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Surya Kanegaonkar Profile picture
Surya Kanegaonkar
@suryakane
Trader | Natural Resources, Geopolitics, Economics | Bylines @the_hindu, @myfairobserver, @CNNnews18 | Alma mater @imperialcollege, @uniofwarwick
eagleeye192020 Proud Hindu &Indian-Modi Ka Parivar Profile picture 1 subscribed
Jan 6 • 4 tweets • 4 min read
Maldives is 10x the landmass of Lakshadweep. It has well-developed tourist infrastructure and direct flights to over 60 international cities. Within 2M tourists a year, a country with 0.04% of India’s population gets a third of the number of foreign tourists India receives. China outmuscled India in Maldives because it spent more and in the “right” places. They spent on infrastructure, politicians, propaganda, and state-subsidized direct flights.

Maldives has also been steadily radicalized over the years. Since tourists don’t spend time in Male, they are oblivious to this aspect of the country. Between 2014-18, Maldives sent more people per capita to fight for IS than any other country. The then president Yameen tacitly allowed this to happen. The “India Out” campaign was funded by China with help from Islamists. The MPP successfully convinced a large section of Maldivian society that India is an adversary. It was a multipronged, sustained effort which even involved running Clubhouse discussion rooms 24/7 during the Covid years. In 2022, MPP leaders attacked International Yoga Day celebrations hosted by the Indian embassy. India has yet to figure a way to counter the China-Islamist nexus.

If India wants to compete in tourism, it must work hard to build a global network of direct flights to key tourist destinations in the country. Lakshadweep’s small size means it won’t directly vie with Maldives for the same number of international tourists. It will however, serve Indian tourists and foreign visitors who combine it with other destinations. For example, a Bombay, Goa, Kerala, Lakshadweep circuit could work, give or take one or two on this list.

My guess is that if Air India lives up to its promise and uses the planes on the order book effectively, it can connect Indian tourist destinations globally, much better. Overall, quality control must improve. Tourist visas should be made easier and cheaper to obtain. Hop flight connectivity must improve. If this is done, just Lakshadweep could get a footfall of 500k-1m/year. Geography also limits the kinds of aircraft that can land in Lakshadweep. Minicoy, it’s most populated island is 300km from the atolls. Most resorts in Maldives are 40-200km from Male, Meanwhile, Agatti airstrip is narrow, limited by the island’s width. It’s also just 1.5km. Male’s is 4km and can take wide bodied aircraft.

No doubt though, land can be reclaimed to build infrastructure Lakshadweep. Fast access from the mainland will need reclamation for building an airport that can accommodate medium sized jet liners and not just turbo props. Goa and Bangalore would then be just one hour from the atolls. Currently, the flight time is 3h 15m.Image
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Oct 9, 2023 • 8 tweets • 5 min read
Thread🧵: A multi-century economic and geopolitical cycle is giving way to a new one. This is a tectonic shift which has got accelerated by both withdrawal from old conflicts and and the emergence of new ones. A single major war, like the one in Ukraine, is like an earthquake that precipitates aftershocks and more conflicts.

Some within the power structures of countries seeking to retain their edge will adapt to new realities while others will not. As a result, internal interests often clash. Countries that remained on the margins or in the shadows of larger powers, will muscle flex. With many moving tectonic plates, the magma underneath - in the form of historical grievances and civilizational enmities - surfaces.

Old conflicts are given new political hues. Actions are backed by actors that want to control outcomes in a new global order and in some cases, retain their traditional methods of exercising influence. The arbitrage that major and regional powers enjoyed in conflict economies is under stress, leading to unpredictable outcomes. The attempt to establish new channels of diplomacy in this context receives pushback sometimes from within countries and other times from outside. Empires often shrink from fringes they occupy. The US’ withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021 and the Taliban was reinstalled in Kabul. The US left behind some $80B dollars worth of weapons and military hardware in Afghanistan. Some of these arms are finding their way to conflicts in the subcontinent and in West Asia. The war theater eventually shifted to Ukraine. Ukraine was armed with north of $100B worth of weapons. Many of these arms are making their way into the black market, from Latin America to the Middle East.

While the US lacks the political appetite to put boots on the ground in any major size, it increasingly deploys advanced cyber and over-the-horizon kinetic capabilities. Some of these capabilities are yet to be tested in a hot war. But wars still involve arms, and these are proliferating in areas where geopolitical interests of several countries and two competing power blocs, collide. This poses new risks given the US has reverted to its pre-9/11 stance of broadly dismissing Islamist terror as a non-issue for its own security.
Sep 23, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
It appears @JustinTrudeau’s narcoterror regime is intent on testing if snakes in its backyard can bite more than once. The incendiary rhetoric will likely result in natural consequences at home. Threatening to jail Indians and teach GOI “lessons” will backfire and prove costly. Evidently, GOI is not backing down and those private diplomatic talks the US refers to ended in stalemate. The Trudeau regime, in cahoots with nameless, faceless Democrats, are now ratcheting up the pressure in response. Kicking away an off-ramp means the gloves are off.
Sep 4, 2023 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
The Congress party is the sole reason for India not being a superpower today. Bandits and anti-nationals masquerading as public representatives purposely wrecked India’s economic prospects relative to China’s. On the one hand, the UPA made India reliant on China while on the other hand, it imported a rogue RBI governor who worked hard to deny India industrialization. It’s now a Herculean task to reverse this. You lot couldn’t even build roads and toilets, let alone strategically plan for a future where we would have to face off against China.

The Congress should never see the daylights of power having kept the country poor, looted the citizens and handed our principal adversary a massive leg up in the world order.
The high GDP growth prints during UPA 1 sat atop a growing dependence on imports and a pile of bad debt issued to Congress cronies. It’s taken years to undo that mess and the job is still not done. Look at what the Congress did after NDA 2:
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Aug 25, 2023 • 6 tweets • 4 min read
Dalio reads the tea leaves well. The five factors of production are land, labor, capital, technology and entrepreneurship. Growth will depend on how a country’s political leadership can develop these factors and maximize their value.

Thread: 1. Land: India, the US and China have have 180M, 168 and 165M hectares of arable land each. They will always support the largest populations in the world. The US is abundant in fossil fuels which effectively makes it mostly energy independent. China generally extracts more natural resources - coal, oil and metals - from its land than India does. Yet, it remains a major importer. Food security is a major concern for Beijing so significant resources have been deployed through the BRI in Africa and Latin America to secure farm produce. India has an edge in agriculture but remains energy dependent. One of the biggest revolutions India can witness is in the resources space. If it expands onshore and EEZ offshore mining while securing offtakes from overseas, it can to secure the requirements for its labor and industries.
Jun 19, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Europe is far more conservative than governments like to portray. There’s a rising tide of Euro-ethnonationalism with an undercurrent of religiocentrism. It’ll naturally sweep an aging, economically stagnant continent facing migration from what @JosepBorrellF calls the “jungle.” This piece forms part of an interesting first step by the media to “normalize” right wing European politics. There will be many more articles like this over time, each one gradually blunting what we have known to be traditional criticisms of this movement.
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Jun 19, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Traders and Indian commentators kept saying this for over a year. The international media must’ve known the truth but chose to repeatedly criticize India for buying Russian crude. The political agenda has come full circle before Modi’s US visit. Late acknowledgement is strategic. Journalistic incompetence is normal when media groups scrape the bottom of the barrel in their hiring process. But this wasn’t just incompetence. What we saw since last March was a coordinated and biased media campaign on India’s energy purchases which served political interests.
Jun 18, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
After the USSR folded, economic hitmen were sent to Russia. Under the garb of market reforms, the state was hurriedly stripped of critical assets. The oligarchy was born. Industrial growth collapsed and a fledgling services sector couldn’t compensate. A superpower was demolished. Image The oligarchs transferred a significant chunk of their wealth to the Europe, the UK and the US. Russia was left broken for a decade until Putin arrived on the scene. His ascent to power in 1999 made the West deeply uncomfortable. He stabilized the economy bit by bit.
Jun 17, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Adaptation needs purity in intent, research and execution, else the quality of both flexibility and results will get compromised. Purity is at the heart of Hindu civilizational continuity, Dharmic economics, and the way Indians envision ideal urban spaces and ecological systems. Adaptability is needed to navigate change, a natural consequence of time. But knowing what to adapt and what to leave pure is essential for building a better society. The anchor here must be objective truths. Should the anchor be adaptability itself, we would look like the US.
May 9, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Thought experiment:

1. GOI runs a taxpayer-backed National Fund for Democracy, which, along with Republic Media and Adani Foundation pumps money into a non-profit that selects “fact checkers.”

2. The Indian Embassy in Washington hires an executive from the non-profit to train… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… China successfully worked with the US for the best part of the last forty years because they drew the red lines early on. They also firewalled themselves from the American internet while they conducted corporate espionage and infiltrated US academia, politics, cinema and media.
May 8, 2023 • 8 tweets • 4 min read
So, @Poynter and its employer, @USAndIndia, believe that Indians are media illiterate. They need hand holding by politically aligned “fact checkers” like @boomlive_in from IFCN, which is owned by Poynter. Poynter is funded by a motley group of foundations, and Washington Post. US media is not independent. The “fact checking” industry is an extension of the state. Private donors fund this and provide a smokescreen of “independence.” After co-opting MSM and Big Tech, they silence opposing voices and censor under the garb of combating misinformation.
May 7, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
1. To preserve the dollar’s reserve status, the US cannot afford to default on its interest payments. The government will raise the debt ceiling. Meanwhile, if fiscal spending isn’t reduced, the debt pileup will accelerate. Given competition with China, fiscal expenditure is… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Dedollarization must be seen in context of the break in downtrend of US borrowing costs that began in the 1980s. The US imported deflation from China. The Fed could keep interest rates low. It fueled economic growth. In turn, the US could borrow more and also inflate away debt. Image
May 6, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Indians needn’t be Russophiles to know that the bilateral relationship is undergoing change but will nonetheless be consequential for both sides.

1. There are no permanent friends. Yes, Russia and China find deep strategic convergence in countering the West. But on the economic… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… A tweet is too short to summarize what is evolving to be a complex web of interdependencies. India a year, five years and ten years from now will look very different from today. Relationships aren’t static and India’s growth will be factored into Russia’s strategic calculus.
May 5, 2023 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
Pakistan is a zombie state. It will resemble a mix of Yemen, Syria and North Korea, except with a population multiple times their collective size, in due course. Undereducated, radicalized and deeply divided, it will increasingly face violent internal discontent. Its economy cannot get off the ventilator given poor quality human capital and a lack of money for infrastructure investments. Misaligned incentives mean that its leaders will work actively to siphon local funds. To remain relevant, Pakistan enables donors to receive kickbacks.
Mar 7, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
India’’s Afghanistan policy is dynamic and has adjusted extremely well to the tumultuous geopolitics of the country and region over the decades. It shows what cross-department info sharing, consistency in human and financial investment, and geostrategic maneuvering can achieve. Except for a brief period during Taliban 1.0 and the IC814 hijacking, GOI has rarely been on the back foot. They built a network of incentives and dependencies which created a set of shared interests with influential Afghan groups and individuals both in and out of power.
Mar 7, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
The main challenges to Chinese growth are rising wages, a shift of supply chains out and an aging population. Exports will slow and a pivot to consumption will take time. Meanwhile, real estate - a key sector for leverage - accounts for 20-30% of GDP and is overextended. China is focusing on state control over critical areas to ring-fence itself from the fallout of great power competition. Domestic coal and gas output is growing and this will increasingly power the manufacturing sector. Food security is also critical for political control.
Mar 5, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Globalization 2.0 must rest on power sharing, a term that finds few takers in the US given its position as the dominant power. Realign supply chains into countries that do not seek hostility with the West and craft healthy interdependencies. Seek stability over hegemonic control. Shared prosperity and emerging codependence require an understanding that partners refrain from interfering in the each others’ domestic affairs. It’s also worth noting that while India doesn’t seek hostility, it aims to become the dominant economic and military force in the IOR.
Mar 2, 2023 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
Atlantic Council’s DFR lab has been at the forefront of training Soros-funded, India-focused “fact checkers.” This thread reveals what many handles have known for long - their voices were muzzled because of a political and religious witch-hunt. @vijaya should’ve known that the most authentic political stand a Hindu can take is that of Hindu nationalism since it reflects their identity, history and cultural ethos. That stand can have a variety of interpretations and doesn’t need to be associated with a political party.
Feb 8, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Adani Enterprises rallied 100% from its recent lows and is currently trading around the same level when the FPO was cancelled. Most financial news outlets are silent. Articles on the company’s supposed impending demise have dried up. They’ll restart on the next round of selling. Is the recent rally driven largely by technicals and short covering? Yes. Can the stock price decline again? Of course.

But traders and investors have made it clear that that they don’t see an impending collapse of the firm, regardless of Hindenburg’s allegations.
Feb 7, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Adani Enterprises +14.65% so far today. The big order that went through at 2000 a few days ago may soon be in the money. The ones in the low 1000s are laughing all the way to the bank. Shorts are getting squeezed. Happy hunting! Image Caveating this - short squeezes aren’t always sustainable. Volatility is going to be here for a while. I can imagine some fresh specs are entering to trade the vol and close out positions fairly quickly. Many shorts would’ve averaged in the 3000s, so they are still in the money.
Jan 28, 2023 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
So @CarnegieEndow pays top dollar for a) commentary on ‘South Asian democracy’ as if it’s a kind of monolith, b) citation of discredited rankings from V-Dem and Freedom House, and c) views on India from Asim Ali who claims “Hindus have stopped being minimally decent people.” “Far from being a beacon of democratic hope, South Asia now instead fits a larger global narrative of democratic malaise.” Disingenuous to lump together a democracy with quasi military dictatorships and term governing parties as “regimes” in some kind of grand regional narrative.