Tariffs or no tariffs: India always finds a way

A country with no hope

When we got Independence in 1947, the British Empire had totally impoverished us. We had a record poverty rate; low rates of industrialization and we were low on ideas. To make matters worse, we adopted a doomed socialistic and Licence Raj system. Nobody gave us much of a chance and expected India to disintegrate and become failed state. (To some degree, they still retain that mindset even today)

A starving nation

The first real crisis came in the 1950s and 1960s. Food shortages and starvation. The Bengal Famine of 1943 which killed up to 4 million and triggered by the British Empire was on everybody’s mind. But in the 1960s we ushered in a Green Revolution. We finally started using fertilizers and pesticides, modernized farm tools and irrigation; but mainly switched to high yield seeds. While wheat production saw a miraculous rise, so did many other crops. Punjab became an agricultural powerhouse at that time. (Today the use of pesticides is really frowned upon, but organic farming cannot feed nations, as we recently saw in Sri Lanka. One wonders how else we could have fed the starving masses.)

The grim dictatorship

When India imposed emergency, a lot of foreign commentators clapped their hands with glee, and they were sure India would become a permanent dictatorship. But it did not even last 2 years. It in fact finally led to the concept of a real opposition party at the national level. The Janata Party came to power from 1977-1980 and the Janata Dal ruled from 1989-91 and 1996-98. Even the BJP is a product of that era. (The Bharatiya Jana Sangh joined the JP in 1977 and split as the BJP in 1980).

Total economic bankruptcy

Then in the late 1980s India entered a severe economic crisis. Gold had to be airlifted out of India in return for guarantees on loans. The then Prime Minister Chandra Shekhar was accused of “selling India”. “Who will buy it,” quipped back Chandra Shekhar pointing to a bankrupt nation with little hope at that time. That led to Liberalization in 1991 and an opening up our economic markets. The boom in some form or the other continues to this present day.

The Y2K panic

Towards the end of the millennium (2000), all hell broke loose. Since all computers had the last two digits for year (’98, ’99), the computers would show 2000 as 00. How would the system read this? 0000 year? 1900? That led to such a panic that people imagined stock markets crashing and planes falling out of the sky. Luckily a fleet of backend software guys worked round the clock to solve this problem and bring the year to 4 digits on existing computers.

That’s where India really cashed in. Liberalization had kicked in. The public Internet arrived. Coaching centres like NIIT and Aptech mushroomed all over the place. We suddenly had a fleet of software guys who had worked for US companies and could be integrated into the Indian IT industry. The IT services book took off and laid the foundation for startups. The government caught up digitally too. (A few years back I had gone to the Wikipedia to check the Y2K page and there was not even one mention of India, typical of Western attitudes and the Marxist outlook of Indians who are Wikipedia editors.)

The African AIDS crisis

In he 2000s Africa was absolutely reeling from the AIDS crisis and expensive Western drugs. That’s when India stepped in and started giving cheap generic drugs. This became a boom, and India was called the “drug factory of the developing world”. Today it can easily be the drug factory of the entire world with the right push. (I checked the Wikipedia page on this a few years back and there were exactly zero mentions of India.)

The Covid tragedy

This one is near and closer to heart. There was absolutely mayhem in 2020, and the Indian GDP growth story tanked. But soon India got its act together. The IT services industry boomed. Startups really took off and the likes of Swiggy and Zomato became household names. Remote work became a thing, and India embraced no touch tech. Today our growth story is back and you could say the whole industry got a tech upgrade.

Tariff pe tariff

Which is why the latest crisis of America imposing tariffs and the rest of India should come not as a tragedy but an opportunity. The tariffs are sweeping and arbitrary. But US President Donald Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and sit together a roadmap that can work for all. Let’s face it, a some of our tariffs are downright idiotic and a few can be done away with. We can rethink our trade with China, Russia, the European Union and the rest of the world. We can emerge from this stronger too. At least history seems to be on our side.