The technologies that are revolutionising the world today are developed by minuscule minorities, by microscopic scientific and engineering elites. To fail to value these elites, to trample in the name of “equality” the incentives and work-environment that would spur them to do their best in our country is to forfeit our future. One has only to bear two facts from recent history in mind as an antidote to the nonsense which progressives feed us so often. One, the leaders and movements that have shouted the most about “equality” are the very ones who set up the most tyrannical regimes, the ones that came to be marred by the most brazen inequalities — who has not read of the nomenklatura that came to rule, and eventually ruin, the USSR?

Second, when you are accosted for being an elitist on this score, when you are lectured about the “revolutionary creativity of the masses”, remind yourself of the fate of Mao’s Great Leap Forward, of those backyard steel furnaces, so idolised by our revolutionaries.

We thus have a duality. On the one side are two facts: without the new technologies, the country will be endangered; and these technologies will be developed by tiny elites. On the other side is the equally undeniable fact: the new technologies will just not provide the massive employment that the growth in population and labour force necessitate in India. Even a factory producing automobile parts looks like a Japanese “lights-out” factory. There are few persons on the shop floor: production is all CAD-CAM. The precision that is today demanded by manufacturers who will use these components in their cars and trucks is measured in microns; the dimensions have to be measured by laser beams. This means that for the kind of numbers that need to be absorbed - we need to create 80 million jobs in the next five years — we have to put massive resources into the only activities which can absorb such numbers: agriculture and infrastructure.

Thus, as Deng would have said, we have to walk on two legs. And that reinforces the point we glimpsed earlier: the cost of squandering resources on wasteful, populist schemes will not just be that we will not have those fabs, and thereby forfeit both competitive advantage and national security; we will foment social unrest.

Given these truisms, what must we be doing?

(To be continued)