'We cannot stand up to bullies if...': Zoho's Vembu slams India's obsession with English and imports

Just days after US President Donald Trump called India a "dead economy" and imposed steep trade penalties, Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu urged India's educated elite to rethink their assumptions about national strength, education, and economic resilience.

"By now, I hope it is clear to all of India's educated elite that we must build up our capabilities here. The mindset 'we can buy whatever we lack' or its much deeper axiomatic version ‘money can buy everything’ won't work in this new era," Vembu wrote on Sunday. "For one, money cannot buy national security nor sovereignty nor resilience. We cannot stand up to bullies if we don't build ourselves up."

Vembu's remarks follow a wave of criticism from Trump, who on Thursday announced a 25% tariff on all goods imported from India, along with a separate penalty for India’s continued purchase of Russian crude oil and military equipment. "I don't care what India does with Russia. They can take their dead economies down together, for all I care," Trump said.

The entrepreneur also questioned the logic of Indian students spending exorbitant sums on foreign degrees, while domestic medical education remains prohibitively expensive. "We must examine why medical education is so costly in India," he wrote.

He then pivoted to a deeper critique of India's English-medium obsession: "Should we still value English as the medium of instruction? We should learn English as a language but does it make sense to make it the medium for teaching mathematics or history or technology or medicine?"

According to Vembu, this colonial-era hangover is now a sharper divider than caste. "English as a status symbol is a bigger barrier today than caste. I know how deeply it is holding back our rural youth," he said, adding that offering English-medium instruction in government schools hasn’t worked. "Instead I propose that all our children — rich and poor — must be educated in our own languages as it happens in countries big and small and as it happens in all of the nations of EU."

He cited examples from the Netherlands, where students must learn in Dutch after a year of schooling, and added, “Children do learn quickly.”

Addressing possible backlash from parents, he wrote: “Before you react emotionally to my suggestion ‘how dare you suggest my English fluent children study in Tamil or Kannada medium’ ask yourself if that has served our nation well. Are we bringing up our children to have no pride or attachment towards India?”

In a direct rebuttal to those who cite jobs as justification for English education, Vembu said, “Please don't bring up ‘IT jobs’. We build sophisticated tools like compilers and the team mostly speaks Tamil. We never made it a requirement to be fluent in English and our engineers learn enough English to read English documentation, just as engineers in Japan and China and Korea and Germany all do.”