We have to safeguard our ideology, and the world trusts us. The blunt reply to Trump that Bharat will not do an iota of compromise on the agriculture sector needs equal celebration as that of Operation Sindoor.  It’s time to chant again: Jai Jawan Jai Kisan. — Alok Singh

Food security, energy security, and defense security are the core for a nation’s sustainable development. The sustainability itself incorporates constraint-free and self-reliant decisions that formulate the public policy. The post-independence public policy of our nation, which the planning commissions dissipated, focused more on the non-agriculture sector, while that of China focused more on agriculture. We overlooked the fact that technology has a limited shelf life during those days. Meanwhile, the Chinese worked to strengthen their agriculture sector, and they understood the cascading effect of the agriculture sector on the non-agriculture sector. The difference between Bharat and China during the 1950s was the same as the difference between the top-down and bottom-up approaches.

Bhartiya philosophy believes that in daily life, monetary wealth is just one among many forms of wealth. The Trump Tariff is the result of many short-term, mid-term, and long-term narratives that are built around the vision of Making America Great Again (MAGA). The MAGA itself reflects that they are not so great today. Their greatness is in danger.  The macroeconomic parameters and the composition of American debt vis-a-vis the American GDP speak loudly. Their debt is almost 124 percent of their nominal GDP. The evergreening nature of debt for consumption has created fault lines in American life. The monetary design of wealth creation and credit-based consumption is unsustainable. This lukewarm tendency has become quite hot to burn the Americans. 

There were proponents of a policy that polluting industries should be located outside the United States to ensure the world’s superpower maintains its air quality, water quality, and environmental standards, thereby providing its citizens with the best possible environment. They believed and encouraged the location of their industries in the so-called underdeveloped countries, or the third world countries, or the countries that supplied cheap labour. It was all well planned. The assumptions of their plans are failing them today.

Moreover, the owners of American companies located outside America, apart from policy support in their domestic countries, saw business sense in locating their polluting factories closer to their customers, i.e., China and Bharat. Americans retained their power plants not because of hedging the energy sector but because of the absence of a power grid to transport electricity from China or Bharat to the American mainland. The affordable electricity storage technology is still in the nascent phase. The electricity production technology is such that once produced, it has either to be consumed or discarded. It is one of the few products with an instant shelf life, as its storage and preservation are very costly.

Apart from the troubling trade deficit with China and Bharat, the Americans are accepting that the distance of the polluting units alone does not dictate environmental and climate change. The speed of the ecological damage can be reduced, but the damage itself can’t be killed. Its magnitude can vary. The technology control, like the factory control, is also failing the Americans.

The survival of the Russians, despite being isolated from SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication), and the emergence of alternatives like the BRICS currency led the Americans to realize that the American Dollar, as the universal transaction currency, cannot sustain them for long.

The alternatives for Americans are to be self-reliant, as other countries are achieving. The dollar as an international transaction currency is an unsustainable model for survival. MAGA is an American compulsion, and it’s not just President Trump’s sloganeering. America wants control over its consumer goods. They know that the shelf life of technology is diminishing.

One more invention and the semiconductors can be outdated. One more finding, and the classification of rare earth minerals can change. One more idea, and social media can vanish. With one more fundamental piece of knowledge, the world order of the knowledge economy can be rearranged. The world knows that we are the goldmine of the next revolution.

The Bharat is offering the world the idea of One Earth One Grid, i.e., from an energy importer, we are projecting the plan towards becoming an energy exporter. From the dependency on Public Law 480 (PL 480) of the United States, we have attained self-sufficiency in food. We have left the ship-to-mouth label decades ago. The nuclear test in Bharat in the final years of the last century was possible because our granaries had been consistently full for a few years, and we had to worry about space for the upcoming surplus outputs from our flourishing green agricultural fields. The nuclear test of 1998 at Pokhran was conducted on the shoulders of our farm outputs. We didn’t bother with sanctions then, and today we are also in the process of attaining energy sufficiency. The recent demonstration of our nation on the battlefield, including damaging the nuclear war assets supposedly under American control at Kirana Hills in Pakistan, is a reflection of our national security. We have announced to the world that “Operation Sindoor” is our permanent strategy. 

The weaponization of non-war tools, such as trade and tariffs, technology development and sharing, food and energy, is ineffective in manipulating us. We have food security, energy security, and defence security. Our technological advancements are reflected in the Unified Payments System (UPI), Covid-19 vaccines, the acceptance of Electric Vehicles, and our strengths in fundamental research, placing our growth prospects ahead of others.

Quantum computing and space science are more fundamental research areas than practical application research. Our information technology sector is thriving, a success story of use case research. The rising global capability centres in our nation are a reflection of the world’s trust in our demographic talents in terms of volume as well as value. We are equally focused on fundamental as well as usage case research, while China’s inclination is more towards application-based research.

The declining fertility rate in the developed countries has left their academic institutions, from primary schools to higher education universities, empty. And to run their universities, they need our students, and this is a source of foreign exchange earnings for the developed countries, including the Americans.  Self-reliance in the education sector is an immediate challenge that needs urgent attention. It needs to be concerned about the rising forex outflow from our country.

On this global chessboard, we are a player with many horses. The geopolitics has such a short shelf life that it resembles a television entertainment show. We must also remember that the Communist Russian ideology is far from our ideology relative to that of the Capitalist Americans.  We have to safeguard our ideology, and the world trusts us. The blunt reply to Trump that Bharat will not do an iota of compromise on the agriculture sector needs equal celebration as that of Operation Sindoor.  It’s time to chant again: Jai Jawan Jai Kisan. 

(Alok Singh has a doctorate in management from the Indian Institute of Management Indore and is a promoter of Transition Research Consultancy for Policy and Management.)