SIZING UP SWADESHI AMBITION

THE meteoric rise of Zoho's messaging app Arattai in India looks like a real-world example of aapada mein avsar (opportunity in adversity), a stage prop which usually serves to dress up debacles as challenges that fortune considerately strews in our path.

- PRATIK KANJILAL

The app debuted in 2021 and enjoyed indifferent growth until the end of September, when its graph suddenly soared-it was being downloaded over 100 times more frequently than before and hit 2 million downloads in a single day on October 1. The earlier baseline was about 3,000 downloads per day.

The Arattai surge was propelled by a concerted wave of endorsements from Union government ministers, whose data and communications are hosted by Zoho to secure digital sovereignty. And these were actually proxy endorsements of the prime minister's call for post-Mahatma swadeshi, even in the choice of messengers. And that, in turn, was an aapada mein avsar response to the tariff war being conducted against India by Donald Trump, an attempt to paper over India's foreign policy setback by dressing it up as an opportunity to support Indian enterprise with Nehru-Gandhi era protectionism. And the windfall beneficiary of this intricate web of global and local forces is Chennai's digital entrepreneur Sridhar Vembu, who promoted Zoho and Arattai.

The primary question is: though tariffs are now spurring protectionism, in the long run, will they actually encourage India to integrate more deeply with globalisation and explore new markets, abandoning protectionist barriers that could have been thrown out long ago with the licence-permit raj? For decades, there's been a case for overhauling frameworks and attitudes to the boilerplate on which the nation runs, but the efforts have been piecemeal, slow and incomplete.