Semiconductor nationalism

There’s a passage in an interview of former RBI governor Raghuram Rajan, published by Frontline on September 1, that many people seem to have misunderstood, especially on Twitter, where — perhaps unsurprisingly — it has been reduced to “India shouldn’t make chips because it can smuggle them in instead”. Excerpt:I want to emphasise that I’m not against self-sufficiency in defence. That’s very important. If you want foreign presence, get them to manufacture in India because at least we will have control over the factories. Let’s not be overly dependent on importing defence equipment. We had to do this when we were far behind the technical frontier but let’s try and get closer to the frontier sooner. People will say that for this we will have to have the private sector’s presence; and I’m not convinced that it has to be this way but if there are areas that we need to have the private sector’s presence in the defence sector, maybe that could be considered.The problem, of course, is as…