Chapter 0 : The Long Hunger

Robert Campbell, Commander-in-Chief of East India Company, was finishing his morning tea when his secretary, young Holliday, knocked twice and entered without waiting.

"Sir," Holliday said, looking as white as sheets. "There is a telegram from London.”

"About Meerut?" Campbell asked.

Everyone knew about the Sepoy mutiny at Meerut. The East India Company, the extraordinary story of a trading house that had somehow acquired an army of two hundred thousand men and governed three hundred million souls had lost control or so it seemed.

The telegram came from Robert Vernon Smith, President of the Board of Control, acting on the authority of Prime Minister Lord Palmerston. Its message was as clinical as it was final.

The Government of India Act would soon become law. The East India Company's armies, territories, and administrative powers would pass to Queen Victoria. India would henceforth be governed directly by the British Crown.

Campbell lowered the telegram. "They are dissolving us."

After a long silence, Sir Patrick Grant, a Company director for three decades, replied quietly, "No... they are just completing the mission."

The conquest of India had begun not with a kingdom, but with a corporation.

Founded in 1600, the East India Company was created to trade spices, textiles, and tea. As the Mughal Empire weakened, the Company exploited political divisions, forged alliances, financed wars, and gradually began its military conquest of India. Its victory at the Battle of Plassey in 1757 transformed it from a merchant enterprise into the de facto ruler of much of India.

For nearly a century, a private corporation collected taxes, administered justice, minted currency, negotiated treaties, and governed millions of people. No corporation before or since has exercised such sovereign power.

The Sepoy mutiny of 1857 exposed the limits of corporate rule. The uprising was crushed, but it convinced London that India was too valuable to be left in the hands of shareholders. In 1858, the British Crown assumed direct control, absorbing the Company's empire into the British Empire.

India was not invaded by Britain first. It was conquered by a corporation. The British Empire merely usurped what the Company had already built. 

History rarely repeats itself exactly, but it often resonates in patterns that evolve.

Today, the world's most powerful corporations no longer command physical armies. But they hold sway over something even more influential - digital infrastructure. Much of the world's cyber ecosystem rests in the hands of just three American technology giants, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. Collectively, they have become the indispensable operating monopoly of the digital age. They own cloud platforms, operating systems, AI models, service portfolio, compute power, and data that powers modern economies. They have the potential to contour the decisions of governments, businesses, and citizens alike.

I am not suggesting that history will replay itself in the same form. But a nation whose critical digital infrastructure rests largely in the hands of foreign corporations inevitably becomes vulnerable to the geopolitical interests of the countries from which those corporations originate. Trump has already demonstrated a willingness to use America’s economic and technological dominance as instruments of national power to squeeze its potential national threats. Venezuela is the starkest example.

This is not a far-fetched myth; it’s a realistic possibility. Who’s to say leaders like him or who follow him will not consider this option seriously.

India does not have to accept that future. There’s a clear answer in front of India 

The Swaraj Stack