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Correspondent

23 August 2024 at 4:29:04 pm

Nordic Narcissism

There is something uniquely comical about a tiny, insulated European Scandinavian country like Norway lecturing a rich civilisation like India on morality. The latest specimen comes from Helle Lyng, a purported journalist from an obscure Oslo-based daily Dagsavisen, who interrupted a tightly choreographed bilateral media interaction during Narendra Modi’s visit to Norway to shout about India’s allegedly dismal human rights record and low press freedom index. It was crude theatre masquerading...

Nordic Narcissism

There is something uniquely comical about a tiny, insulated European Scandinavian country like Norway lecturing a rich civilisation like India on morality. The latest specimen comes from Helle Lyng, a purported journalist from an obscure Oslo-based daily Dagsavisen, who interrupted a tightly choreographed bilateral media interaction during Narendra Modi’s visit to Norway to shout about India’s allegedly dismal human rights record and low press freedom index. It was crude theatre masquerading as journalism. The Indian and Norwegian Prime Ministers were not scheduled to take questions to begin with. Yet Lyng behaved less like a reporter seeking answers than an activist seeking virality. Within hours, India’s Opposition ecosystem and professional Modi-baiters within Indian media elevated Lyng into a democratic Joan of Arc. Her social-media footprint, dormant for months, burst into life. Whether coordinated or merely opportunistic, the spectacle had all the subtlety of a pre-packaged outrage campaign. Then, Aftenposten, Norway’s largest broadsheet, went one better with a crude illustration straight from the attic of colonial caricature when it rendered Modi as a snake charmer beneath the sneering caption, “A sneaky and slightly annoying man.” This is no satire but a stale racial cliché embalmed in Scandinavian self-righteousness. The affair revealed not just the shallowness of a section of Norwegian journalism, but also the extraordinary moral vanity of modern northern Europe. Norway is a country of 5.6 million people whose most enduring contribution to the political lexicon remains the surname of Vidkun Quisling, the traitor whose collaboration with Adolf Hitler during the Nazi occupation of Norway was so notorious that “quisling” entered the English language as shorthand for traitor and collaborator. Yet, contemporary Norway today floats about the world dispensing ethical report cards to postcolonial democracies infinitely more diverse and politically complicated than anything it has ever governed. Norway’s moral vanity would be easier to tolerate if its own recent history were not stained by horrors of its own. In 2011, right-wing racist Anders Behring Breivik murdered 77 people in one of Europe’s worst modern massacres. Norway, like every Western society, has grappled with extremism, racism and democratic tensions. Yet somehow these complexities never seem to invalidate its standing in the fashionable “freedom indices” endlessly weaponised against countries such as India. India, a deafeningly argumentative democracy of 1.4 billion people with thousands of newspapers, television channels and digital platforms attacking the government daily, is routinely portrayed as ‘authoritarian’ by opaque Western metrics. But countries inflicting chronic violence against journalists somehow fare better. This bizarre methodology reflects a closed loop of Western NGOs, advocacy networks and self-certifying liberal institutions validating one another’s prejudices. The real story was not Norway’s predictable condescension, but the speed with which sections of India’s own elite genuflected before it. The Scandinavian sneer found eager amplification from India’s own salon of professional Modi-baiters, whose instinctive reflex is to applaud any foreign sneer at India so long as it embarrasses the man they loathe.

Robot Dog, Paper Tiger

The Galgotias University fiasco reveals how dishonest branding can make a mockery of India’s AI ambitions.

Delhi
Delhi

India’s ambition to become a global artificial-intelligence (AI) power ought to rest on something far less glamorous than summits or shiny exhibits, namely basic credibility.


That asset took a needless knock at the India AI Impact Summit in Delhi, where the Uttar Pradesh-based Galgotias University found itself embroiled in a contretemps that has roundly embarrassed the nation.


The object at the centre of the controversy was a robotic dog named ORION (short for Operational Robotic Intelligence Node). According to the university’s own promotional material, the robotic dog was the star attraction at its pavilion and interacted live with delegates and demonstrated applied robotics and intelligent systems integration. Visitors assumed it was a product of the institution’s AI-driven Centres of Excellence, itself promoted as part of a Rs. 350-crore push into advanced technology.


However, it turned out that the robot was a commercially available Unitree Go2, manufactured in China and sold online for a few lakh rupees. Worse, reports suggested that the original manufacturer’s branding was still visible on the device, leading to a raft of accusations that imported hardware was being passed off as indigenous innovation.


Faced with an online backlash, the university insisted it had never claimed to have built the robot. However, this proved difficult for the varsity to disown once scrutiny began. To make matters worse, videos of the robotic dog were amplified by government social-media handles, lending the display an air of state-sanctioned achievement. It suggested that India’s AI push was already yielding sophisticated, home-grown hardware. Within a day of the controversy, Galgotias University was reportedly asked to vacate its stall at the AI Expo.


This embarrassment was eminently avoidable. Indian universities routinely rely on foreign platforms as teaching aids, just as their peers elsewhere do. American engineering students cut their teeth on Taiwanese semiconductors while European robotics labs routinely use Japanese hardware. Chinese universities themselves build on American software frameworks and open-source tools developed abroad. Exposure to imported technology is not a confession of weakness.


What distinguishes serious systems from performative ones is not the origin of the hardware, but the honesty with which it is presented and the intellectual value extracted from it. In the world’s leading universities, off-the-shelf tools are dissected, stress-tested and improved upon. The learning lies in the code rewritten, the papers published and the incremental advances pushed into the public domain.


Indian higher education, particularly in its fast-expanding private sector, too often reverses this logic. Under pressure to attract students, climb rankings and impress regulators, institutions substitute branding for substance. ‘Centres of Excellence’ proliferate faster than serious research output. Memoranda of understanding are announced with fanfare, while citations, patents and reproducible results lag behind.


This creates a more delicate problem of dependence without discernment. China’s growing penetration of global education and technology markets is real, strategic and unapologetic. Chinese firms aggressively market low-cost, sophisticated hardware to universities worldwide, embedding their platforms early in the learning cycle. Western firms have done the same for decades. The danger in the uncritical adoption of foreign hardware combined with rhetorical nationalism. When imported technology loudly rebranded as indigenous, the result is not self-reliance but self-deception.


The contrast with China itself is instructive. Chinese universities are ruthless about separating demonstration from development. Foreign tools are used extensively but credit, authorship and ownership are policed with care. The aim is not to impress visitors at expos, but to dominate standards bodies and supply chains.


India’s AI race will not be won in expo halls or summit pavilions. It will be decided in classrooms that teach mathematical foundations rather than buzzwords.


When Indian institutions exaggerate, it weakens the credibility of genuinely good work being done elsewhere in the system. It encourages scepticism among global partners. And it reinforces a lingering suspicion that India’s technological rise is more rhetorical than real.


If ‘Make in India’ is to mean anything in the age of artificial intelligence, it must begin with intellectual honesty. Otherwise, the country risks being quietly dismissed in a very serious race.

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