Global ambition, westward drift

The Digital Alarmist

When the Donald Trump administration talks about ‘civilisational erasure’ in Europe because of the EU’s immigration policies, it is trying to get the European countries to become a right-wing, xenophobic, and Christian white nationalistic monolith, patterned after Trump’s vision for America.

Conveniently left out in the discussion is the fact that the colonialist powers, the United States included, systematically erased the civilisations and cultures of many countries in Latin America, South and Southeast Asia, and Africa over the past 600 years. What is happening today is not so much a civilisational erasure as a technological erasure, across the globe, engineered by Silicon Valley companies. When nation-states attempt to rein in these companies by taxing them or levying huge fines for monopolistic behaviour, the US is always ready to impose sanctions on the ‘offending’ countries. Size matters as does military might.

Not too long ago, Prime Minister Modi bemoaned the slavish mentality of the Indian public and fervently hoped that this mindset could be gotten rid of in the next ten years. Easier said than done, especially when Modi himself caved in to the demands of the Trump administration that the country suffer the economic impact of the 50% tariff on all Indian exports to the US and stop buying oil from Russia. He allowed the US to send back hundreds of shackled Indian migrants to India on US Air Force planes, which were allowed to land at Indian air bases.

This mentality becomes clear when one takes a close look at how the IT sector (this includes the national institutes of technology and science) and the defence sector in India operate. The two sectors are reliant on overseas technology, irrespective of whether the countries involved are the US, the UK, Russia, France or Israel. In times of crises, be they political, economic or military, these countries would have no hesitation in cutting off support, technical or otherwise, and even sabotage, using the tools of cyberwarfare, GPS in particular, the information and defence infrastructure, since their larger interests have always lain elsewhere. China, on the other hand, has had a robust and longstanding policy of not relying on Silicon Valley, the Pentagon, Whitehall or Red Square for its IT and defence needs.

If you look at the business of arms procurement in India, you will be struck by the incontrovertible fact that all the technologically sophisticated weaponry is being supplied by the west and Russia. India touts its Tejas light combat aircraft, but producing swords when the opponents are busy manufacturing machine guns is absurd. Moreover, it points to the dearth of engineering talent despite the country churning out hundreds of thousands of engineers each year.

The IT sector, spearheaded by just three companies – Infosys, TCS, and Wipro – which do all the bookkeeping work for businesses, mostly in the US but some in Europe and the UK, involves writing rudimentary software, and there is nothing significantly creative or innovative about this kind of work. The operating systems and programming languages in support of such software were all created in the US, but not necessarily by Indian software professionals, the ones who went to the US on hard-to-get H1B visas. Many of these code jocks spent family fortunes credentialing themselves by obtaining degrees in IT and computer science at various national, regional, and foreign institutes of technology.

There have been many reported instances of parents selling their family real estate holdings to enable their offspring to become certified as software developers and, hopefully, obtain employment at western multinational companies, preferably in the US, but Canada, Australia or the UK would do as well.

If India does possess a huge pool of IT talent, as is often claimed by politicians and the media alike, a claim that I utterly dismiss, why is it that no innovative piece of software in whatever field (search engines, social media, scientific software, natural language translation, etc.) has ever come out of the country and widely adopted across the world? It took Google fifteen short years to provide automatic language translation software for a number of Indian languages. No Indian company or linguistics expert was involved in this effort.

India’s rise as a global power will hinge on the shift it brings to its ethos. A fundamental question remains – for India and Indians, why is the grass always greener on the other side?

The writer is a computer scientist, a newly minted Luddite and a cynic.

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.