Why boycotts are complicated

Starting from the Swadeshi boycott of 1905 to when I grew up in Left-ruled West Bengal, boycotting the West is an often-done activity in Kolkata. The Iraq War post 9/11 led to one such phase. The Left Front parties itself left the UPA coalition over the India-USA nuclear deal in 2008.

I heard an anecdote that a professor who was a sycophantic supporter of the Left (who changed his colours post regime-change, as sycophants do), once refused to buy a bottle of packaged water even though his kid was thirsty because the packaged water bottle bore the mark of one of the two American soft drink majors. Like all anecdotes, I am not sure of its veracity but it could be true, and it leads to important questions.

A professor of IIT Kanpur, in 2008, once told me that boycotting is often not a choice. He said that he had a choice of either riding a bicycle through the dusty and dangerous (for bicyclists) roads of Kanpur or driving a car. Even if he really believed that public transport should be much better and bicycles should be prioritised over cars, he drove a car simply because it was the more sensible thing to do.

I recently read this sarcastic article (Jeremy Ettinghausen, ‘This unAmerican life: can you really divest yourself of everything from the US?,’ The Guardian, 19 April 2025) and realised that boycotting is easier said than done. Nationalism is problematic (as Rabindranath depicted in Ghare Baire). India’s 1991 opening up of the economy is criticised by critics of neo-liberalism whereas its proponents argue that closing borders leads to expensive worse-than-cheaper products.

Creating a self-sufficient national production and consumption pattern is no longer possible and hasn’t been for a few centuries.