India's AI Debate Has Been Solving the Wrong Problem

In an interconnected technology stack, the goal of national self-sufficiency is a target the country can never actually reach. The real currency is leverage over systems the country already depends on. That is the pattern Nirupama Rao's column exposes, and it travels past India to any country that still treats AI as a thing to own rather than a system to influence.

Rao's argument is that the right word is strategic agency: the capacity to shape options, set standards, and make choices others must take seriously. The wrong word, she writes, is autonomy, because in a deeply interconnected technological system autonomy is an illusion, and access to global markets does not make domestic capability unnecessary. The two words sound similar and prescribe opposite national strategies. Autonomy is a defensive posture, a list of dependencies to eliminate. Agency is an offensive one, a list of standards to set, partnerships to stack, and compute to commit.

The mechanism is portable. Countries that treat AI as a fortress end up with expensive bunkers and no voice where the rules get written. Countries that treat it as a system they already inhabit build partnerships, energy infrastructure, and research depth that compound into influence. Rao's column, written ahead of the 2026 India AI Impact Summit, names the choice India is being asked to make. The choice is the same one facing every government that still confuses independence with power.