Mr. President, be grateful that all the political leaders, all the political parties, and the ordinary citizens of our country are in rhythm with the swadeshi practices. — Alok Singh

The Swadeshi movement is more than a century old. The contemporary civilization keeps moderating the formats of swadeshi ideology. The swadeshi practices during the initial and final phases of the last century differed significantly. 

The international organizations, starting from ITO (International Trade Organization), followed by GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade), and later WTO (World Trade Organization), were like substituting the bottles for the exact old wine.  The issues of ITO, GATT, and WTO, of course, have been continually evolving. But the outcomes were unfavourable, primarily to developing countries. It's like changing the nameplate without changing the occupant's behaviour. These trade policies, masked as a saviour of humanity, actually weakened humanity. The WTO as an institution still exists, but who cares? The economic profile of countries has changed. The agriculture-based economy of yesterday has evolved into today's export-based economy.

The composition of the economy has been in a state of constant change. It has shifted from a majority contribution from agriculture and minerals to manufactured goods and services, and today it's mainly about internet-based activities, including purchasing, education, health services, banking, election campaigning, and more. 

The internet-based economic activities and the essential daily activities created an opportunity for data-based research. The data of the internet created a path beyond empirical and analytical research. It paved the way for artificial intelligence, artificial general intelligence, and numerous other variants, including machine learning and deep learning. The internet-based companies that provided free services earned a lot from such research firms, and the end-user consumer remained ignorant about the impact of their personal data being created and used to influence their individual mind, their particular lifestyle, their original eating, dressing, family, and entertainment habits. The owners of such data created an ecosystem where one individual attempted to control the whole civilization. But the data are everywhere, and so are such companies. An individual or a company can't succeed in maintaining the entire civilization, and the stakeholders have accepted this fact. From this acceptance comes the hope that it's not about the best will survive, but those that are sustainable will only survive.

When it's about sustainability, then it's about the sustainability of the environment, climate, human population, varieties of species, including flora and fauna. It's about the sustainability of knowledge and civilization. The knowledge that is running the economy today, i.e., the knowledge economy itself, is unsustainable today. This is because the shelf life of knowledge itself is diminishing. Facebook killed Orkut, the  X or Twitter damaged the businesses of media houses, YouTube strained the movie industry, and many more disruptions have happened in various sectors of the economy.

But again, the proper knowledge is always sustainable. True knowledge of the economy fosters a sustainable economy, adequate understanding of medicine leads to sustainable health practices, and accurate knowledge of entertainment brings genuine happiness, rather than the artificial, joyless replica of joy. The shelf life of real is lengthier than that of synthetic, which is, at maximum, spontaneous.

The original pyramid of civilization is one in which the dharma controls society, society controls the political establishment, and the political establishment controls the economy. But over a period of time, the economy started controlling political establishments, political establishments started controlling society, and society started controlling dharma. The latest arrivals are of big technology companies that control the economy.

The 2024 United States Presidential election demonstrates this dangerous pyramid. The prominent technology company Tesla attempted to influence the president of the world's most powerful country and wealthiest economy. The president of the United States dared to checkmate the big technology company. 

So, we should be thankful to President Trump. We should be grateful to Mr. President for providing an opportunity for our indigenous electric vehicles ecosystem to stand on its own feet.

The just imagination of cheap Tesla cars flooding our domestic market and following the money-burning practices would have demanded an enormous awareness campaign to convince our electric vehicle buyers to buy the indigenous brands. We are still struggling to cope up with foreign e-commerce companies that damage our economy by tax theft, damage our Micro Small and Medium Enterprises MSMEs by following money burning business models, damage our taste for festivals and entertainment, and damage our cultural heritage, damage our food and other life styles, damage our hard and soft power by using our personal data for training their machines and algorithms.

Major technology companies, including Alphabet, Google, Meta, Amazon, and Walmart, along with emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, have challenged the power of the democratically elected president of the United States of America.

The US president must demonstrate that a democratically elected leader, with a fixed tenure, holds more power than these technology companies. Consequently, the president had no choice but to create the wealthiest person on earth. The technology of blockchain business in general and cryptocurrency in particular provided an opportunity to accomplish the purpose of clipping the wings of Alphabet, Google, Meta, Amazon, Walmart, and others.

Mr. President should be commended for not distinguishing between American and non-American companies controlling the civilization. He wishes to make America Great Again. The first step is to empower democratically elected leaders over the money-printing owners of big technology companies. 

Contemporary big technology companies, along with financial engineering and fintech, do not allow any new idea or company to grow and stand on its own. The loss of Flipkart to foreign hands reflects this.

We should be thankful to President Trump as he has immunized many countries from the repercussions of violating the rules and regulations of the WTO. It is a blunt announcement that no one cares about the WTO. Mr. President, we thank you for providing a clean slate to all countries, enabling them to revise their trade policies.  Mr. President, be thankful that homegrown companies like Zoho are being welcomed by all, including those who previously criticized our talents and policies. Mr. President, be grateful that all the political leaders, all the political parties, and the ordinary citizens of our country are in rhythm with the swadeshi practices.

Mr. President truly deserves the Nobel prize if he succeeds in setting the pyramid right, i.e., society should control politicians, and politicians should control the economy. The knowledge should have a sacred place that is not associated with the act of printing money. 

(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.)