Modi hard sells Digital India

During his US visit last year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had hard-sold India as an investment destination. While this thrust continued this year, he moved on to the next stage by inviting American technology and has promised to up his “Make in India” pitch to “Design in India.”

Modi was very articulate when he talked of linking every Indian village with optical fibre. Human settlement and economic development took along rivers in the ancient times and along the highways in the past. Now it would be along optical highway, since optical fibre is “the new connector for civilisation.”

No Indian leader has been more forthright in inviting technology the way he has been doing. Having garnered goodwill, it is now for Modi and his team to deliver on the promises made. That task is not easy, given the parliamentary compulsions

Pt Jawaharlal Nehru was put off when told during his 1949 America visit that the annual budget of General Electric, the multinational corporation, was larger than that of India. A triumphal America emerging from the World War II did not realise how it had frittered away the goodwill it had gained among the Indians for its support to India’s freedom movement.

The Cold War was yet to begin, but the once that did, the Indian and American trajectories went separate. The USA viewed Nehru’s non-alignment chant with suspicion. And Nehru turned down an American proposal to set up for free a television network. He opted to purchase technology from Germany for what is Doordarshan today.

American technology was expensive and a source of suspicion for India. In any case, the one relating to defence was banned by American laws to a cold war ‘adversary’. Each time it went to Pakistan, Indians were alarmed, but could do little.

One such issue was the intended US sale of F-16s, the combat aircraft to Pakistan. It is more than just symbolic, if reports are true, that Lockheed Martin, the F-16s’ maker, now wants to set up an assembly line in India. It may be Pakistan’s turn to protest.

Sartaj Aziz, the Advisor on foreign and national security affairs, has already lamented that the ‘shift’ in the US’ policy towards India has ‘destabilised’ South Asia.

The choice of the phrase ‘destabilised’ is remarkably the same as what India used to say in the 1980s.The point to ponder, just in the passing, is that the US can lean on India,

now that it needs Pakistan less, most of its troops having withdrawn from Afghanistan. Given this mood in Pakistan and the current Indo-Pak relationship,

it was hardly surprising that Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif made his Kashmir pitch and faded away to have dinner with Chinese President Xi Jinping while Modi, by contrast, was all over New York and then, California.

India and the USA, once described as two “distant democracies,” have come a long way. The process began during the Vajpayee era and accelerated during the Manmohan Singh decade, is now at full-throttle ahead under Narendra Modi.

During his US visit last year, Modi had hard-sold India as an investment destination. While this thrust continued this year, he moved on to the next stage by inviting American technology and has promised to up his “Make in India” pitch to “Design in India.”

Modi was very articulate when he talked of linking every Indian village with optical fibre. Human settlement and economic development took along rivers in the ancient times and along the highways in the past.

Now it would be along optical highway, since optical fibre is “the new connector for civilisation.” No Indian leader has been more forthright in inviting technology the way he has been doing.

Modi has shown himself as business-savvy, without having background of either. He wooed just all the top guns of America’s digital world, including a happily blushing Marc Zukerberg of Facebook, someone half his age.

One fallout of his effort may be that this may trigger a race among the Americans to come to India. If India plays its cards, it can end up as the Asia hub of the best in American digital technology, which has a huge scope of application in a variety of fields. This is good business sense. India needs it all.

Modi has been the most tech-savvy Prime Minister of India. The ease with which he was able to interact with the digital gurus in the US should impress them into placing their eggs, and shifting some from the Chinese one, into the Indian basket.

Slowing down of the Chinese economy could be a boon for Indians if they know how to about their work. Whatever their motives be, this has been a prolonged and continuous phase of burgeoning bilateral ties that needs to be taken full advantage of.

Above all other brownies that Modi has sought to score during his score of foreign tours, is his treatment of the diaspora. Unlike past government leaders (for most of them the Gulf was the beginning and end of their reach), he has embraced them with enthusiasm. Indeed, he has nursed this constituency for long and it is only getting more and more enamoured of him.

Granting that the Indian diaspora, 30 million strong and spread across a hundred nations with varying needs and aspirations, Modi has shown imagination. He has captured the imagination of the most well-off, and not necessarily Gujaratis alone, as was evident during his Dubai visit and the SAP Centre at San Jose.

His stress on the digital technology and embracing the ‘techies’ has had one effect: yesterday’s “cyber coolies,” some of whom have turned big entrepreneurs today, have received the much-deserved respect and recognition from the Prime Minister of the nation where they hail from. That is a bigger ‘samman’ than what the dozen-plus Pravasi Bharatiya Divas have conferred in the past.

Modi’s talk of “brain gain” from what was worrying called “brain drain” is an invitation to them to return. It is obvious that any major American investment in India would have to come with the investor banking heavily on Indian-Americans who know the technology and the Indian culture and environment.

Add to that the mutual advantage of English language, the Americans stand to great advantage over others who may want to come to India and invest.

Having garnered goodwill, it is now for Modi and his team to deliver on the promises made. That task is not easy, given the parliamentary compulsions (the way the Land Acquisition Bill has been thwarted) and political ones (coming from the Sangh Parivar hardliners who are as suspicious of things American as the Communists are). Add to that the bureaucracy that remains mainly reactive while performing.

Modi really brazened it out when he declared that the new century “belongs to India and the world has come to accept it.” Even allowing for the hyperbole, it was a grand statement that none would want to dispute.

Except, perhaps, the Congress Party, that injected controversy at the beginning of the tour by criticising his “wasteful foreign visits” and then sending its own Rahul Gandhi for an American junket. While wanting to keep Rahul’s tour plans a secret, was it necessary for the party to do this “me-too” on Modi?

By:Mahendra Ved