1/ Definitely give this a read. Goes to the heart of l'arrangement infernale that Facebook has struck with the BJP in India wsj.com/articles/in-in…
2/ This infernal bargain is that the BJP will help boost FB's userbase and engagement metrics in India, while FB turns a blind eye to the BJP's increasingly violent oppression of non-Hindu religious adherents to build a majoritarian Hindu coalition
3/ This infernal bargain also extends to the BJP's imposition of political controls on capital and tech inflows into the Indian market under Atmanirbhar, to force foreign companies to embrace its majoritarian politics and partner with favored domestic oligarchs
4/ This is most egregiously demonstrated in how nearly half of India's FDI for 2020 was concentrated in Mukesh Ambani's "everything platform", Reliance Jio thehindu.com/business/Econo…
5/ This would be fine if Indian conglomerates behaved like Korean or Japanese conglomerates in aggressively absorbing foreign technology and processes to upgrade domestic productivity, but instead, they seem to focus on digitized rent-seeking and capturing vertical value chains
end/ The end result of this is that India becomes a progressively more oligarchal and less competitive economy whose firms are ever-increasingly dependent on government protection and unable to internationally compete... which is great for Ambani and the BJP, but bad for India
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