I frequently meet conservatives who defend nationalist regimes as being good for business. Next time I meet one, I’ll be sure to ask how business in Russia is doing these days.

Bloomberg has a good article on how Hindu nationalists are turning on India’s highly successful tech companies:

For a growing number of Hindu nationalists, home-grown tech companies are not national champions but enemies within: the agents of a global culture bent on dissolving traditional values by allowing women to work instead of staying home to have children (Infosys boasts that 39% of its employees are female); where people are promoted on merit rather than confined to their caste identity; and in which cities expand at the expense of villages. . . .

The original founders of Infosys are now not only billionaires in their own right but godfathers of the next generation of Indian tech, taking young entrepreneurs under their wings and investing in dynamic new companies. But for all that, both they and their families are no longer exempt from the anti-globalization forces that are raging across the world. And the general business atmosphere in India is getting colder, with private investment falling and the economy slowing even before Covid struck.

I suspect that Hindu nationalists are correct that companies like Infosys are “agents of a global culture bent on dissolving traditional values”.  Where I differ from them is that I believe that abolishing caste and patriarchy is a good thing.

PS.  Here’s another perspective:

All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe.

Let’s hope this is correct.