Editor's Note: New Code Of War

Imagine this: just as Indian troops are gearing up to fight an incursion along the border with China, a nationwide outage hits. City after city goes dark. Every closed-circuit camera shuts down. Key personnel get locked out of their offices. ATMs malfunction. Digital payments stop. And then Beijing starts precision strikes on unguarded routes.

This isn’t fear mongering. But a very real possibility that Ajay Chowdhry, co-founder of HCL and chairman of the Mission Governing Board of the National Quantum Mission, warned me about when I met him last month. The root of this vulnerability? India’s dependence on foreign technology, particularly Chinese systems. Chowdhry’s message is clear: India must achieve strategic autonomy in technology to safeguard its sovereignty.

We live in an era of intensifying geopolitical conflict. The spectre of nuclear war looms large. Russia has threatened to let loose its weapons of mass destruction. Donald Trump—the man who had once threatened North Korea about the size of America’s nuclear button—has returned to the Oval Office.

Globalisation is in peril. The stasis in the world order that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall has been disturbed. China has emerged as an economic and military superpower ready to challenge American hegemony. Demagogues have swept to power. The share of international trade in the global GDP in 2023 has dropped to lower than what it was in 2008.

Navigating this chaotic new world is not easy for anyone. But for India, the world’s most populous nation which desires to become developed in the next 22 years, the challenges are immense. Every day new battlefronts open. And having the second-largest military is not enough.

The wars to come will be wars of technology. Quantum computers of tomorrow will be able to decrypt military communications in seconds. And with equal ease be able to penetrate the cyber infrastructure of banks and stock exchanges. Here on, our fate will be determined by the degree of our tech sovereignty: our ability to build critical technology at home.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the new Frankenstein. As AI chatbots replace traditional search engines, they will become arbiters of truth. And if India does not make its own large language models, future generations will grow up on a diet of foreign narratives detached from its cultural roots and national realities.

India dreams of doubling its per capita GDP every eight years. But no number of hot samosas delivered in 10 minutes will do it. To achieve its economic goals, India needs to arrest its waning labour productivity, spend on research and development and find ways for its youngsters to use tech to compound economic gains.

A multipolar world is scary and promising in equal measure. If India can crack the code of tech sovereignty, it might emerge as a great global power again. If it cannot, it will risk losing its freedom. To its credit, the government has started taking the first steps.

All of this is perhaps too sombre for the first edition of the New Year. But these are trying times, and we need to have difficult conversations. On the bright side, this month we start a new section called ‘Bharat Start-ups’. It will feature entrepreneurs from the heartlands who struggle to secure the spotlight that start-ups in metros get. This will be our way of bringing some of these bright, new ideas to you.