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It was Sunday evening. I had been switching between three news channels, trying to find one anchor saying anything new about the Bengal result. Around eight, a different story took the lower third. The Prime Minister, in Hyderabad, had delivered what the anchors were calling a "patriotic appeal" to the country. Within the hour, a clean MyGov graphic was on every phone in the house. Seven appeals, in plain language.
The seven, in case you missed them. Prioritise work from home. Avoid buying gold for one year. Use the metro and public transport. Cut cooking oil. Reduce chemical fertiliser. Buy Swadeshi over foreign-branded goods. Avoid foreign travel for a year. The Prime Minister stood in profile in the graphic, hands folded. The headline read: Nation First, Duty Above Comfort.
By this morning, several readers had already written in. The question was the same in almost every email. Should they sell their gold funds?
This column is about why that is the wrong question to ask.
Let me start with the appeal closest to my own work. I have spent the better part of two decades writing that gold is a poor long-term investment. I was, on the evidence of the past five years, wrong about that, and I have said so in this column more than once. Gold at around Rs 1.53 lakh per 10 grams has delivered equity-grade returns over 20 years. The framework I held was sound but incomplete. Warren Buffett’s argument that gold produces nothing treated gold as a commodity. It underweights the other thing gold is. A currency that no government can freeze.
So when the government of India now turns around and asks citizens to stop buying gold for a year, you might think I would feel quietly vindicated. I do not. The appeal is not making the old argument I used to make. My argument was about long-term portfolio choices for an Indian household. The appeal is about something else entirely. It is about the country’s foreign exchange reserves and the pressure they are under.
That is the signal. The list is just the wrapping.
Read the seven appeals together. The pattern is unmistakable. Gold, crude oil, edible oil, foreign-branded electronics, foreign travel. Every category named is import-heavy. Every one of them, even reduced at the margin, conserves dollars. In the speech itself, the Prime Minister used the phrase "guardian of the rupee". That phrase is the column. That phrase should get every investor’s attention. Not the list of seven things to do. The fact that the head of government is publicly asking citizens to defend the currency.
The backdrop is not hidden. Brent crude is back above $100 a barrel after the latest flare-up around the Strait of Hormuz. Foreign Portfolio Investors have pulled more than Rs 2 lakh crore out of Indian equities in just the first four months of 2026, already more than the entire outflow of calendar 2025. The rupee touched a record low of 95.2 to the dollar last week. The Prime Minister’s appeal is not a separate story. It is a reflection of all of these stories arriving in the same week.
So what does this actually mean for what you do?
In response to the appeals themselves, almost nothing. Indian household consumption is shaped by income, prices and habit. Not by moral exhortation. "Vocal for Local" did not visibly dent the market share of any large multinational FMCG company. The annual Swadeshi exhortations around the festive season have not measurably shifted the urban consumption basket. I expect this list to follow the same arc. Indians will hear it, applaud it and continue buying gold at the next family wedding.
What is worth paying attention to is the policy that follows the appeal. When a government publicly frames an import category as unpatriotic, the next few months usually see a duty hike, a customs revision, or an announcement of a renewed Production-Linked Incentive (PLI) scheme. The investor questions worth asking are practical. Could the customs duty on gold imports go up? Probably yes. Will Sovereign Gold Bond issuances return with more attractive terms to replace private gold imports? Quite possibly. Will the PLI schemes for electronics, defence and pharma get fresh political momentum? The setting is now ideal.
A weaker rupee, if it persists, is its own set of trades. Indian IT services companies and pharma exporters earn in dollars and report in rupees. They benefit. Importers get hurt. That includes refiners, edible oil companies, electronics assemblers that still source from abroad, and jewellery retailers. That is where the second-order thinking belongs.
For the long-term mutual fund investor reading this column on a Monday morning, the practical message is the simplest one I can give. Do not redeem your gold fund because the Prime Minister has asked you not to buy more. Do not sell your IndiGo, Indian Hotels or MakeMyTrip shares because foreign travel is now politically unfashionable this month. Above all, do not "do something" with your portfolio on Monday because something was said on Sunday.
Read the list once. File it. Then go back to your SIP, your equity allocation, and the asset mix that fits your life, not the lower third of a Sunday news channel.
The appeals will fade. The rupee story will not. That is the one worth watching.
Also read: Is gold a relic or a refuge?
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