A version of this essay has been published by Open Magazine at https://openthemagazine.com/world/india-will-collapse-without-digital-sovereignty-and-pax-indica-lessons-from-hormuz

By now it is clear that the Iran War (or West Asia War) has been a disaster to all concerned, including the principals as well as assorted passersby. The massive amounts spent by the US (at last count $25 billion) are at least articulated; the bill for the enormous infrastructural and human suffering inflicted on Gulf states, in the theater of war, must be greater, by definition.

The collateral damages suffered by the rest of the world from the cessation of trade through the Straits of Hormuz will presumably run into the trillions of dollars. As one of the worst affected, India, which imports 90% of its hydrocarbons from the Gulf, not to mention other essential items such as urea (for fertilizer), sulfuric acid, helium, etc., is on track to take a massive hit. As an article in The Economic Times said, “India must brace for broad-based economic shock”.

Indian exports of up to $50 billion are also affected, especially agricultural products including perishable foodstuffs, but also gems and jewellery, electronics, textiles and garments. Some of this can be diverted via Oman and the UAE’s Fujairah port, but much of it passes through the Straits of Hormuz and is potentially blocked and/or stranded at sea.

The Hormuz closure is a body blow to India’s economy. What can and will India do about it? The Indian State has a habit of rising to the challenge only when there is a crisis, while vegetating otherwise. The 1991 economic crisis is a case in point; the sanctions following “The Buddha is smiling”, and the denial of cryogenic rocket engines and supercomputers are other examples where the nation rallied. So were covid vaccines. Necessity, they say, is the mother of invention.

Turning a threat into an opportunity

If I were to be an optimist, I could say that the current crisis is actually an opportunity. In fact, a major opportunity. My reading of the Iran War is that it is President Trump’s strategic tit-for-tat against China for denying him rare earths and cutting off soybean purchases. In return Trump decided to deny China access to oil by closing access to Venezuela and Iran. Whether this will work, or whether the G2 condominium (read ‘surrender’) will prevail, is unclear.

But that is, in a sense, background noise that needs to be managed. India needs to focus on its own issues, of which I see several as critical, and the solution in general is to become Atmanirbhar, self-reliant, and from that, to create an Anti-Fragile nation:

* National security/defense

* Food security

* Energy security

* Digital security/narrative control

* Trade security

The first three do not need an explanation: they are obvious. Internal and external security are pre-requisites for any successful society. If India’s hard-won food security can be threatened by external threats, then there needs to be some deep introspection. Energy security means diversification, both of hydrocarbon sources, and of types of energy, including renewables, nuclear, biomass, coal-based, and so on.

Malign narratives and digital sovereignty

Narrative control is something that the Indian State has failed at so far; it is laughably easy to create hate speech against Indians and India (as has been demonstrated freely by any number of players, starting from the MAGA crowd, to Audrey Truschke to a”Cockroach Janata Party” and some nitwit Norwegian journalist in just the last fortnight) and there are no consequences to the culprits. It’s enough to make me pine for Lee Kuan Yew’s aggressive legal battles against the media.

It’s one thing if it were only a problem with foreigners, but with the massive spread of social media, and in particular generativeAI, it is becoming a serious domestic issue. Since India is an avid consumer of social media, and because generativeAI is trained on things like Wikipedia, X, Whatsapp and Google content, biased and motivated material becomes ensconced as The Truth. I have written about narrative warfare and manufacturing consent.

This used to be a one-way tsunami of (mis)-information by legacy media, but now there is also the opposite: the wholesale and free vacuuming-up of Indian data (whatever happened to “data is the new oil”?). The “Great Firewall of China” both kept out foreign BIg Tech applications and prevented their plundering Chinese data: is that the way to go?

Manufactured narratives are intended for regime change: all the color revolutions today are hatched with massive bot-farms funded by some combination of Deep State, CCP, ISI, Qatar etc. (for example the alleged Gen-Z uprisings that rocked Nepal, drove Sheikh Hasina out of Bangladesh). Thus muzzling malign narratives, and ensuring data security, are imperative.

Even Singapore is not immune: it had to block anti-India narratives that likely originated from Chinese sources.

A particularly striking example of narrative warfare is the virtual hate speech inducted into Wikipedia by deeply prejudiced anonymous editors. Ashley Rindsberg, who exposed the mighty New York Times’ biases in his book The Gray Lady Winked, provides many examples of this.

Of note to Indians and Hindus is his recent substack titled “Wikipedia’s India War” where he identifies just four editors as having created most of the content condemning the Hindu American Foundation (HAF) in ‘Wikivoice’, i.e. the allegedly neutral perspective of Wikipedia. They are, on the contrary, shown to be highly one-sided.As Rindsberg mentions, Wikipedia being central to generativeAI, the damage is baked into the world-view of all AI applications. Truly Orwellian. Says Rindsberg: “four… anonymous accounts can have an enormous impact on what millions of people believe to be the truth.” “Over four years (2021-2025), editors systematically erased HAF’s identity as an American civil rights group, transforming its Wikipedia page into a heavily curated dossier of accusations.”

Trade, and how the Spice Route was far superior to the Silk Road

Finally, something that is becoming increasingly important: ensuring freedom of trade. This is more than just freedom of navigation, although I find it instructive that Emperor Rajendra Chola sent a huge fleet 1,001 years ago simply to open up the Straits of Malacca. India can make an active attempt to regain primacy in Indian Ocean trade, the whole Pax indica idea.

Here is another example of the power of narrative: we have been led to believe that the Silk Road to China was some major highway of commerce between ancient Rome and ancient China, but it was a term coined only in 1877 by the German Ferdinand von Richthofen. There was no highway. A large caravan might take six months, and with 500 camels traversing treacherous deserts and braving bandits, it might carry a maximum of 100 tons. That is puny.

In comparison, on the Spice Route, a single stitched ship from Muziris could carry 400 tons of ivory, pepper, silk, tigers and elephants; and the historian Strabo around 1 CE talks about fleets of 250 ships going from Alexandria to India on a six-week monsoon-powered journey. That is 100,000 tons of merchandise. No wonder Pliny the Elder complained that Rome’s treasuries were being emptied of gold by India.

Simple question: where are hoards of ancient Roman coins found in Asia? Answer: not along the Silk Road. The hoards are in Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka.

Today, it is possible for India to aspire to port-led development of trade, especially with the major ports at Trivandrum (Vizhinjam), Maharashtra (Vadhavan), and Great Nicobar (Galathea Bay). The underlying ‘software’ of India’s millennia-old trade competency was a