The new United States tariffs on Indian exports, along with pressure over Russian energy purchases, show that economics has become an instrument of geopolitical leverage. India also operates in a difficult neighbourhood that includes cross-border terrorism, nuclear sabre-rattling, and technology choke points. In such an environment, strategic autonomy requires more than diplomacy and deterrence. It must rest on competitiveness at home, on resilient institutions, and on technological capability that reduces exposure to coercion. The Prime Minister’s Independence Day address implicitly made this case by treating aatmanirbharta as the operating system for sovereignty in a world where interdependence is often weaponised.

The idea has deep antecedents. John Maynard Keynes argued in his lecture, later published as National Self-Sufficiency, that while ideas and knowledge should remain international, nations should retain the ability to produce essential goods domestically so they are not hostage to “intolerable interference." The Yale Review publication confirms the essay’s 1933 provenance, though the argument dates to 1931, and it reads today like a blueprint for strategic insulation without autarky.

Read through this lens, the speech’s reform thrust is not administrative housekeeping but the construction of autonomy. Simplifying direct taxes, promising a second generation of GST reforms, scrapping obsolete statutes and compliances, and establishing a Next-Generation Reforms Task Force are instruments for lowering transaction costs and improving predictability. The point is to make India a credible platform for production and a reliable node in reconfigured supply chains. The academic literature has moved in this direction too. Recent surveys of industrial policy find that properly designed interventions can shift resources toward targeted sectors and generate long-run productivity gains, especially when the state works in concert with firms under clear performance criteria. This is the “new economics of industrial policy," and it strengthens, rather than weakens, the case for targeted capability-building that advances national resilience.

The speech also fused security, technology, and industry. Operation Sindoor underscored the value of........

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