Indians Have Not Lost Hope – Stop Reading Rants of Foreign Writers

Noted journalist K. Yatish Rajawat comes down heavily on “another rant” from Opinion Columnist of Bloomberg Andy Mukherjee, which he describes as a stuck in the mud view of India, a verbose one, its making the rounds of viral media. To help save you time, I am putting up this post. The challenge with Andy’s writing is that it can paint everything as wrong. The past was sad, current is bad and future is even going to be worse. Though he does not give any data to prove it, you have to believe him because he lived in India for a few years. Fortunately, 1.3 bn people still living and working in India have more faith in the Indian civilization than him.

As per him reforms were unfinished, telecom revolution did not fully happen, software exports were a flash in the economy pan, India remains backward, poor and undeveloped and will continue to do so. Why ? Because Andy’s father’s firm that made shoe uppers  in 70’s could not grow to become an industrial empire for him to inherit.  Because Andy’s mother knitted sweaters, he feels defeated by a darkness and wants that a country of 1.3 bn should not and cannot have any hope or aspiration.

His dramatic headline mentions China but not a word about the debt crisis there, a lot about Zombies business in India but nothing of Zombie banks, State owned businesses with debt mountains in China. A willful dissing of everything that has happened in the last three decades as bad.

Andy Mukherjee has been commenting on India from Hong Kong for decades, while his segmental comments on banking still has some data and nuance. This long diatribe against everything that has happened in India is wrong in every way. Wild sweeping arbitrary statements to boost a pessimist view of India during Covid times is just sad.  Defining India’s only aspiration a ‘national dream of emulating China’  while sitting in Hong Kong is just pandering to the Chinese.  Andy’s beating heart rant is not an analysis, its anger from a ‘past his age’ journalist.  Shallow analysis does revel in criticism as a badge of honor but all it does is create darkness, especially if it is not constructive and moves the debate forward.

What Andy does is beat up a nation battered by Covid, struggling with lost jobs in the biggest healthcare and economic disaster to hit Independent India. He wants Indians to lose hope, lose faith in its systems, give up their dreams and aspiration for a better tomorrow, all because he can weave the darkness into words and call it an essay. I have also attached a list of headline of columns by Andy over the last few months below, see the pattern and repetition of words of failure, lost for the country.
Don’t read the verbose rant of the article below as there is nothing but negativity here.

Views expressed here are those of K. Yatish Rajawat, senior journalist and public policy expert