Why India Must Remember How to Build
Trump's rants expose our dependence. But the real problem is deeper—we forgot we were ever builders.
US President Donald Trump has gone on a rant against India and the Indian Prime Minister once again.
Why does he get away with this? It is because he knows that between the two countries, the United States has more leverage over India than India has over the US.
What is this leverage?
India is dependent on the United States for its Tejas project. The GE F404 jet engines will power Tejas aircraft, and without those engines, our biggest aerospace engineering project comes to a halt. Some of the Indian Navy’s largest ships are dependent on US engines for propulsion.
Not just in engines but also in areas like semiconductors, cloud services, even some of the high-end engineering software that we use to design other engineering stuff. We are heavily dependent on the United States.
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If India wants to be a serious nation, it has to invest heavily into becoming a country that makes these things: engines, propulsion systems, semiconductor chips and state-of-the-art AI algorithms.
But these won’t come out of “projects” and “schemes”.
What we need is a complete national revival.A cultural reset. A mindset that prizes innovation over arbitrage trade. A government ecosystem that is willing to invest and back national strategic projects.
What we need is a national renaissance.
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When historians talk about the European Renaissance, they’re describing something very specific: a period when a civilization rediscovered its own capabilities and entered a burst of creation across every field simultaneously.
It wasn’t just art, or just science, or just commerce. It was all of these at once, feeding into each other, creating a flywheel of confidence and output that transformed Europe from a backwater into the centre of global power.
The key insight is that a renaissance is not a philosophy movement or a cultural mood. It is a generative phenomenon—a civilisation that starts making things again, at scale, with confidence.
An Indian Renaissance would be similar: Indians building original things—companies, cities, art, scholarship, institutions—with the confidence that we don’t need borrowed blueprints.
Not rejecting the world, but engaging with it from a position of civilisational confidence. Not imitating the West, but not reflexively opposing it either. Creating from first principles, informed by the deep wisdom of this ancient land but directed toward the future.
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Through our coverage of R&D, deep-tech and government policy issues Swarajya tries to light sparks - we work to light enough sparks that they come together to ignite a flame of Indian renaissance.
We’ve compiled the best of our coverage into a special issue, a manifesto of sorts, that tells India what it needs to fix, what it can aim for and what it does well.
The time to light the flame is now. Trump’s rage baiting may be irritating but the lesson we must learn is to not give anyone leverage over us. And for that we must invest in an Indian renaissance.
I agree with your spirit, quoted below. But disagree with your assessment of European Renaissance. There was an earlier Renaissance in the 9 th century following Ibn Siena's (Avicenna);reform in Islam to reconcile its doctrines with the rationale of Aristotle. Known as Carolingian Renaissance it ushered in the Middle Age and a number of Christian Studies Universities sprouted.
The other, more famous Renaissance was the reaction of midieval Christianity to their defeat by Turks in the Crusades. It was no more than a Protestant Movement against Papacy and Catholic Latinised faith.The achievements were mainly in fine arts like painting, music and drama.The politics of nations and the voracious greed for resources were the results of excessive emphasis on individualism in both thought and interests.
The Indian culture suffered badly by the defects in the Veda centric Discourse created by Veda Vyasa. Unquestionably that created the First version of Bharatam and Bharatiyam as a larger, comprehensive and living identity.
What we need is another Vyasa to update this to make every Indian's heart resonate with it. Harking back and living in a glorified past will make us a nation of mesmerised zombies.
India should wake up and introspect very very seriously..
'Not rejecting the world, but engaging with it from a position of civilisational confidence. Not imitating the West, but not reflexively opposing it either. Creating from first principles, informed by the deep wisdom of this ancient land but directed toward the future."
Very important article, it would have been important if this article covered where are we against each line items, that would have given a confidence. Also how our educational institutions preparing for this requirements, Financial institutions roles and private sectors roles.