nations allows us: leadership in various forms, and freedom from the tunnel vision that condemns the country to just one. The aspiration to “technological sovereignty” rankles specifically because, taken together, it offers one pointless pinnacle at the expense of others, and without the requisite justification of its presumed supremacy.
The image of the nuclear weapon slips back into view. It’s from a promotional video in Seth’s LinkedIn post. It opens with a staccato montage of the Indian flag atop a temple tower, atop a mountain (Kargil?), atop the Red Fort, atop a glacier (Siachen?), and atop the moon.*** Perhaps the fund’s ultimate priority is national security, yet “technological sovereignty” implies even greater ambitions — as do other visuals in the video**** and the enterprises Industrial47 has already invested in. National security also exists today in a baleful avatar. Rather than inculcate something the armed forces deem worth fighting for, the government’s narratives have often attempted to cast soldiers’ “spirit and courage” themselves to be the objects of desire, the thing citizens at large must prove they deserve. The government has also invoked national security as a spectre, bolstered by periodic allegations of threats to Hindus, disinformation about the intentions of Muslims, and in general the communalisation of public life, to deny requests under the RTI Act about information as benign as the designs of scientific spacecraft. Unspecific appeals to national security have also become the basis for jailing students and academics for indefinite periods of time, expel foreign journalists, rebuke foreign governments’ comments on the country’s “internal affairs”, and deny the findings of international democracy and welfare research organisations. If this is national security, I sincerely dread a deeply technologised form.
It’s just a video, you say, and you’re seeing meaning that isn’t there. Most of you must’ve watched Oppenheimer by now but let me call your attention to something Leona Woods asked Enrico Fermi after the world’s first nuclear reactor went critical: “When do we become scared?” Call it the naïvety of eggheads or political premeditation, Oppenheimer et al. had control of the Bomb until suddenly they didn’t. Its very existence reshaped the world order. Whether or not it actually went off was secondary. This is scope creep: when the parameters of a project are changing so slowly as to not be threatening, until one day you realise they’ve crossed some threshold, an unforeseen tipping point, and significantly altered the scope of the project. You thought you had a hand on the wheel, and maybe you did, but the car’s almost imperceptible drift to the right now has you endangering oncoming traffic, and yourself, on the other lane. Call it pithy, call it a cliché, but science and the technologies that follow need a hand on the wheel to adjust the course of their fantasies every now and then instead of going with the flow. Politics needs your other hand on another wheel to do the same thing, considering science is already a reason of state in India. Otherwise, we’re left staring at “technological sovereignty”.
Or maybe these are all just words trading in josh on an investment fund’s webpage — although it does alert us to one particular plausibility and renders the words more potent: “The problems we solve here will ripple across eons. The companies we build here will transform billions of lives. The technologies we pioneer here will reshape what’s possible.” When do we become scared? I don’t know, but when you do, don’t ignore it. That’s all I’m asking.
* “Leonardo da Vinci had Lorenzo de’ Medici” and “Walchand Hirachand had the Kingdom of Mysore” — and of course a wider socio-political environment that they navigated as well, but this aside: notice the distinctive singularity of “genius”, its manifestation with problems amenable to being solved by individuals, often working alone, as was once the case in some of the sciences but hasn’t been so for more than a century — and as has more rarely been the case in the social sphere, virtually by definition.
** I can seem like a habitual naysayer but I assure you I’m not. I can’t get onboard with new technology + business ideas if they’re ill-conceived or if their social and political implications haven’t been thought through. If I keep saying ‘no’, it’s because I’m being met with a continuous stream of half-baked ideas. I have no obligation to put up with one every now and then.
*** The video includes footage from Associated Press. I hope it was licensed properly.
**** The video’s theme seems to be masculine middle-class fever dream. The scenes of its montage go space, space, sport, space, cricket, space, EV, sport, sport, a CEO, software code, sport, a CEO, a CEO, automation, an award, music, the stock market, Rajpath, military, Taj Mahal, IT, IT, a CEO, a CEO, space, space, mountains, tigers, IISc, IISc, metallurgy, military, Mahabharat on DD, space, some nuke test, polio vaccine, Shah Rukh Khan, Modi performing aarthi like a priest, AR Rahman, cricket, military, military, a CEO, automation, the “shayari jugalbandi” in Parliament, CV Raman, an Amul ad, military, that nuke test, military, military, Parle G biscuit dipped in tea, military, metallurgy, military, space, and finally Nehru hoisting the flag in front of a crowd of thousands.
Sharda Ugra has a sharp piece out in the Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack 2024 laying bare the ways in which the BJP hijacked the 2023 ODI Cricket World Cup via the BCCI, whose secretary Jay Shah is the son of Union home minister Amit Shah. The Reddit thread on the article has a link to a full archival copy.
It was clear to everyone the World Cup had been stage-managed by the BCCI; as I wrote when it concluded, just a few of the symptoms of the BJP’s interference were that Sunday games had been reserved for India, many tickets were vouchsafed for government officials or to bodies with ties to such officials, police personnel were present in the stands for many games, snatching away placards with shows of support for Pakistan; many spectators (but not all, and not everywhere) often chanted “jai shri Ram” — the BJP’s “call to arms”, as Ugra put it — in unison; Air Force jets flew past the Modi stadium named for Prime Minister Narendra (even though he’s alive) on the day of the finals, which only the government has the power to arrange; the man himself elected to bunk the game once it started to become clear India would lose it; and throughout the tournament the game’s broadcaster was fixated on showing visuals of celebrities, including BJP leaders and supporters, in the stands when they weren’t of the game itself.
Together with releasing the tournament schedule late, all-but-accidental delays in clearing visas for Pakistani and Pakistan-affiliated cricketers and journalists, suppressing the sale of merchandise affiliated with the Pakistani and Bangladeshi cricket teams, and DJs playing songs like “Ram Siya Ram” and “India jeetega” during India games, the BJP’s hyper-nationalist hand was in plain sight, especially to those who knew what to look for. Many of these feats had been foreshadowed during the 2022 Asia Cup, when Star Sports and Pepsi had joined in on the fun. To these incursions, Ugra’s essay has added something more in-your-face, and obnoxious for it:
… three independent sources — one each from the team, the ICC and the BCCI — have confirmed the existence of an all-orange uniform, which was presented to the team as an alternative two days before the [India-Pakistan] game. They had already been given a new training kit — an orange shirt and dark trousers — a week before their first fixture. When the all-orange kit arrived in the dressing-room, the players looked nonplussed, according to an insider. Here, the story split into two versions. One, out first, said the uniform was rejected because it “looks like Holland”. The other had the Indian cricketers saying to each other: “This is not on… We won’t do it… It is disrespectful to some of the members of the team” [referring to Mohammed Shami and Mohammed Siraj].
That this was an ICC tournament had become moot by this point, with the BJP-BCCI combine subsuming or just disregarding too many of its rules and tenets for the international body to matter. The BJP sought to have a literal saffron-versus-green contest on the ground, replete with provocative music and police presence — not to mention also packing the stands with people who booed Pakistani players as they walked in/out — and the BCCI obliged. The only reason this doesn’t seem to have succeeded was either an unfavourable comparison to the Dutch circket jersey — which I’m sure the BJP and/or the BCCI would have noticed beforehand — or that the players didn’t want to put it on. According to Ugra, an orange or a blue-orange jersey was on for a UNICEF event called “One Day for Children”, and the corresponding match was to be an India-Sri Lanka fixture three weeks after the match against Pakistan; there, India wore its traditional blue, presumably the BCCI had stopped insisting on the saffron option.
But what rankles more isn’t that the ICC folded so easily (Ugra: “The ICC demonstrated neither the nous nor the spine to resist the takeover”) but that the BCCI, and the BJP behind it, laboured all the time as if there would be no resistance to their actions. Because, clearly, the two things that seemingly didn’t go the BJP’s way were the result of two minimal displays of effective resistance: the first when “Young Indians among the ICC volunteers eventually had [“Ram Siya Ram”] removed from the playlist for the rest of the tournament”, and the second when the Indian men’s team refused to don the saffron tees and trousers.
The ICC is a faraway body, as much undermined by the Indian cricketing body’s considerable wealth and political influence in the country as by the BJP’s now well-known tactic to take advantage of every little administrative loophole, leeway or liberty to get what it wants. The latter alone is reason enough to not expect more from the ICC, at least not without being exposed a few times to the demands of the adversarial posture engaging with the BCCI merits. Instead, the BCCI’s capitulation — completed in 2019, when Jay Shah became its secretary — and its organisational strategies in the Asia Cup and the World Cup cement the conclusion that it cares nothing for rituals and traditions in service of the spirit of the game. There is no public-spiritedness, only party-spiritedness.
And just as the BJP wins its third term to form the national goverbment, the T20 World Cup will begin.
Featured image: A surfeit of India flags among spectators of the India versus South Africa match at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, 2015. Credit: visitmelbourne, CC BY 2.0.
From ‘SC declines Ramdev, Patanjali apology; expresses concern over FMCGs taking gullible consumers ‘up and down the garden path’’, The Hindu, April 10, 2024:
The Supreme Court has refused to accept the unconditional apology from Patanjali co-founder Baba Ramdev and managing director Acharya Balkrishna for advertising medical products in violation of giving an undertaking in the apex court in November 2023 prohibiting the self-styled yoga guru. … Justices Hima Kohli and Ahsanuddin Amanullah told senior advocate Mukul Rohatgi that Mr. Ramdev has apologised only after being caught on the back foot. His violations of the undertaking to the court was deliberate and willful, they said. The SC recorded its dissatisfaction with the apology tendered by proposed contemnors Patanjali, Mr. Balkrishna and Mr. Ramdev, and posted the contempt of court case on April 16.
… The Bench also turned its ire on the Uttarakhand State Licensing Authority for “twiddling their thumbs” and doing nothing to prevent the publications and advertisements. “Why should we not come down like a ton of bricks on your officers? They have been fillibustering,” Justice Kohli said. The court said the assurances of the State Licensing Authority and the apology of the proposed contemnors are not worth the paper they are written on.
A very emotionally gratifying turn of events, but perhaps not as gratifying as they might have been had they transpired at the government’s hands when Patanjali was issuing its advertisements of pseudoscience-backed COVID-19 cures during the pandemic. Or if the Supreme Court had proceeded to actually hold the men in contempt instead of making a slew of observations and setting a date for another hearing. Still, something to cheer for and occasion to reserve some hope for the April 16 session.
But in matters involving Ramdev and Patanjali Ayurved, many ministers of the current government ought to be pulled up as well, including former Union health minister Harsh Vardhan, Union micro, small, and medium enterprises minister Nitin Gadkari, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Modi’s governance and policies both written and unwritten enabled Patanjali’s charlatanry while messrs Vardhan and Gadkari were present at an event in February 2021 when Patanjali launched a product it claimed could cure COVID-19, with Vardhan – who was health minister then – speaking in favour of people buying and using the unproven thing.
I think the Supreme Court’s inclination to hold Ramdev et al. in contempt should extend to Vardhan as well because his presence at the event conferred a sheen of legitimacy on the product but also because of a specific bit of theatrics he pulled in May the same year involving Ramdev and former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Ramdev apologising because that’s more politically convenient rather than because he thinks he screwed up isn’t new. In that May, he’d called evidence-based medicine “stupid” and alleged such medicine had killed more people than the virus itself. After some virulent public backlash, Vardhan wrote a really polite letter to Ramdev asking him to apologise, and Ramdev obliged.
But just the previous month, in April 2021, Manmohan Singh had written a letter to Modi suggesting a few courses of action to improve India’s response to the virus’s spread. Its contents were perfectly reasonable, yet Vardhan responded to it accusing Singh of spreading “vaccine hesitancy” and alleging Congress-ruled states were responsible for fanning India’s deadly second wave of COVID-19 infections (in 2021). These were all ridiculous assertions. But equally importantly, his lashing out stood in stark contrast to his letter to Ramdev: respect for the self-styled godman and businessman whose company was attempting to corner the market for COVID-19 cures with untested, pseudo-Ayurvedic froth versus unhinged rhetoric for a well-regarded economist and statesman.
For this alone, Vardhan deserves the “ton of bricks” the Supreme Court is waiting with.
On March 27, 2019, the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) conducted ‘Mission Shakti’: India’s first anti-satellite (ASAT) missile test. After the event, the national broadcaster broadcast an hour-long speech by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Since the Election Commission’s restrictions on poll candidates’ screen time was in effect ahead of the Lok Sabha polls that year, some of us surmised the test had been timed to allow Modi a reason to get on TV without explicitly violating the rules.
Yesterday, on March 11, the DRDO conducted a test of its new Agni 5 missile in its MIRV – short for ‘multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles’ – configuration, a powerful defence technology that allows a single suborbital missile to deliver multiple warheads (possibly nuclear) to strike different targets. This time, however, the Commission’s restrictions are not yet in effect nor has Modi tried to deliver a speech ostensibly about the test, although he has been in Pokhran today talking about ‘Bharat Shakti’, which I believe is the name of India’s programme for self-sufficiency in defence.
Surely this is some kind of pre-election muscle-flexing bluster? After the first Agni V test in April 2012, DRDO’s then chief controller of missiles Avinash Chander told Business Standard: “The primary modules of MIRV are in an advanced stage of development. Realisation and integration of them into a weapon is just a question of threat perceptions and the need as it arises.” This ‘need’ seems to be signalling to both agam and puram actors just before the national elections. It holds for the ASAT in March 2019 as well, when there was reason to believe India was ready with ASAT capability during Manmohan Singh’s tenure as prime minister, if not earlier.
In the broader view, China tested both MIRV and ASAT missiles before India, most recently in 2017 (DF-41 missile) and in 2007, respectively, notwithstanding some claims in 2008 that it was modifying its submarine-launched JL-2 MIRV to have ASAT capabilities as well. The post-test bluster by BJP leaders on both occasions was directed at China. What will India test come March 2029, I wonder.
When a user asked, “Is modi a fascist”, Gemini AI responded that Mr. Modi had “been accused of implementing policies that some experts have characterized as fascist”.
“These are direct violations of Rule 3(1)(b) of [the IT Rules, 2021] and violations of several provisions of the Criminal code,” Mr. Chandrasekhar said on X, formerly Twitter. His sharp reaction reveals a fault line between the Indian government’s hands-off approach to AI research, and tech giants’ AI platforms which are keen to train their models quickly with the general public, opening them up to embarrassing confrontations with political leaders.
Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
‘Gemini AI’s reply to query, ‘is Modi a fascist’, violates IT Rules: Union Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar’, The Hindu, February 23, 2024
We all understand why this is an asinine statement by the IT minister, motivated possibly by having to fuel a news cycle to distract from something else. Importantly, the people who demonstrated and popularised the habit of twisting statements out of context — e.g. reacting to “experts have called his policies fascist” as if it meant “he is fascist” — are now seemingly duty-bound to keep track of and react to each one of these opportunities in the appropriate way. Woe betide them if they slip: their own foot-soldiers might turn on them!
