Tech Superpowers: India

Uncharted waters

Hindustan Times/Getty

The “Hindu nationalist” Indian regime today finds itself sailing well beyond its historical horizons. Despite thousands of years of rather unbroken religious and civilizational history, the Indian state as a consolidated political entity has never been a first-rank world power, and right now, it is safe to say it has never been in better shape.

While it is tempting to attribute this success to its embrace of technology, this is too pat: India has done more of consequence to export itself into Silicon Valley than it has done to import Silicon Valley into itself. This state of affairs can’t be chalked up entirely to statecraft, but the regime has certainly allowed it to happen, as part of a larger and not insignificant “brain drain”. It’s interesting too, that the increasingly powerful and accomplished Indian diaspora in the Valley and “tech” more broadly is not exactly defined by a devout and traditionalist observance of Hinduism.

American Avatars

Perhaps inevitably, the trend has bubbled “up” (or down) into American horserace politics, where two Indian candidates, Vivek Ramaswamy and Nikki Haley, neé Nimarata Randhawa, have made a notable dent, if only a dent, in the proceedings to date. Sparks have flown as each has carved out a niche incompatible with the other — Vivek, the Trumpist not named Trump, Nikki the neocon in all but name, both angling for a quick rise toward the top of one of the two available power centers on the Right. One glaring distinction not immediately political is that Vivek has a familiarity and comfort level with tech conspicuously lacking in his nemesis. But for now, at least, it appears Vivek is too fresh, and Nikki too stale, to alter the dynamics of the race.

The significance here goes beyond the horserace: somebody ought to bring some political order to the array of Indians and Indian-Americans in the Valley, whose priorities, if not their loyalties, are often more unclear than they ought to be, but this is an awkward mission likely destined for failure unless the leader is him or herself of the same nationality or heritage. The basic question is, what’s the motive for those at the top of the food chain in tech. Influence? Prestige? Filthy lucre? A love of innovation? Or is it a love of organizational dominance or sheer administration? Is the open-ended technologization of America a goal? Is the tech still more of a draw than the US itself? What’s the ambition, and where does it end? And how does that line up, if at all, with the faith, mores, habits, and allegiance of the critical segments of the American people?

Imperial Fates

Because whatever the answers, plural, assuredly, they don’t boil down to Hindu Nationalism, and that brings us back to India proper. Like all tech superpowers, India must grapple not only with the necessity of re-grounding its political legitimacy on the basis of an extant spiritual authority sufficient to escape assimilation into the integral techno-world; it must also grapple with the temptation to give up on that strenuous task and fall back on gaining public support by simply identifying itself with tech and full-dress technologization, whether literally imported from America or not.

Wise Indians must be taking note of Israel’s inability to date to solve this same problem, and the massive instability that has erupted as a result, as well as China’s quieter and calmer tug of war between its atheist materialists and its Daoists. From the standpoint of the UK and the US, there’s something sad about the idea of having to fall back on the English language itself as a tool of statecraft on which to rely, but it is a powerful one, and India’s use of English gives it a leg up in the struggle to establish itself as an independent digital power.

Yet the fundamental choice rears its head even here: English is the native language of the internet, and the road to the digital terraforming of India into an integral part of the global borg is doubtless paved with the English alphabet, English literacy, and the egregiously swelling corpus of justice-worshipping and tech-worshipping liturgical terms and phrases coined in, and often only comprehensible in, the English tongue.

From Gentleman to Harsh Mistress

In the end, India has only the English to blame for the incorporation into its contemporary culture of the allure of the digital nomad, the startup nation, the world computer, the technologization of all things, and the abandonment of the long millennia of creed, caste, and culture at the heart of Hindu civilization. India’s relatively beneficial time in the British Empire once conferred on men of ambition, intellect, and initiative a sort of global passport, a ticket to independence, adventure, and, to coin a phrase, sovereign individuality. But today, technology itself is punching that ticket, and the true cost of the fare is coming due: the sovereign individual must bow to the borg and scrape for his supper, no longer only in the court of the king or across his territorial realm, but anywhere he roams, wherever he may log on — the utopian which is increasingly everywhere, his only true home his home screen. Where in such a noplace is there a place for Actual India, the one built and tended in the given world by human beings living as they, like we all, have been given to do?

It is a haunting question for this ancient civilization. Even here, so far in human space from the epicenters of the West that a careful modus vivendi can been established with the great Eurasian powers, the path toward an innovative future channeled spiritually to the benefit of the people and their civilization is elusive; the dilemma of a forced choice between one or the other, borg or birthright, stalks the land from the Indus to the Ganges, even as its erstwhile heirs in American tech work and play as if no choice must be made, nor any reckoning faced.