#344 Juggernauts

Juggernauts: the political one and the geopolitical one.

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India Policy Watch: To Stop A Juggernaut

Insights on current policy issues in India

—RSJ

The usual trope of election coverage in India is to refer to them as festivals of democracy. Anchors will momentarily tone down the cacophony in their studios to speak about the dance of democracy in exalted terms. That these are celebrations of participation, moments of collective will and periodic renewals of the social contract.

All that is true, but perhaps irrelevant. Elections might be festivals of a kind. But for the citizenry, they are primarily disciplining mechanisms. Their real function is not simply to produce governments, but to remind governments that they can be removed.

The fear of removal is one of the great invisible stabilisers of democratic systems. It disciplines arrogance, forces responsiveness, moderates excess, and occasionally compels probity in public life. Governments that believe they can lose behave differently from governments that believe defeat is improbable.

Since the surprising blip of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, where the BJP lost its majority, the empire has struck back with vengeance. The BJP electoral machine has been relentless since. And this is a point to ruminate over after another round of state election results declared last week. Not whether the BJP wins or loses a particular state election in Assam, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu or Kerala, but whether India is entering a phase where electoral competition itself begins to lose its disciplining edge.

The BJP’s rise is often explained through ideology alone. Critics see only Hindutva, state capture and divisiveness. Admirers see nationalism, leadership and decisiveness. These are somewhat accurate though facile explanations. What India has witnessed over the last decade is the construction of the most sophisticated electoral machine in democratic history. The scale of this machine is still underestimated because Indian political commentary continues to operate with assumptions from an older age. The usual shibboleths dominate our discourse: that economic underperformance naturally produces anti-incumbency, unemployment translates into anger, inflation gets punished, and that, over time, voters simply get tired. But elections in India are no longer referendums on governance. They are contests over narratives, identity, organisational permanence, with a late dose of welfarism to sway voters.

The BJP has mastered the craft of bringing several things together that Indian parties historically struggled to combine simultaneously: ideological coherence, welfare politics, charismatic leadership, booth-level mobilisation, and a permanently active cadre ecosystem (anchored by the RSS). Most Indian parties awaken during elections. The BJP operates continuously. It is not merely a party fighting elections every five years; it is an ecosystem that remains politically alive between elections. Electoral politics for the BJP isn’t about episodic communication. It is an ambient presence in all its decisions.

And because it is so ambient and ever-present, it is changing the psychology of the electorate itself. Consider a voter born in 1992. That person would have been too young (under 18) to vote in the 2009 general election, the last election won by the Congress-led UPA. By 2029, that voter will be 37 years old. For their entire adult political life, for anyone below the age of 37 in 2028, the BJP would have occupied the political mindspace with continued narrative dominance. To such voters, the opposition begins appearing abnormal rather than an alternative.

There is a tendency among sections of the opposition, especially the Congress old guard, to assume that the BJP’s dominance is temporary, that eventually anti-incumbency will mechanically restore equilibrium. This is the underlying message you hear from Rahul Gandhi apologists. History offers little support for that assumption. Democracies across the world have repeatedly produced dominant-party systems that last for long. Post-independence India itself was effectively a one-party dominant state for almost three decades. Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party has been in power for most of the post-war era. Mexico’s PRI ruled for decades. Dominant-party systems emerge when political organisation, ideology, governance and institutional advantage converge in a manner that leaves the opposition without a plank.

But there is a crucial difference between the old Congress system and the current BJP system. The Congress system was inherently centrifugal, which eventually led to its decline from within.

Congress thrived over the years by absorbing contradictions. It was less a political party than a sprawling tent under which socialists, conservatives, industrialists, secularists, caste leaders and regional aspirants all coexisted uneasily. Every new social movement eventually found its way into the Congress tent.

But big tents carry within them the seeds of fragmentation. Prolonged power creates newer claimants. Not every claimant gets what it wants, and that creates factions. Factions eventually seek autonomy. Congress could not permanently satisfy its contradictions: the left and right, centralisers and federalists, socialist instincts and market-oriented impulses. Over time, these resentments accumulated. The Swatantra Party emerged from one side, socialist formations from another, and regional caste politics from yet another. By the time the Emergency arrived in 1975, the Congress system was already weakening internally. And then it started breaking. Almost the entire political class that’s non-BJP and non-Congress today owes its origins to Congress eventually.

The BJP operates differently. People do not enter the BJP expecting ideological negotiation. They enter accepting an ideological hierarchy that’s cast in stone. Nationalism, welfare delivery, centralised leadership, civilizational rhetoric and Hindutva form the party’s core grammar. Leaders from different backgrounds may join, but they are expected to align themselves with this existing ideological framework rather than reshape it. There is a syntax to learn, and that’s the only way to move ahead within it. The likes of Scindia, Sharma and Adhikari have all followed this. Congress expanded by diluting its ideological boundaries. The BJP expands by converting entrants to follow their ideological order.

This is why the usual theories of dominant-party decay may not fully apply here. The Congress weakened because its contradictions became unmanageable. The BJP’s contradictions are narrower and more controlled. That does not mean the BJP cannot fragment. All dominant parties eventually confront succession crises and personal ambition. But ideological centrifugal forces inside the BJP are weaker than they were inside Congress. The primary fault lines are likely to emerge not from doctrine but from ambition after Narendra Modi.

And even there, the BJP possesses something Congress did not (or frittered away): a durable organisational spine outside the political party itself. The RSS is not merely a support organisation; rather, it is the source of its ideology, the reserve of cadres, its arbitration mechanism and its institutional glue. In many instances, dominant parties weaken after charismatic leaders fade because there is no deeper coherence beneath them. The BJP may prove more resilient because its ecosystem extends beyond electoral politics.

The BJP has also occupied much of the traditional opposition space. Welfare politics, once the natural terrain of Congress and regional parties, has been appropriated and fused with nationalism. The BJP speaks the language of aspiration and subsidy simultaneously. It invokes markets when convenient and redistribution when necessary. Successful dominant parties are rarely ideologically pure. But they are emotionally coherent. And BJP is Exhibit A of this approach.

The other transformation is institutional and informational. Elections are now fought inside a surround-sound environment of television amplification, WhatsApp networks, micro-market mobilisation, constituency-level analytics and narrative saturation. Add to this campaign finance asymmetry, institutional takeover and administrative leverage, and the challenge before the opposition becomes enormous. The playing field has not disappeared entirely, but it has unquestionably tilted.

This is where the opposition’s problem becomes deeper. The German political theorist Carl Schmitt argued that politics ultimately rests upon the distinction between friend and enemy. Every durable political movement defines who belongs and who does not. The BJP has understood this distinction with remarkable sophistication. It has gradually positioned itself not merely as a party asking for votes, but as the authentic political expression of national belonging itself. Opposition to the BJP can therefore be reframed not as opposition to a government, but as opposition to the nation’s emotional consensus.

This creates the central dilemma for the opposition. To oppose the BJP frontally on nationalism or civilizational politics risks immediate delegitimisation because the opposition is then pushed too quickly into the category of “enemy” of the nation. The traditional anti-BJP vocabulary of secular restoration, anti-majoritarian rhetoric, and anti-Hindutva positioning struggles because large sections of society no longer experience those arguments as culturally persuasive. Hindutva isn’t merely an ideological position any more; it has become part of the accepted operating system for large sections of Indian society.

Which means the starting point for defeating the BJP may paradoxically require not appearing as an enemy at all.

A successful challenger may have to present itself as a dissatisfied friend rather than a hostile adversary. Someone operating within the broad emotional universe that the BJP has normalised, while arguing that the current regime has become complacent, arrogant or ineffective. Not a rejection of nationalism, but a claim that nationalism has become performative rather than productive. Not an assault on welfare politics, but an argument that welfare without broad-based prosperity perpetuates the mai-baap sarkar model, which the people wanted to exit. This kind of dominant political position can’t be defeated through direct negation. It will need to be challenged from within their own emotional framework. I don’t see anyone from the opposition space that has the political nous and the energy to mount such a challenge. The idea that everyone ganging up against the BJP will lead to its electoral defeat is an arithmetical chimaera. It will never become a reality.

Democracies do not get undermined simply because one party wins repeatedly. The greater danger emerges when permanence begins reshaping institutions, incentives and public imagination. Bureaucracies adapt to continuity. The judiciary seeks to please rather than challenge. Media ecosystems align themselves with power. Capital and business optimise around incumbency. In such an environment, voters are conditioned to blame everyone except the party in power for their problems. Over time, elections become routine exercises of continued dominance, and the disciplining mechanism weakens.

Of course, nothing is inevitable. History offers a final caution. Dominant systems often appear invincible until suddenly they are not. Congress once looked immovable. So did Mexico’s PRI and Japan’s LDP at various moments. Political permanence is rarely permanent. But the effects of prolonged dominance can endure long after electoral turnover eventually arrives.

The real question for Indian democracy, therefore, is not whether the BJP will someday lose. Every dominant party eventually does. The more important question is what happens to democratic competition, institutional neutrality and political imagination during long periods when defeat itself stops feeling plausible. Those scars are almost permanent.

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Matsyanyaaya: US-China De-Risking is a Euphemism

Big fish eating small fish = Foreign Policy in action

—Pranay Kotasthane

I spent the last week at an Indo-Pacific Roundtable organised by the University of Cambridge on US-China de-risking and its global fallout. It was coincidentally appropriate that this discussion took place in a week that also saw the US President’s much-discussed trip to China.

What follows is an annotated version of my comments.

1. De-risking is a Euphemism

“US-China de-risking” is a euphemism coined somewhere between Brussels and Washington. What really is happening is better described as the weaponisation of interdependence, a term coined by Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman in their influential 2019 article. While the US has weaponised export controls, entity lists, the dollar system, and technology access, China has weaponised supply chains, rare earths, and market access.

Neither of these is conventional trade policy. Conventional trade policy uses barriers to protect domestic producers or penalise imports. What both powers have done is more structural: they have turned the architecture of globalisation into an instrument of coercion, even as they continue to trade with each other in high volumes.

De-risking is what countries like India are trying to do in response to this weaponised interdependence. India faces this weaponisation from both directions simultaneously. Other countries have it bad in one direction. The EU faces Chinese overcapacity and American technology controls, but EU members are US allies with treaty relationships that act as a buffer. EU countries are biding time for the Trump administration to end. Japan has a deep alliance architecture with the US, and its METI subsidies are often coordinated with Washington. India’s position, not fully aligned with either power and dependent on both, is what makes its de-risking challenge distinct.

2. China as an international market failure

China’s overcapacity in manufacturing was the market failure of negative externalities. Subsidised production at scale, underwriting costs no commercial firm could match, drove out investment everywhere else and made the rest of the world structurally dependent. The steel and solar stories are the canonical ones, but the pattern extends to industrial chemicals, consumer electronics components, and now EVs. Individual governments responded with tariffs. Tariffs protected domestic producers temporarily and raised consumer prices permanently. None of it resolved the underlying problem, because the underlying problem was not a trade imbalance. It was a structural market failure that individual country responses cannot fix.

China’s restrictions now display a different kind of market failure, that of monopoly behaviour. The global controls on rare earth magnets, gallium, and germanium target every country. But India also faces something more targeted, and the targeted restrictions are more revealing.

Over the past year, China blocked speciality fertiliser exports to India even as it resumed them to other countries. Herrenknecht tunnel boring machines assembled in China, used in metro projects across Indian cities, were held back from Indian buyers. Foxconn’s Chinese engineers were recalled from Indian facilities. Specialised manufacturing equipment shipments were delayed without a formal explanation.

Each of these restrictions is individually substitutable. Herrenknecht now supplies from its Indian facility. Taiwanese and Vietnamese engineers replace the Chinese ones within weeks. Fertilisers get routed through third countries at a cost premium. The point is not that any single restriction is crippling. The point is that they function as attrition. They introduce friction, slowing the pace at which manufacturing capacity shifts out of China.

The strategic signal here is that China views supply chain diversification itself as a threat. The irony is that this outlook makes diversification a necessity for companies seeking policy consistency. Its own restrictions are accelerating the diversification it fears, i.e., China is making China+1 happen.

3. India has a long memory of tech denial and the confidence to build base-level capabilities in critical sectors

In January 2025, the Biden administration’s AI Diffusion Rule placed India in Tier 2, not alongside Japan, the UK, and Australia, but with most of the developing world, with caps on how many advanced AI chips India could import. The Trump administration rescinded it before it took effect but the fear looms that some controls on AI compute might be forthcoming.

These developments have a familiar narrative territory. India has a long institutional memory of technology denial. Cryogenic rocket engine technology was denied in the 1990s, which is why ISRO spent the next fifteen years building its own engine. Cray supercomputers were denied to Indian institutions in the 1980s, which is why the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing built PARAM. Nuclear fuel and dual-use technology were withheld for decades under NSG and MTCR restrictions, constraining not just the weapons programme but civilian nuclear power too.

Every time, the lesson was that India can build what it prioritises, even if that version is slower, more expensive, and takes more time. The AI Diffusion Rule triggered exactly that institutional memory. This is why India’s response to US-China ‘weaponised interdependence’ has been to invest in building base-level capabilities across semiconductors, AI, and rare earths.

4. India does trade defence alright. But it has no institution to deploy offensive economic statecraft.

India’s defensive architecture is largely in place. Press Note 3 screens Chinese investments. Huawei is excluded from 5G deployment. There is a Trusted Source, Trusted Product framework for telecom vendors and satellite services. The relationship with China is a one-dimensional buy-sell transaction. This is in sharp contrast to the web between China and the West, characterised by overlapping layers of talent, technology transfer, investment, and trade, making it difficult to untangle.

But what India lacks is offensive economic statecraft. China’s State Administration for Market Regulation has turned antitrust review into a geopolitical lever. It can threaten to block any cross-border merger where the parties have significant China revenue, which, for major technology and industrial companies, is nearly every deal. India is the only other market large enough to plausibly do something similar.

And India has a structural asset that almost never appears in de-risking discussions. It has over 1,800 Global Capability Centres, R&D hubs, product development facilities, and operational decision-making units for nearly every large global corporation. These are not call centres. They are where chip architectures get designed, where algorithms get built, and where product roadmap decisions get made. They are sticky in ways factories are not; the organisational dependency they create is deep and hard to reverse. In an era of weaponised interdependence, talent inside someone else’s company is leverage. But India has no institution to deploy it. That’s why we have written in these pages that India needs a SAMR equivalent to use market access as a bargaining chip.

5. The coordination problem remains underappreciated

If Chinese overcapacity is structural, individual country responses are insufficient by design. Domestic capacity built behind tariff walls gets destroyed the next time Chinese prices drop. We have seen it in steel, where Indian mills built behind high duties watched their margins collapse when Chinese export prices fell. We have seen it in solar, where module manufacturing capacity in the US and EU became unviable the moment Chinese panels got cheap again. The pattern is stable and repeating.

There are 91 semiconductor fabs under construction globally right now, some of them outside China, most incentivised by industrial policy responses to the chip shortage and the CHIPS Act. Without cross-country coordination on capacity, pricing, and market access, a significant portion of this investment will not survive the next deflationary wave from China, as the largest amount of mature-node capacity coming up is from China. We are setting up for a massive collective write-down unless some big markets can frame a collective response.

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India’s challenge is whether the political economy can sustain de-risking, whether institutional imagination can move from defence to statecraft, and whether anyone will solve the collective action problem before the next ‘China Shock’ makes individual country responses moot.

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HomeWork

Reading and listening recommendations on public policy matters

1. [Puliyabaazi] The next episode discusses the AI Divide(?), India’s Human Capital, Cognitive Autonomy in the AI age, and the Enshittification of Software.

   सोच की स्वछंदता, सॉफ्टवेयर का 'कबाड़ा' और AI की दौड़ में भारत कहाँ? Cognitive Autonomy, Enshittification and AI Divide

2. [Article] Check this take by my senior colleague Nitin Pai, on the significance of the early findings of the Genome India project. Aside from the findings, I found it motivating that several organisations came together to work on this multidisciplinary study that’s vital for India.

3. [Book Bundle] Read Farrell and Newman’s The Underground Empire and Edward Fishman’s Chokepoints as a stack.

4. [Repo] What if you had access to the Takshashila Way of Research from anywhere in the world? What policy question would you ask and investigate? Well, here’s a beta version of ‘Takshashila in a Box’ for you to begin your policy research journey.

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