We live in unusual times. Just a few years ago, the idea of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh chief Mohan Bhagwat giving a 55-minute lecture on the Indian economy at the Bombay Stock Exchange may have belonged in an enterprising comedian’s stand-up routine. These days it’s a legitimate event, earnestly covered by the pink papers.

Bhagwat gave the speech in question last month. The headlines dwelled upon his opposition to both privatisation and foreign ownership of the loss-making Air India. As the RSS chief put it, in fluent Hindi, “does it not run properly, or has it not been properly run?” In short: never mind that countless attempts to manage the chronically inefficient airline “properly” have failed. Next time must be the charm.

My purpose here is not to relitigate the case for privatising Air India, but to ask a more basic question: what are the economic consequences for India of the worldview outlined by Bhagwat at BSE? If you’re sanguine, you can see it as a set of harmless nostrums with few real world economic consequences. Alternatively, to take a darker view, the insularity that nativists espouse could permanently hobble India’s bid to catch up with the prosperous economies of East Asia.

In fairness, much of what the RSS chief expounded upon was unexceptionable. For instance, he pointed out the well-known inadequacy of gross domestic product as an accounting measure. GDP counts a maid’s work as economic output, but ignores a housewife’s unpaid labour. He pointed out that each country must pick policies to suit its circumstances, and that it’s foolish to be a slave to theory. He emphasised that the benefits of economic development must reach the poorest members of society.

The bulk of Bhagwat’s effort appeared to be an attempt to massage Hindu spiritual ideas into some kind of economic philosophy. (Much of this echoed the work of RSS ideologue Deen Dayal Upadhyaya, who rejected both communism and capitalism as unsuitable for India.) For instance, according to Bhagwat an Indian could never ask you to believe in an ideology such as socialism or capitalism. The Indian way is merely to share one’s own experience and allow others to learn from it if they find it helpful.

In a similar vein, the RSS chief emphasised the need for Indians to remain “themselves” by remaining connected to who they once were. He likened those who lack this quality to an elephant playing football or a monkey riding a bicycle.

Why does any of this matter? For starters, because we live in an age where conventional expertise appears to carry a lot less weight than before.

Take the idea for demonetisation, the Modi government’s harebrained decision in 2016 to nuke nearly 90% of India’s currency by value overnight. This brainwave was not incubated in a think tank or in the pages of a peer reviewed journal. Most credible accounts suggest that its proponents were a well-connected yoga guru, a spiritually inclined chartered accountant, and an obscure activist in Pune. Only after the fact did a handful of trained economists attempt (probably to their lasting chagrin) to justify the bizarre policy that even Venezuela deemed too risky.

Similarly, former Reserve Bank of India governor Raghuram Rajan, widely lauded in the West for his economic acumen, was virtually hounded out of India for, in the immortal words of BJP leader Subramanian Swamy, being “mentally not fully Indian.”

When noted trade economist Arvind Panagariya returned to Columbia University last year, his successor as NITI Aayog vice chairman Rajiv Kumar made a dig about India no longer needing foreign experts. On the campaign trail, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has himself extolled the virtues of hard work over Harvard.

Can India prosper while waging a cultural war against Western-educated experts? Unfortunately for the nativist brigade, the weight of evidence leans against them. Over the past century and a half, the Asian countries that have successfully played catch-up with the advanced industrial economies of the West have been those where nobody spends much time worrying about looking like an elephant playing football.

Less than two decades after American warships pried open its ports in the 1850s, Japan paved the way for its breathtaking modernisation with the Meiji restoration, whose 150th anniversary we are commemorating this year. Acquiring Western education was central to this effort. To varying degrees, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore and China have followed suit – aggressively scouring the West for what works and shamelessly adapting it for their own use.

According to the South Korean author Park Seong-Rae, East Asian countries even adopted remarkably similar-sounding phrases to describe this process of modernising by synthesising. For the Japanese, it was “Japanese spirits and Western talents.” The South Koreans used “the Eastern way and Western tools.” For the Chinese, it was “Chinese body and Western uses.”

In his meetings with Modi in Wuhan last week, Chinese President Xi Jinping invariably wore a Western suit. You can view Xi’s sartorial preference in two ways: as a symbol of subjugation by an alien culture, or as a matter-of-fact aspect of globalisation. But as China shimmies up the ladder of prosperity one thing is clear: nobody in Shanghai or Beijing seems to spend a lot of time fretting about how much they borrow and how much is authentically their own.