Short Circuits

Priyank Kharge’s gaffe over semiconductor investments exposes not just Congress’s tone-deafness, but its failure to grasp India’s new industrial geography.

Assam

India’s race to join the global semiconductor club was never going to be easy. Building chip fabs requires billions in investment and, above all, political will. Yet, amid this high-stakes competition, the Congress party has managed to turn a debate about national industrial policy into an episode of regional insult. Priyank Kharge, Karnataka’s minister for IT and Biotechnology and son of Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge sparked outrage when he questioned why the Centre was steering semiconductor investments toward Gujarat and Assam. “What is there in Gujarat and Assam? Is there talent there?” he asked in a tone more suited to a colonial official than a national leader.

Kharge’s tactless remark betrayed the intellectual bankruptcy of a party that once prided itself on building India’s industrial modernity. He later clarified that he was criticising the alleged “arm-twisting” of companies that preferred Karnataka, which boasts India’s most mature tech ecosystem. But his explanation rang hollow. What might have been framed as a legitimate argument about industrial efficiency instead came across as a sneer at India’s peripheries.

The BJP, quick to seize the moment, needed no better foil. Assam’s voluble chief minister, HimantaBiswaSarma, called Kharge a “first-class idiot” and threatened legal action. While Sarma’s theatrics are familiar, Congress once again made itself the butt of a national controversy. The party’s reflex to personalise policy debates, to couch everything in grievance and entitlement, has cost it both credibility and coherence. Priyank Kharge’s outburst could have been avoided had the Congress leadership been capable of enforcing even basic message discipline. But with the party chief himself being the minister’s father, discipline gave way to dynastic indulgence.

The Congress’s blunder reveals its outdated mental map of India’s economy. The assumption that only Bengaluru or the southern metropolises deserve high-value industry is both factually wrong and politically suicidal. New industrial clusters are emerging in places long dismissed as ‘peripheral.’ Gujarat, for all its controversies, offers formidable infrastructure, ports and power reliability.

Assam, under Sarma, has aggressively courted logistics and electronics firms to diversify its economy beyond tea and oil. India’s industrial geography is being rewritten, but the Congress seems unwilling to read the new map.

That stubbornness is rooted in the party’s complacency. For decades, Congress leaders have treated industrial investment as a reward for political loyalty, not a function of competitive policy. Karnataka’s IT success, which Priyank Kharge so readily brandishes, owes more to private entrepreneurship and the momentum of global capital than to state or central planning. Yet, Congress continues to confuse legacy with entitlement. The result is a tone-deaf politics that alienates precisely those constituencies it once claimed to represent: the aspiring middle class and the young workforce.

The semiconductor episode has also exposed the elder Kharge’s inability to command moral authority. Mallikarjun Kharge’s silence on his son’s remarks suggests a leadership unwilling to confront its own. This is the malaise that has hollowed out the Congress from within.

Meanwhile, the BJP has skilfully turned industrial policy into political narrative. Every new semiconductor announcement is portrayed as proof of India’s rising technological sovereignty under Narendra Modi.

Whether or not those fabs eventually roll out chips, they have already yielded electoral dividends. Congress, by contrast, has become the party of complaints by forever protesting bias and never offering vision.

If Congress wished to challenge the government, it could have argued that India’s semiconductor push needs stronger coordination between states, universities and private investors. It could have called for a transparent evaluation of why earlier proposals in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu stumbled. Instead, Priyank Kharge’s rhetoric reduced a strategic debate to a parochial quarrel.

In politics, as in electronics, circuits need to be connected for the system to work. The Congress’s circuitry, alas, remains shorted by ego, dynasty and decay. In the race to make India a semiconductor power, Congress has managed only to prove its unrivalled talent for self-sabotage.