CHASING TECH SOVEREIGNTY

Pagers turn into bombs. Chips shatter freemarket dogmas. As tech becomes the new front of geopolitical conflict, India must strive to become a product nation

- Deepsekhar Choudhury

It was just another day in Beirut, on September 17 last year. As ordinary as days could be. The 5,000-year-old city has had a rough few decades caught in the conflicts of West Asia. But life goes on. Until it doesn't. Just as the clock struck 3:30 pm on that day, hundreds of pagers all around the city started beeping. And then exploded.

Chaos ensued. People threw their phones out in fear that those too would explode.

Twelve people died, including two children.

It later surfaced that the explosions were the result of an attack by Israel on operatives of Hezbollah. The attackers had hacked into the pagers and turned them into time bombs.

Two months later in Romania, elections had to be cancelled when a court found that voters had been manipulated using the short-video app TikTok, owned by the Chinese tech major ByteDance.

Halfway through the third decade of the 21st century, geopolitics has changed. As have the ways of geopolitical conflicts. The thaw in the world order that followed the Cold War has ended. And technology has transformed war. No longer does a nation need giant armies to annex territories or change regimes. Sophisticated chips and weaponised algorithms solve it all.

Meanwhile, the world is taking a protectionist turn. Advanced economies are becoming possessive about sharing critical tech. And just about three decades after the global order promised a future of shared prosperity through unhindered global trade, every nation is on its own.

In this new world, India finds itself incredibly vulnerable.