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21 August 2024 at 10:20:16 am

Crimson Rot

For decades, Kerala’s Marxists had cultivated an image of ideological austerity by speaking the language of class struggle and public morality while portraying their opponents as corrupt bourgeois opportunists. The CPI(M), particularly under former Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan, had perfected this moral theatre. Today, with its political fortunes on the wane, the party’s carefully constructed halo is collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions. The Enforcement Directorate raids...

Crimson Rot

For decades, Kerala’s Marxists had cultivated an image of ideological austerity by speaking the language of class struggle and public morality while portraying their opponents as corrupt bourgeois opportunists. The CPI(M), particularly under former Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan, had perfected this moral theatre. Today, with its political fortunes on the wane, the party’s carefully constructed halo is collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions. The Enforcement Directorate raids connected to the CMRL ‘monthly payment’ scandal symbolise the unravelling of a political mythology built over generations. The raids at the residences linked to Vijayan, his daughter Veena Vijayan, and former minister Mohammed Riyas expose a deeply embarrassing spectacle for a party that lectured the nation about probity and ideological purity. The case concerns Cochin Minerals and Rutile Ltd, which allegedly paid Rs. 1.72 crore to Veena Vijayan’s firm, Exalogic Solutions between 2017 and 2020 for consultancy and software services that investigators allege were never actually rendered. According to findings flagged by the Income Tax Settlement Board, these payments allegedly continued because of her “relationship with a prominent person.” This is the oldest form of capitalist cronyism, family connections functioning as political currency. The comrades who once thundered against “bourgeois exploitation” by the likes of Adani now find themselves defending precisely the ecosystem of privilege they claimed to despise. The hypocrisy is staggering. Under Vijayan, the CPI(M) had increasingly ceased to resemble a cadre-based ideological movement and instead acquired the traits of a tightly centralised family enterprise. Despite Kerala’s Marxists fiercely denouncing personality cults, they constructed one of their own around Vijayan’s dominating personality. The most revealing aspect of this scandal has been the collapse of moral legitimacy. The Indian Left long claimed that while others amassed wealth, communists alone stood with clean hands. That illusion has steadily eroded across India, but nowhere is its collapse more dramatic than in Kerala. The party that once romanticised workers now appears inseparable from elite privilege. Its leaders move within circles of influence, patronage and dynastic entitlement strikingly similar to the political classes they once condemned. Kerala’s Marxists increasingly resemble what George Orwell warned revolutions often become: new aristocracies wearing the vocabulary of equality. Vijayan may continue to dismiss the allegations as attempts to tarnish his image. His loyalists may continue shouting conspiracy. But public perception has irrevocably shifted. The image of ED officials entering the former Chief Minister’s residence while probing payments linked to his daughter is politically devastating, irrespective of eventual legal outcomes. Skeletons are tumbling from the cupboard because the cupboard itself was built on deception. The tragedy is that a movement which once promised moral seriousness and ideological discipline has descended into the very decadence it spent decades denouncing. Kerala’s self-proclaimed moral vanguard now stands exposed by the very decadence it once claimed to fight. The comrades preached revolution. What they perfected instead was entitlement.

From ‘Melodi’ to Microchips: Going Beyond Toffee Diplomacy

A small object changed hands in Abu Dhabi earlier this month, and almost no one paused to consider what it meant. Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the President of the United Arab Emirates placed a silicon chip in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s palm. It was a Cerebras chip given to the Indian Prime Minister as part of a bilateral agreement – a working piece of one of the most powerful artificial intelligence machines money can build, soon to be installed on Indian soil.


That gesture set the tone for everything that followed. Over six days, Modi visited five countries: the UAE, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway and Italy. The trip ended in Rome with the viral bonhomie between him and Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni being fondly labelled “Melodi” after a packet of Melody toffees that Modi gave Meloni.


While the toffees hogged the spotlight, the real story was technology and the quiet accumulation of Indian national power through it.


The last few months have seen enormously significant deals being inked: the trade pact with the European bloc EFTA came into force last October after 16 years of negotiation, carrying a binding pledge of $100 billion in investment over 15 years. The European Union deal followed in January, hailed by Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal and Commission President Ursula von der Leyen as “the mother of all deals,” and now awaits ratification. In Oslo, Modi noted that trade with the Nordic region had quadrupled in a decade, while Nordic investment in India had risen by roughly 200 percent.


Trade Neologism

While this trade is real and growing in volume, it is no longer the ‘prize’ celebrated in the five capitals that Modi toured. The prize was access to technology that money alone cannot buy, and the capability to make more of it at home. This is the difference between being a market and being a maker, and it sits at the very heart of the national interest.


There is even a word for this now, coined in Copenhagen. In January 2017, Denmark’s foreign minister, Anders Samuelsen, announced a new initiative under the label ‘techplomacy’ and that September, the country sent the world’s first Tech Ambassador, Casper Klynge, to deal with the great technology firms as though they were states. His reasoning was blunt. Those firms, he said, “are also policy actors, and indeed, foreign policy actors in their own right.”


The idea soon found powerful echoes. Political scientist Ian Bremmer warned in Foreign Affairs that a handful of technology companies had begun to “rival” states “for geopolitical influence.” For a few years, though, it stayed an elegant Western theory. India has turned it into a working strategy, on a scale no other democracy has attempted. Where others argued about how to regulate technology, India built it, scaled it to more than a billion people, and is now exporting it. As External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar observed, the world is moving towards “trusted geographies,” and the geopolitical meaning of that phrase “is very clear.” On this tour, India was being chosen as one.


The Real Haul

Consider what India actually carried home. In Abu Dhabi, the UAE’s G42 and the Government of India formalised Condor Galaxy India, an eight exaflop artificial intelligence supercomputer built from 64 advanced Cerebras systems. It will be among the most powerful AI machines ever installed in the country.


It will train models in Indian languages, forecast our monsoon, and give Indian start-ups the kind of computing muscle they have always had to borrow from abroad. The man who signed it for G42, Mansoor Al Mansoori, called it infrastructure that turns “energy and compute into sovereign governed nation-scale intelligence.” This is digital sovereignty in practice: India will no longer have to send its most sensitive AI work overseas.


The most consequential agreement came in The Hague. Tata Electronics, led by Randhir Thakur, partnered with ASML, the Dutch firm that alone makes the machines capable of printing the world’s most advanced chips. Its chief executive, Christophe Fouquet, spoke of India’s “compelling opportunities”. These are precisely the tools America has spent years denying China. India will instead deploy them at its first commercial chip plant in Dholera, Gujarat - a $11 billion bet that turns ambition into industry.


Perhaps, it is the quietest agreement that may matter the most. In Oslo, India and Norway signed a Digital Development Partnership, in which a wealthy European nation agreed to help carry India’s digital public infrastructure to the developing world. This is where India’s lead over everyone else is widest.


Competitive Edge

Our payment system, UPI, handled 22.64 billion transactions in March alone, its busiest month since it began a decade ago. It now runs in eight foreign markets, from Bhutan and Nepal to France and the UAE, each link built between central banks rather than through a private vendor. India has signed agreements to share its digital systems with 23 countries, the government told Parliament in February.


Aadhaar, UPI and DigiLocker were built to serve Indians. They have become India’s most admired export, and a genuine instrument of soft power. Here is the part that gives them real diplomatic weight: unlike oil or weapons, sharing them earns goodwill rather than fear. When the Global South looks for a model of digital governance that is neither American Big Tech nor Chinese state control, it increasingly looks to Delhi.


At the third India-Nordic Summit, India reaffirmed that its defence sector is open to full foreign ownership, including inside its industrial corridors, and welcomed Nordic firms, a confidence it would not have shown a decade ago. Sweden’s Saab already builds the Carl-Gustaf at a wholly owned plant in Jhajjar, India’s first fully foreign owned defence facility.


India’s defence exports touched a record Rs. 38,424 crore last year, up sharply from Rs. 23,622 crore the year before, with a target of Rs. 50,000 crore by 2029. The Netherlands brought green hydrogen and critical minerals. Italy, on the final leg, added a defence production roadmap, a minerals’ understanding, and a tie up between the two countries’ space agencies.


None of this should be mistaken for self-sufficiency. The supercomputer runs on chips India does not make. The chip plant depends on Dutch machines that one decision in Washington could cut off. Our rare earths still pass through Chinese refineries before they become magnets and batteries. While Indian strength on display this month is real, a great deal of it is still borrowed. A ‘techplomacy’ built on borrowed capacity is not yet strategic autonomy.


Closing that gap is the challenge, and it is a daunting one. India is not starting from nothing here. The foreign ministry set up a New, Emerging and Strategic Technologies division back in 2020 to do precisely this work, and a separate cyber cell before that. But they remain thinly staffed and scattered. What India needs now is to consolidate them into one empowered, well-resourced team for technology diplomacy.


It needs a law, not merely a promise, to protect its pursuit of critical minerals through changes of government. It needs to aim Nordic defence investment at the precise gaps its usual partners will not fill, such as undersea sensors and materials built for the Arctic. And when India hosts African leaders in Delhi later this month, it should hand them its digital toolkit as a gift to the world, not a product to be sold.


Trade has carried India this far. Technology will decide how much further it travels, and how much of that journey India truly owns. While the toffees handed over in Rome made for charming social media theatre, the real story that must endure long after the photographs fade is India’s techplomacy: the supercomputer, the chip machines, the payment rails crossing continents, the minerals and the satellites. The Prime Minister has pointed the way with unusual clarity. The harder task begins now. For in geopolitics, technology borrowed is merely influence rented. Only technology built is sovereignty secured.


(The author is an Assistant Professor at Ajeenkya D.Y. Patil University and a doctoral scholar in tech diplomacy and geopolitics. Views personal).

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