There are possibly five disproportionately large reasons why Indians are among the most affluent and successful immigrant communities across the world, particularly in Anglo-Saxon, First World, developed countries such as the USA, Canada, the UK, and parts of the EU.
- Knowledge of and comfort with English, regardless of accent, MTI (Mother Tongue Influence), or the occasional Indianisation of idiom and syntax.
- Early adoption of computers, software, and IT, right around the mid-1980s, perfectly timed for the Y2K gold rush and the outsourcing boom that followed. This coincided with a rapid expansion of long-distance (STD/PCO) and mobile telephony (pagers and mobiles), internet cafés, and an entire generation that could code before it could legally vote.
- Subsidised higher technical education, especially in engineering and medicine, with fiercely competitive entrance exams, underpaid but brilliant teachers, draconian pass criteria, and vast campuses that looked more like refugee camps than centres of excellence, but produced excellence nonetheless.
- A functioning welfare architecture, however frayed at the edges, with free or subsidised food, healthcare, public transport, primary education, electricity, basic clothing, and access to banking and stable employment. All this while keeping the borders mostly intact and civil unrest largely contained.
- Liberalisation and globalisation in the 1990s, which opened the economy and expanded aspiration without collapsing the social contract. No coups, no famines, no mass privatisations. Just an entire generation entering the middle class without blood on the streets.
The first of these was a colonial byproduct, accidental and oddly fortuitous. The next three were the outcomes of a socialist vision driven by leaders like Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Lal Bahadur Shastri, and Rajiv Gandhi. The fifth was ushered in by the quiet revolutionaries PV Narasimha Rao and Dr Manmohan Singh, who liberalised without detonating the system.
And let us not forget those who laid the groundwork: Vallabhbhai Patel and V. P. Menon, who stitched together a nation where none existed; Ambedkar, Iyer, Munshi, Rau, and others in the Constituent Assembly, who drafted a Constitution not only ahead of its time, but ahead of its society; Chief Justices like Kania, Hidayatullah, Sikri, Bhagwati, and Chandrachud, who held the line when elected governments overstepped; election commissioners like Sen, Seshan, and Lyngdoh, who treated democracy as more than a ritual; and institution builders like Bhabha, Sarabhai, Swaminathan, Kurien, and Mahalanobis, who ensured India did not just survive, but thought, invented, and fed itself.
It is they, along with countless others, who gave the Indian citizen credibility, competence, and dignity on the world stage. Not mythology. Not mysticism. Not mantras. Method, science, law, and language.
Indians embraced English, the lingua franca of global commerce and science. We not only became proficient, but in many cases, far more dexterous than native speakers. We used it to understand, adapt, innovate, and yes, dominate fields as varied as software, law, finance, academia, and medicine. Much like cricket, only with more spreadsheets and fewer leg byes.
Why do I say all this?
Because yesterday, Amit Shah, Union Home Minister, declared:
“The time is not far when people speaking in English in this country will feel ashamed.”
English, he said, is a symbol of colonial baggage. True pride, we are told, lies in rejecting it in favour of native tongues, our “cultural jewels.”
This, from a senior leader of a government whose ministers tweet in English, legislate in English, and govern through institutions built largely in English. And it is not just them.
A growing number of Indians, especially among the wealthy diaspora, are echoing this rhetoric. These are people who owe their privilege to English education, scientific institutions, secular courts, public infrastructure, and socialist policy. And yet today, they ask, without irony and often with disdain:
“What did we even achieve in the past 78 years?”
They sneer at English, in English.
They mock modern medicine while living longer, healthier lives because of it.
They elevate Ayurveda, a pre-germ-theory concoction of herbs, heavy metals, and cosmological speculation, as evidence of ancient genius.
They dismiss subsidies and public services while using roads, electricity, passports, and pensions created by those very mechanisms.
They romanticise a mythical past while living luxuriously in the factual present, built painstakingly by planners, scientists, teachers, and bureaucrats.
And with exquisite hypocrisy, they send their own children to English-speaking private schools in India and prestigious universities abroad, while lecturing the rest of us on the virtues of feeling ashamed for doing the same.
There is a peculiar kind of arrogance, foolish to the point of farce, that does not emerge from struggle, but from being lifted by someone else’s labour and mistaking it for your own ascent, indeed conquest. To rise on the strength of institutions, language, science, and law, and then, once elevated, to pretend you climbed there unaided, indeed against stiff opposition!
It is harvesting the fruit of decades of sowing, watering, and labour, and then declaring the orchard flourished solely because you happened to be standing under it when it ripened.
You forget the blisters that built it, the storms it withstood, the seasons it survived. You dismiss those who toiled as fools, mock the tools they used, and insist the soil was always fertile and just waiting for someone like you. You mistake inheritance for invention, and convenience for consequence.
You feast on the harvest with both hands, then turn away in disdain. You enjoy its shade, its sweetness, its abundance, and then, ashamed of its roots and origin, you set it alight. Not out of need, but out of vanity. Not because it failed you, but because you could not bear the thought that others built it first.
And in doing so, you not only erase the past, you rob the future of any sense of proportion, of humility, of truth.
By spitting on those who came before you, you do grave injustice to those who will come after.
