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Feb 25, 2026
Rohit KA & Dr A Adityanjee

US Capture of Venezuelan Crude Oil: Strategic Implications

Introduction The United States’ takeover of Venezuelan crude after Nicolas Maduro’s capture in Jan 2026 marks a seismic shift in world geoeconomics. The United States of America now controls the largest proven oil reserves globally, which are approximately 300 billion barrels of heavy crude oil extracted from the Orinoco belt in Venezuela. This disrupts supply chains tied to China, Russia, Cuba, and Iran. Through the lens of maritime trade, logistics, and supply chain, this rewrites tanker routes, spikes compliance risks, and weaponises naval power for US-centric flows, which span into the Caribbean Sea, the Atlantic Ocean, and the Indian Ocean. Cargoes flood US Gulf Coast refineries built for heavy sour crude oil. There will be a sudden demand for tankers to move this oil due to the limited availability of ships worldwide, which will increase shipping rates. These increased shipping costs in restricted areas, along with sanctions and high demand, will result in higher insurance premiums. In such a scenario, a competitive environment (fewer tankers) with only a few players will result in a winner-takes-all choke point battle. Maduro’s fall also relieves neighbouring Guyana, ending years of threats over energy-rich Essequibo, which is two-thirds of its territory. Neo-realist Power Maximisation in Maritime Domains Neorealism sees the world as chaotic, where countries boost their power edge by holding sea lanes of communication and logistics. The seizure of oil tankers by the US forces beginning in 2026 serves as a clear, real-time indicator of Neo-realist power. The US identified and pursued Venezuela’s “dark fleet” of VLCCs (Very Large Crude Carriers) hiding with AIS (Automatic Identification System) spoofing, which sent 80-90% of exports, which is roughly about 900,000 bpd, to Chinese refineries through ship-to-ship transfers in West Africa and the Malacca Strait. The US Navy's boarding and seizing of oil tankers belonging to the shadow fleet of Iran and Russia stops them from obtaining cheap heavy crude feeds and raises costs for them. Gulf Coast refineries like Phillips 66, with two sites each handling 200,000 bpd of Merey-grade oil, now lead the competition of heavy crude oil. The utilisation of Venezuelan heavy crude oil in the United States is designed to strengthen the US energy self-rule by reducing reliance on other foreign sources. However, this shift has disrupted established global oil trade routes, increased shipping traffic in the Atlantic path, and put pressure on the Panama Canal. The dominance of the US Navy strengthens the US's top spot in the Western Hemisphere under a new Monroe Doctrine, which is the “Donoroe Doctrine," just like the old Monroe Doctrine, powered by satellite data and control of the US Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) that blocks insurers and ship inspectors from helping US sanctions-breakers like China and Iran. The recent US embargo on the supply of Venezuelan crude to Communist-controlled Cuba has reduced the energy supply to that island nation by 75%, leading to severe shortages. While Russia has condemned this oil blockade, there is a potential for Russian tankers to break the US embargo, leading to a situation like the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. The US has already intercepted Russian tankers in the past, but repeated strategic insults to Russia may not go unanswered. The US weaponisation of Venezuelan crude supplies to Cuba, combined with threats to Mexico to stop exporting crude oil to Cuba, is leading to a humanitarian disaster for the civilian population in Communist-controlled Cuba. Trade route rerouting and Global Freight Volatility Venezuela dodged the US-imposed unilateral sanctions before the takeover; these included ships leaving Puerto Jose under Russian or Panamanian flags and switching STS (ship-to-ship transfers) off the Ghanaian or Malaysian coast. From there, it reached Dalian port as fake Malaysian mixes. After the US oil companies obtained control over the Venezuelan crude oil, there was an increase in traffic between the Orinoco Belt and the Gulf Coast, which supports 60% of flows. This, in turn, packs the Panama Canal (which has a potential of a 5% rise in Venezuelan traffic), stresses the Gulf docks, and changes VLCC use by pulling ships from Asia spot markets and raising charter rates. Reuters reports that companies are hurrying to build compliant shipping, booking berths, getting P&I (Protection & Indemnity) cover, and using blockchain and immutable digital ledgers to prove the exact origin of the oil so that every step of the journey is legal. But the ongoing jams cause price twists, discounts shrink as buyers fight, and heavy crude benchmarks push up. Reuters also reports the United States has given export licenses to trading firms such as Vitol and Trafigura to market and sell Venezuelan crude oil. In this multipolar world, China takes the hardest hit as it scrambles for Middle East oil or refinery overhauls. Russia and Iran watch their shadow model collapse and race toward Arctic/Caspian oil alternatives. Stakeholder Redistribution and Supply Chain Fragility The US Gulf Coast refiners will now get cheap feed stocks fit for their refineries. Oil giants see the rebuilding of their refineries, and traders play with prices via the pricing standards of dollar Houston spots. On the other hand, China and Russia face feed shortages for their independent refineries. Beijing faces a feed shortage for its TEAPOTS (small) refineries, cutting $10-60 billion in holdings. Moscow drops anti-US sentiments and avoids addressing specific narratives, accusations, or shared information (dodging books). Middle countries like India take temporary side hits, notable examples being ONGC (Oil and Natural Gas Corporation) Videsh, having unpaid cash and waiting for the US deal to be fixed. The US offers Venezuelan crude to India in place of Russian crude supplies. Large state refiners like Indian Oil Corp, Hindustan Petroleum, and Bharat Petroleum, along with private refiners like Reliance and HPCL-Mittal Energy, order large amounts of sour Venezuelan crude. Insurers and ship runners put themselves in a tight spot. Maritime insurers (P&I clubs) are reducing coverage for ships visiting Venezuela due to U.S. sanctions, demanding clear Automatic Identification System (AIS) tracking to ensure compliance. The crackdown on the 'Dark Fleet' closes the legal and technical gaps that allowed these "dark" ships to operate discreetly, such as fraudulent registrations or ship-to-ship transfers in international waters and is placing further pressure on the global supply chains of crude oil already strained by Houthi attacks in the Red Sea and Suez Canal. The logistics involved in the supply of crude rely on efficient, "immediate" tanker loops through chokepoints like Panama or the Suez Canal, which will go into a major disaster, and even a single blockage or localised conflict can disrupt up to half of the world's energy shipments, leading to global economic consequences. Maritime Risks and Escalation Scenarios The Caribbean Sea, the Atlantic Ocean, and the Indian Ocean shipping lanes have become the world’s most dangerous waters, where every oil tanker risks sparking military conflict. US Navy ships patrol 24/7 under the guise of prohibiting drug smuggling, but their intentions are something different, and that is to control the Venezuelan oil from reaching China, Russia, and Iran. US actions create counteractions from its rivals, that is, China, Russia, and Iran. China sends warships to guard the remaining cargoes through the narrow, risky straits where collisions happen easily. Russian submarines quietly sail close to Venezuela’s coast, close enough to warn but not shoot. Iran pays armed local groups to run fast rocket boats through Caribbean tanker lanes, testing US limits. Even minor clashes could cause massive shipping costs to go up by 30% overnight, similar to an oil hike due to the ongoing Ukraine war. The worst-case scenario could be to destroy trade; Iranian teams plant underwater bombs on piers or fire cheap missiles on oil tanks, stopping 500,000 barrels daily in a jiffy, like the oil embargo by OPEC in 1973, when Middle Eastern countries cut off their oil supplies and crashed Western economies with empty gas stations and factory shutdowns. Legal fights freeze everything. Four groups claim PDVSA (Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A.) ownership: Venezuela’s (Maduro’s) last government, the 2018 elected congress, China’s $60 billion loans, and US $30 billion bonds. The $150-170 billion debt stops all new factors. India’s ONGC loses $1 billion with no defined legal ownership. Oil prices swing wildly. Late 2025 exports crashed from 900,000 to 200,000 barrels daily, jumping Brent crude from $75 to $92. Fixed fields pump 2 million barrels. When electric cars kill heavy oil demand, the USA wins strategically; it gets cheap oil for refineries while the rivals starve. But victory is on a knife's edge; one wrong decision equals a world economic crash. US forces must patrol forever across these three oceans, watching every tanker, port, and radar blip daily. Geopolitical Implications This isn’t just about barrel shifting- it’s tectonic plate relocation in energy geopolitics. The US-Venezuelan oil grab rewrites the global power map, turning maritime logistics into precision weapons of doomsday. Panama and Gulf chokepoints now rival Hormuz and Malacca, which are strategic arteries where America’s "denial power” locks petrodollars against yuan experimentation, forcing Beijing into costly Middle East bidding wars that strain Saudi relations. Guyana emerges as the quiet victor, suddenly free from Maduro’s Essequibo sabre-rattling that threatened two-thirds of its energy-rich territory. ExxonMobil’s offshore fields can now breathe, potentially catapulting Guyana into OPEC while weakening US strategic encirclement arguments. Cuba oscillates on collapse, which makes the 75% energy cut trigger rolling blackouts, hospital failures, and ration card riots. Havana faces a stark choice: the first one is to capitulate or double down on desperate Russian/Iranian lifelines, risking another missile crisis when Putin’s tankers test the naval picket line. Mexico walks a diplomatic tightrope, which includes US threats to choke its Cuba crude exports and pits neighbourly solidarity against MAGA wrath. China plays 4D chess: Chinese small refineries called (TEAPOT) refineries starve without mercy discounts, and $60 billion in oil-for-loans evaporates, pushing Xi Jinping toward Saudi reconciliation or domestic shale acceleration. Russia pivots the Arctic, which follows the Northern Sea Route, and it becomes the petrostate's highway, shipping Yamal LNG past US patrols. Iran sharpens the Hormuz dagger, threatening a tit-for-tat tanker war if Venezuelan shadow routes get boarded. Europe looks two-faced; they criticised Russia at the UN over Ukraine, but stayed quiet when the US seized Venezuelan oil tankers. India is in a tough spot, both good and bad. ONGC Videsh has more than $1 billion stuck in Carabobo and San Cristobal projects; it needs the help of the United States to help it to back out. Tanker price hurts 10% of India's oil buyers from the Gulf/Russia. Short-term win: Venezuelan crude offer - Indian Oil Corporation, HPCL, BPCL, Reliance, and HPCL grab cheap Merey crude oil. But in the long run, an oil buildup in Guyana has happened, which has already raised 20%, locking long-term tanker rents (VLCCs). The green energy shift hurts. The dependence on heavy crude oil is increasing the carbon cost to more than $180 billion. Orinoco fix loses to US shale strength, the Guyana light oil boom, and Middle East solar power. The world always watches tankers, ports, and waves.

Feb 23, 2026
Gargi Joshi

Why India's Civilisational Intelligence Will Outpace Silicon Valley's Vision

DHARMA IN THE AGE OF ALGORITHMS In early 2026, the world witnessed something remarkable. At the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed leaders from over fifty nations with words that cut through a decade of Silicon Valley supremacism, “Some people see fear in AI, but India sees fortune and future in it. The real question today is not what AI can do, but what humans can do with it.” These words were not mere political rhetoric. They were a civilisational declaration. They announced, quietly but unmistakably, that a billion-year-old culture built on Dharma, on righteous order, on the flourishing of all living beings, on wisdom rooted in Satya and Ahimsa, had entered the most consequential technological race in human history. And it had entered not as a consumer, not as an imitator, but as an architect with its own blueprint. This essay argues that in the age of Artificial Intelligence, India’s Dharmic worldview is not a handicap but a profound competitive and moral advantage. That the Western, and specifically the American techno-capitalist model of AI development, is producing a form of civilisational poison, what our ancestors would recognise as Asuri (demonic) intelligence: intelligence without conscience, power without purpose, wealth without Dharma. And that India, if it holds its nerve and its roots, is positioned to offer the world not just a product, but a path. I. The Anthropology of Silicon Valley To understand why India’s approach matters, we must first honestly reckon with what the dominant Western AI paradigm actually represents. And there is no better lens for this than a single, chilling statement from Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, made in defence of AI’s enormous energy consumption: “People talk about how much energy it takes to train an AI model… But it also takes a lot of energy to train a human. It takes like 20 years of life and all of the food you eat during that time before you get smart,”, Sam Altman, CEO, OpenAI Read that again. The head of the most powerful AI company on earth has just described a child growing into a human being as an inefficient ‘training run’, a biological investment measured in calories and years, evaluated purely on the output of cognitive utility. In a single sentence, he has reduced the mystery of human personhood, the wonder of childhood, the bonds of family, the accumulation of culture, memory, love and wisdom across twenty years of living, to a cost-benefit equation. This is not merely a clumsy analogy. It is a revealed worldview. And its implications are catastrophic. Because once you accept the premise that humans are essentially inefficient meat-computers, the logical conclusion follows with terrible coherence: that artificial intelligence, which trains faster and cheaper, is not merely equivalent to human intelligence but superior to it. That burning mountains of electricity to build synthetic minds is not a trade-off to be agonised over but a simple upgrade. That human flourishing, education, childhood, culture, and raising of families, is a bug in the system, not the point of the system. This is what the ancient Indian texts would recognise as the Asuri temperament. In the Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 16, Sri Krishna describes the Asuri disposition: those who deny the Divine order, who act from ego and desire alone, who see the world as existing purely for their exploitation. “The world is without truth, without a moral basis, without a God… What is there but desire?” (16:8). For the Asuri personality, everything, land, water, data, human beings, is a resource to be extracted. Sam Altman’s worldview is structurally identical. To look at a billion people’s data as a resource deposit. To view land and water as AI infrastructure inputs. To compute human existence as an energy cost. This is not the failure of a single man’s imagination; it is the logical terminus of a civilisation that divorced technology from ethics several centuries ago and has been running that experiment ever since. II. Monopoly, Control, and the New Colonialism The Asuri logic of Silicon Valley does not merely produce bad philosophy. It produces bad economics. Specifically, it produces a monopoly, the concentration of transformative power in the hands of a tiny number of companies and individuals who then use that power to shape, extract from, and ultimately govern the lives of billions of people who had no say in the matter. Consider the infrastructure being built. OpenAI’s ‘Stargate’ project envisions $500 billion in AI infrastructure, much of it oriented around data centres that will process the digital lives of people across the Global South, their health data, their financial transactions, their political opinions, their cultural expressions, and feed them into models that optimise for outcomes decided in San Francisco boardrooms. The data flows in one direction. The wealth flows in one direction. The control sits in one place. This is not a partnership. It is the digital infrastructure of neo-colonial extraction, dressed in the language of innovation and opportunity. The early European trading companies also came with gifts, with technology, and with the promise of mutual benefit. We know how that ended. The lazily celebrated ‘AI race’ framing, where nations compete to dominate AI, is itself a product of this worldview. Racing to dominate implies that the purpose of AI is power over others. It assumes a zero-sum world where one nation’s AI supremacy is another’s subjugation. This is precisely the mindset Dattopant Thengadi identified as the fatal flaw of both Western capitalism and Soviet communism: the reduction of all human activity to a competition for material dominance, with the strongest extracting from the weakest, and calling this progress. III. Two Summits, Two Worldviews Figure 1: Contrasting visions at the Paris AI Action Summit (2025) and the India AI Impact Summit 2026, New Delhi , JD Vance on risk appetite vs. PM Modi on human agency The contrast between the 2025 Paris AI Action Summit and the 2026 India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi is instructive. At Paris, JD Vance’s address, dismissing AI safety concerns as ‘too self-conscious’ and ‘too risk-averse’, captured the dominant American posture: move fast, regulate later, and let markets sort out the consequences. The implicit assumption is that those consequences will be borne by others. In New Delhi, the spirit was categorically different. Modi’s framing, that the question is not what AI can do, but what humans can do with it, places the human being at the centre of the story, not as a cost item but as the protagonist. The Summit drew more attendees than Paris. Senior leaders from over fifty nations were present. And yet, notably, not a single Chinese firm was visible. The story being written in New Delhi was distinctly, consciously, Indian. Journalist reports from on the ground captured what official communiqués often miss: an unmistakable sense of civilisational confidence. India’s AI ecosystem is not mimicking Silicon Valley. It is building something different: Sarvam AI, India’s first fully homegrown multimodal, multilingual large language model, beat Gemini and GPT on India-specific tasks just two days before the Summit. An Indian DeepSeek moment, celebrated not as a challenge to America but as proof of indigenous capacity. As one observer put it, “Indian tech has officially arrived on the global AI stage.” IV. The Seven Pillars and the Dharmic Difference Figure 2: The Seven Pillars of the India AI Mission: compute, datasets, future skills, safe AI, innovation, applications, and startup financing Look carefully at the architecture of the India AI Mission’s Seven Pillars. What is remarkable is not merely what they include, but the order of their priorities and the philosophy embedded in their framing. The pillars are: India AI Compute, India AI Dataset Platform, India AI Future Skills, Safe and Trusted AI, India AI Innovation Centre, India AI Application Development Initiatives, and India AI Startup Financing. Compare this with the American approach, which is essentially: build the biggest models, attract the most capital, dominate the global stack, and let diffusion happen through market mechanisms. India’s framework is structurally different. Skills and safety are not afterthoughts or regulatory burdens; they are foundational pillars, equal in architectural weight to compute and capital. India is focused heavily on AI diffusion to the last mile, preparing to become the AI-enabled society of the future. This is not merely a policy preference. It reflects a deeply Bharatiya understanding of what technology is for. In the tradition of Kautilya’s Arthashastra, the measure of good governance is Yogaksema, the attainment and protection of the welfare of all people, not just the elite. The Arthashastra states clearly: what is grown must be protected, and what is protected must be distributed (Rakshanam → Vardhitam → Vitranam). India’s AI Mission, imperfect as any policy must be, is attempting to operationalise this ancient principle at a digital scale. AI capabilities would diffuse to a depth no society has reached yet. Nine hundred million Indians are plugged into high-speed data networks. The government is focused on last-mile adoption, skilling, and safety. Scale that across 1.4 billion people, including 500 million farmers, 60 million small businesses, 250 million students, and you begin to understand why India’s AI story, if it holds its Dharmic course, will not merely be different from Silicon Valley’s, it will be vastly more consequential for human welfare. V. The Underground Cables and the New Architecture of Trust Figure 3: Google’s $15B undersea cable network connecting the US, India, Australia and South Africa via Vizag, India, as the central node of future data flows The geopolitical dimension of the India AI Impact Summit was equally significant. Google announced a $15 billion investment in undersea cables landing at Vizag, connecting the United States, India, Australia, and South Africa. Microsoft announced a $50 billion pledge to expand AI across the Global South through skilling and infrastructure. The Tata Group and OpenAI are jointly building one of the largest Stargate data centres outside the US, a one-gigawatt facility valued between $35 and $50 billion. NVIDIA’s partnerships are pervasive across every major Indian AI project. Lazy commentary in both the West and India has dismissed these deals as either ‘spectacle’ or ‘digital colonisation.’ Both readings miss the strategic reality. India negotiated these partnerships from a position of sovereign strength, not supplication. The Tata-OpenAI deal, crucially, gives India the ‘off switch’ on Indian data flows to US models, a sovereignty provision that no previous technology partnership between India and the West has achieved. India’s use of UPI’s scale for a global AI standard through the FiMI-NPCI partnership further exports India’s Digital Public Infrastructure model to the world. This is the Dharmic approach to partnership: not dominance, not submission, but reciprocity. Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam, the world as one family, does not mean naive surrender of sovereignty. It means engaging with the world from a position of grounded identity and mutual benefit. The Arthashastra is clear on this: a ruler must exercise bargaining power to secure the best terms, while linking foreign technology to the development of indigenous capability. India has done precisely this. What is more, these cables bypass the Red Sea chokepoints that have made global data flows vulnerable. India, positioned at the centre of this new network architecture, becomes not merely a consumer of global AI but its infrastructure. The data corridor connecting the US, India, Australia and South Africa is, in geopolitical terms, a reorientation of the world’s digital spine away from traditional chokepoints. India is not a node in someone else’s network. India is becoming the network’s new centre of gravity. VI. The Cultured Leaders and the Bharatiya Technologist What makes this moment genuinely different from previous waves of Indian technology engagement is the emergence of a new class of Indian entrepreneur, scientist, and policy leader who is self-consciously working from within a Dharmic frame. They do not need to be told that technology must serve human flourishing. They know it in their bones, because they come from a civilisation that spent millennia thinking carefully about what human flourishing actually means. Dattopant Thengadi, whose vision of a Third Way beyond capitalism and communism has become increasingly prescient, wrote that the goal of all life is happiness, complete, solidified, eternal, and unintermittent, and that this happiness must reign at physical, mental, intellectual, and spiritual levels simultaneously. A technology policy built on this foundation looks radically different from one optimised purely for GDP growth or market capitalisation. Thengadi was also prescient about the dangers of uncritical technology adoption, “The sudden application of a new technology, useful in one set of socio-economic conditions, to a different economy in which those conditions are absent may considerably upset the socio-economic life and relations prevalent under the latter.” This is not technophobia. It is wisdom. India’s technologists who carry this wisdom, who ask not ‘can we deploy this?’ but ‘should we deploy this, and how, and for whom?’, are building something more durable than the next unicorn valuation. The Sarvam AI story is exemplary here. Founded by Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar, built on the principle that AI must serve India’s linguistic and cultural diversity, not flatten it. Sarvam has produced the first truly multilingual Indian LLM capable of operating across the full richness of Indic languages. This is not just technically impressive. It is Dharmic. It says: the 700 million Indians who do not speak English are not edge cases. They are the centre of the story. Their languages, their knowledge systems, and their ways of knowing are not barriers to be overcome by an English-trained model. They are assets to be served. Similarly, India’s push to embed AI into its Digital Public Infrastructure, Aadhaar, UPI, DigiLocker, represents a model of AI deployment that Silicon Valley has not imagined and cannot easily replicate. Because Silicon Valley’s model requires data monetisation to generate returns. India’s DPI model generates public value without requiring data to be sold. The business model is civic, not extractive. The architecture is Dharmic. VII. The Third Way: Beyond Capitalism and Its Discontents Arnold Toynbee, one of the greatest historians of civilisation, wrote with striking foresight, “At this supremely dangerous moment in human history, the only way of salvation for mankind is an Indian way. In the present age, the world has been united on the material plane by Western technology. But this western skill has not only annihilated distance; it has armed the peoples of the world with weapons of devastating power… The only way of salvation for mankind is the Indian way.” Thengadi built on this intuition with rigorous intellectual architecture. He identified three fundamental failures of the Western paradigm: its reduction of all value to economic value, its divorce of technology from culture and ethics, and its inability to conceive of human progress except through material accumulation and competitive dominance. The result, as he observed, was not merely philosophical failure but civilisational dysfunction: degenerative disease, psychiatric disorder, ecological destruction, wealth inequality, and the paradox of unprecedented material abundance producing unprecedented spiritual poverty. The Third Way, rooted in Dharma, offers a different grammar entirely. It holds that economics must be embedded in ethics. That technology must serve human and ecological flourishing, not dominate it. That the goal of national life is not GDP but what Thengadi called ‘Param Vaibhavam’, the pinnacle of glory of a people who have fulfilled their potential at every level: physical, cultural, spiritual and intellectual. And that this goal requires, in Kautilya’s precise formulation, that what is grown is protected, and what is protected is distributed. This is not romanticism. It is a practical programme. And India is, haltingly but unmistakably, beginning to implement it in the domain of AI. The Safe and Trusted AI pillar of the India AI Mission is not window dressing. It is an attempt to operationalise the Dharmic principle that power must be exercised responsibly and that those who wield transformative technologies bear a duty of care to those most vulnerable to their effects. India’s insistence on digital sovereignty, on maintaining the off switch, on building indigenous models, on ensuring that AI diffusion reaches the last mile, is the application of Thengadi’s principle that technology must be controlled for the benefit of the many, not extracted by the few. And India’s positioning of itself as a bridge between the Global South and the technological frontier, offering Microsoft and Google access to unparalleled data and compute scale in exchange for infrastructure, skilling, and genuine partnership, is Kautilya’s bargaining wisdom applied to the twenty-first century. VIII. Why India Will Surpass the Rest There is a quiet but growing consensus among serious observers of global technology that India is not merely a participant in the AI race but its most interesting dark horse. The reasons go beyond the obvious: the demographic dividend, the engineering talent pool, and the scale of digital adoption. They are structural and civilisational. First, India has what no other large nation possesses in comparable depth: a living intellectual tradition that asks hard questions about the relationship between knowledge, power, and ethics. The Indian scientific and entrepreneurial community does not need to import these questions from philosophy departments. They breathe them in from a culture that has been grappling with them for millennia. This gives Indian technologists a native capacity for the kind of ethical reflection that Silicon Valley is only now, painfully and reluctantly, beginning to develop. Second, India’s diversity is not a weakness but an extraordinary training ground for robust AI. The challenge of building systems that work for speakers of Tamil, Marathi, Bengali, Odia, and Gondi simultaneously, that respect the epistemic diversity of Indian knowledge systems, is vastly harder than building for a monolingual population. Systems that solve for Indian diversity will be more robust, more adaptable, and more genuinely intelligent than systems trained only on English-language internet data. Third, India’s model of AI deployment through public digital infrastructure, where the state acts as a platform builder rather than a gatekeeper, and where AI capabilities are diffused to citizens rather than monetised from them, is likely to prove far more politically sustainable than the American model. There is a growing global backlash against the concentration of AI power in the hands of a few corporations. India’s alternative model, AI as a public good, AI as DPI, AI as Yogaksema, offers a template that dozens of nations in the Global South are watching carefully and beginning to emulate. Fourth, and most profoundly, India has something that no amount of capital or compute can manufacture: cultural coherence. A shared civilisational story that gives its people a sense of who they are, what they are for, and what technology is meant to serve. Sam Altman’s anthropology of humans as inefficient training runs and produces AI companies that cannot answer the question ‘AI for what?’ without eventually arriving at answers that serve the elite few rather than humanity. While India’s Dharmic anthropology considers humans as divine sparks engaged in the great project of collective flourishing, produces a different question and a different answer. IX. The Guardrails We Owe the Young There is one challenge that the Dharmic framework demands India face honestly, and which the techno-utopian narrative conspicuously avoids: the question of the young. India has the world’s largest youth population, a median age of twenty-eight, 600 million people under twenty-five, plugged into high-speed data, aspirational, energetic, and increasingly educated. This is rightly celebrated as India’s greatest asset. But it is also a profound responsibility. A young demography exposed to AI-driven jobless growth, to development sold as material excess and dopamine-hit consumption, to a world in which their cultural identity is systematically flattened by English-language AI models trained on Western values, this is not an opportunity. It is a crisis waiting to happen. The Dharmic framework demands that India ask hard questions that the capitalist AI model cannot ask without undermining its own logic: What happens to the farmer whose expertise is replaced by an AI agronomy app but who receives none of the economic surplus that app generates? What happens to the textile artisan whose pattern-making skills are captured by a generative model and then sold back to the market without attribution or compensation? What happens to the young man in a tier-three city who has access to AI-generated entertainment twenty-four hours a day but no meaningful work, no community, no purpose? These are not merely economic questions. These are questions about what kind of human beings India’s AI future will produce. And the Dharmic tradition, with its insistence that Artha (wealth) and Kama (pleasure) must always be governed by Dharma (righteous order) and directed toward Moksha (liberation and fulfilment), is uniquely equipped to hold these questions open, to resist the easy answers, and to demand that technology serve the full spectrum of human becoming. Conclusion: The Indian Ending the World Needs Toynbee wrote that the chapter of global history begun by Western technology “will have to have an Indian ending if it is not to end in the self-destruction of the human race.” He wrote that in the mid-twentieth century. The AI revolution makes his words feel not merely prescient but urgent. The model of AI development, which sees humans as inefficient biological training runs, which treats data as a colonial resource, which measures success by market capitalisation, and which builds intelligence without conscience, will produce a world that is technically sophisticated and humanly impoverished. We are already seeing the early signs: the mental health crisis driven by algorithmically optimised social media, the democratic erosion driven by AI-powered disinformation, the ecological catastrophe driven by the energy demands of unchecked computational expansion. India, rooted in Dharma, does not need to repeat this experiment. It has the philosophical resources, the policy framework, the engineering talent, and increasingly the geopolitical positioning to offer the world something genuinely different: AI as Yogaksema. AI as Lokahita, the welfare of the world. AI that knows it is a tool in the hands of human beings, not a replacement for a human being. PM Modi said it clearly, the real question is not what AI can do, but what humans can do with it. That question, rooted in the Dharmic understanding that technology exists to serve the flourishing of all living beings, is the most important question of our age. And India, if it holds its nerve and its roots, is the civilisation most prepared to answer it. The algorithms can be built anywhere. The Dharma that governs them, that insists on asking who benefits, who bears the cost, and what kind of world we are building for our grandchildren, that comes from a very particular place. That place is Bharat. Sources and References Dattopant Thengadi, The Third Way (2000 / 2023 edition). BMS / Sahitya Sindhu. Kautilya / Chanakya, Arthashastra (Shamasastry translation, 1915). Government Oriental Library. Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 16 (Daivasura Sampad Vibhaga Yoga). India AI Impact Summit 2026, New Delhi. Field reports and official communiqués, February 2026. Anugraha Sandesh: Public Policy in Civilisational Context. Brhat Institute publications. Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History (Abridgement by D.C. Somervell, 1946). Oxford University Press. R.V. Vaidyanatha Ayyar, Public Policymaking in India (2009). Pearson Education.