Indians demonstrate the correctness of Murphy’s law repeatedly: if something can go wrong, it will. If it, miraculously doesn’t, we will find new ways to screw things up.
While this is an unflattering view of the average Indian’s (and officialdom’s) chalta-hai attitude, let us step back and ask a different question: what is the single thread (apart from our own follies) that may (or may not) connect the NEET paper leaks, the CBSE exam paper mess (and denial-of-service attacks on the portal), the sudden appearance of the Cockroach Janta Party a few weeks ago, the Bangladesh and Nepal street protests of 2024 and 2025 that sent two incumbent governments packing, the crash of a Tejas aircraft during an airshow in Dubai last year and the endless delays in the delivery of engines for the Tejas programme by GE, the death of India’s first Chief of Defence Staff in a helicopter crash in 2021, and the failure of two PSLV launches – both carrying critical security and surveillance satellites – in two consecutive years? We can add to the list the US targeting of Gautam Adani, India’s richest individual, in an alleged victimless crime (now settled out of court), the short-selling of Adani stock following a negative report by Hindenburg Research on the group, followed in due course by the massive general selling of Indian equities by foreign institutional investors, and the cyber-attack on Jaguar Land Rover (JLR), the only India-owned car company in the UK. JLR lost millions of pounds due to this cyber-attack, and one wonders why only an Indian-owned company was chosen for this honour.You don’t have to believe in conspiracy theories too much, but we must acknowledge one reality: India’s rise will be more contested than the rise of any country, with both America and China keen to slow it down. We didn’t even need to imagine this as Christopher Landau, US deputy secretary of state, made it crystal clear at this year’s Raisina Dialogue. He said in so many words that the US won’t facilitate India’s rise as it does not want to repeat the mistakes it made with China. Translated, this means the US could do a lot to impede our rise – as it did by imposing mindless tariffs and secondary sanctions on India last year under the guise of tackling Russia’s aggression in Ukraine.
