Washington 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 Indian 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.
The contradictions in our somnambulistic policies are sharp. If we are still sleeping, this is a nightmare. How can BRICS function as a cohesive alternative to Western hegemony when its internal architecture is falling apart? India finds itself hosting an anti‑Western bloc whose primary members back its adversaries, while chasing Gulf partnerships directly targeted by the same bloc members. If it was meant to be a balancing act, its material basis is eroding. Under intense pressure from Trump, India’s cut‑rate purchases of Russian crude are hit, forcing New Delhi to taper the very energy trade that funded its defiance of Western diktats.
The Iran-US war must wake us up. Can India productively absorb its elite tech and research talent if external pathways remain closed? Can IIT and IIM graduates be leveraged for domestic deep‑tech innovation rather than absorbed by a saturated services and gig economy? The Economic Survey notes that R&D spending is structurally stuck at 0.6-0.7 percent of GDP, with very low private‑sector participation for over a decade, while China records around 2.8 percent surpassing the average of Western economies.
We hear stentorian noises about the next great India dream: artificial intelligence. The general opinion of the world, though, is that India has missed the bus. The patriotic rhetoric surrounding AI is particularly delusional. It is sold as India’s shortcut—a digital leapfrog to affluence. But AI is intensely material. The industry requires immense energy inputs and continuous cooling; semiconductor fabrication demands millions of gallons of water daily, while India faces severe groundwater depletion across its primary urban hubs like Bengaluru and Hyderabad. Regions struggling to secure basic municipal water stability are bidding for leadership in a technological domain that depends on unprecedented resource reliability.
Here the contrast with China becomes stark. Through aggressive State‑directed industrial policy, China secures dominance over battery supply chains, semiconductor investments, rare‑earth materials and port infrastructure. It builds institutional ‘return pathways’ for its diaspora—funding laboratories, providing venture capital and offering institutional prestige to repatriate scientists and engineers. Political observer Fareed Zakaria has warned that India, by contrast, risks ending up in a geopolitical no-man’s land: neither firmly aligned with the West nor structurally prepared like China, and therefore unable to fully cash in on its supposed leverage.
Rip Van Winkle survives his sudden displacement into reality because his daughter takes him in. There is an existing social structure capable of reabsorbing him, however out of sync he may be. The question for India is whether its own institutional “daughter’s house” exists.
If Western migration corridors continue to narrow, where do India’s stranded students, underemployed engineers and globally trained researchers go? Do we possess the universities, laboratories, advanced industries and liveable cities capable of receiving them?
India recently secured an agreement for the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company to store up to 30 million barrels of crude oil in India’s strategic petroleum reserves. Instead of future dependence on Iran, one of our hitherto reliable sources, we switched to its enemy without batting an eye, yet remain beset with all the vulnerabilities that come with the same Gulf corridor.
India’s policy imagination remains dangerously calibrated to a bygone global order—one defined by porous borders, integrated markets and globalisation. That world is gone. The warning embedded in ‘Rip Van Winkle’ is not just that a man wakes up to a changed world, but that the world has reorganised itself without him. Optimism and cultural pride are catalysts for national ambition, but in a hardened geopolitical landscape they function as lullabies, not awakening alarms.
C P Surendran | Author whose latest volume of poetry is Window with a Train Attached
(Views are personal)
(cpsurendran@gmail.com)