SLEEP-WALKING IN A POLICY DESERT

ASHINGTON Irving's ‘Rip Van Winkle’ is about a man who wakes up after a 20-year nap to find that the American Revolution has happened and British King George III's portrait in the village inn has been replaced with that of George Washington.

- C P SURENDRAN

ASHINGTON Irving's ‘Rip Van Winkle’ is about a man who wakes up after a 20-year nap to find that the American Revolution has happened and British King George III's portrait in the village inn has been replaced with that of George Washington. The fable has implications for India today.

The world of 2014, when the present regime at the Centre assumed power, was anchored in an expansionary, hyper-globalised consensus. Immigration pathways remained fluid. Indian students poured into Canada, the UK, Australia and the US. Gulf labour migration stayed robust, anchoring the remittance-driven consumer economies of India’s southern states. The diaspora became a synchronised extension of India soft power.

Twelve years later, like Rip Van Winkle, India is waking up to a world that has fundamentally reorganised itself. The country finds itself in a landscape where hugging diplomacy, laughter and acronymic jokes (AI as “America-India”) have yielded little, except perhaps some 11th-century Chola-era copper plates.

The contemporary equivalent of Irving’s American Revolution is the collapse of the Washington Consensus and the death of open-border globalisation. The geopolitical landscape has fractured. Borders have hardened, immigration has become a volatile domestic weapon and supply chains have splintered into adversarial, securitised blocs.

India pulls in over $135 billion in annual remittances—the highest in the world—with states like Kerala attracting a disproportionate share. A structural contraction in global migration directly threatens household consumption, real estate cycles and the fiscal stability of such remittance-dependent regions.