The Narendra Modi globetrotting juggernaut hits Silicon Valley this weekend. The prime minister will visit the headquarters of some of the world’s most creative companies — Tesla, Google and Facebook. The valley, in itself, is a global brand name for innovation: a mystical land of moonshot ideas that auto-magically turn into real products, which then become so indispensible to our daily lives that we wonder how humans lived without them for so long. And it always starts with one mad geek and his world-changing fantasies.

Take, for example, Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla Motors and SpaceX. He is the rockstar entrepreneur and mad scientist who is creating electric cars and batteries that will make the internal combustion engine obsolete, building his own space rockets to colonise Mars and bringing artificial intelligence ever closer to the everyday.

The futuristic vision and scalability of Silicon Valley contrasts quite starkly at times with the Narendra Modi government’s ham-handed, jugaad approach to India’s future. Recently, none other than RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan called out this jugaad approach to policymaking. Speaking earlier this month at the CK Prahalad Memorial Lecture in Mumbai, he asked for “discipline to stick to our strategy of building the necessary institutions and creating a new path of sustainable growth where jugaad is no longer needed.”

This government’s jugaad approach was most visible in the way it tried to amend the Land Acquisition Bill through an unsustainable ordinance. Rather than take the long route of building support across parties for the bill, it chose the ordinance jugaad , which ultimately collapsed, as most jugaad contraptions eventually do.

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has been blaming the opposition for stalling the Goods and Services Tax, another reformist piece of legislation. He seems to have forgotten that he led the BJP’s opposition against the same bill when the party was sitting on the other side of the aisle in Parliament till May 2014.

On August 26, 2012, he had said outside Parliament, “there are occasions when obstruction in Parliament brings greater benefits to the country.”

Once again, it is an unprincipled jugaad strategy at work from both our main parties, which will brazenly stall reforms and economic growth when in opposition, but look to slyly push them through when in power. They forget (or don’t care) that if both parties take the same stance, what you have is a dysfunctional Parliament and a democracy that is unable to bring about the changes needed by its citizens. Not once have either the BJP or Congress shown the conciliation, generosity or give-and-take that comes with an ambitious, long-term vision.

In Silicon Valley, salesman Modi will undoubtedly make his pitch for global tech giants to make in India and sell in India. He will rally NRI crowds with big talk of how his government has restored national pride, eased business conditions and visa procedures. His photo-ops with Zuckerberg, Musk, Google’s Sergey Brin & Co will go viral on social media, as will his live-streamed town hall Q&A at the Facebook headquarters. His supporters will lap up this global ambassador who is at home with the gods of hi-tech and entrepreneurship in the paradise of modernity.

At home though, his government still shuns modernity for obscurantism. His Culture Minister believes women should not go out at night; BJP state governments are encroaching on our food choices with random meat bans; the government’s draft policies on net neutrality and encryption shows a bureaucracy stuck in the dark ages of information control; ‘godman’ Ramdev is tying up with Indian Institutes of Technology and the Defence Research and Development Organisation, while rationalists are being killed allegedly by extremist Hindutva groups. These are not the signs of a cosmopolitan and scientific society, which leads to a free flow of ideas and innovation.

As a Financial Times article warned, “Modi may have to decide whether he wants to be leader of an ancient Hindu civilisation too proud to think it needs help from the outside world, or of a modern, outward-looking nation of young people even more tech-savvy than he is.”

The misplaced pride that ‘nationalist’ forces have in our ancient practices and jugaad contraptions is a serious impediment to real, scalable innovation in India. The government’s paternalistic desire for control over information, food and religious choices, is alarming and dangerous. Till this Indian government, led by the prime minister himself, grows out of this cocoon, it will not be able to embrace the true spirit of Silicon Valley.

Modi and India will have to choose between Tesla’s electric cars and the overloaded jugaad vehicles of rural India. We will have to choose between a sustainable, long-term vision and opportunistic politics geared to win elections. We will have to choose between science and fraud. We must choose wisely between Elon Musk and Baba Ramdev.

Sambuddha Mitra Mustafi is the founder of The Political Indian; @some_buddha

Related Topics
comment COMMENT NOW