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22 January 2011

22 January 2011

Speaking at a memorial meeting at Birla Matushri Sabhagriha on 13 July 2002, a week after Dhirubhai Ambani’s death, I had made a semi-facetious comment on why he attracted so much awe and envy, respect as well as hostility. I said: to understand the phenomenon of Dhirubhai, you have to see Mumbai and Delhi as two different and distant sovereign republics that are yet to establish diplomatic relations with each other.

In Delhi, you acquire power through politics and use that to collect wealth. In Mumbai, you acquire money through enterprise and use that to get, or buy, power in Delhi. Dhirubhai was a unique Indian entrepreneur: he spanned the two ‘republics’ as no one else has done before him and after. He had power in Mumbai and had the key to Delhi. That’s the reason he was such a larger-than-life figure.

But this week’s argument is not about Dhirubhai. It is about the loss of clout of the republic of Mumbai and, by implication, corporate India. This is also about how New Delhi has again acquired pre-eminence over Mumbai in matters of business for the first time since the reforms began in 1991.

Many of the capital’s Bhavans have been restored to their old power and glory; the Congress party’s discourse has become suspicious of, and hostile to, corporate India; and some individual ministers have arrogated to themselves discretionary and arbitrary powers that you last saw only during V.P. Singh’s mercifully short raid raj.

It is, in fact, in this light that you have to read the ‘open letter’* written by some of India’s most loved corporates, accompanied by some of our most respected former judges and regulators. Far from being able to influence policy, these conscience-keepers of corporate India are now reduced to

making desperateappeals to New Delhi’s good sense.

And how much clout they now have is evident in how little response their letter has evoked. Nobody in the UPA government has responded. Or in the BJP. Nobody has even made a token

statement sharing their concern. Nobody has invited them for a conversation to ask why they are so

sullen when the economy is growing at 8.5-plus, and just a week before Indian entrepreneurs’ beauty parade in Davos. Today’s UPA isn’t sure how it should be conversing with business; and those of its

leaders, including the prime minister, who still speak for free economy, are generally sniped at by the Great (and rapidly growing) Congress Whisper Factory as being anti-poor and not ‘in sync’ with the party, or with 10 Janpath.

Of course you could fault the signatories of this open letter for being too cautious. That is why their letter is so unspecific in what it is complaining about, or the actions they want taken in redress.

It is full of platitudes and, frankly, in places reads like the usual rant, though more gently worded, you hear from the anchors of two-and-a-half muck-raking TV news channels these days—of course much more elegantly and gently worded. That, also, is why the letter loses much of its impact. You need to pick up an oversized magnifying glass and search between the lines. Then, maybe, you will find what

it is all about: the use of arbitrary powers by many ministers; the return of widespread rent-seeking, political arrogance, bureaucratic negativism, of environmental obstructionism that harms the poor; poor communication between the Centre and the states; even the BJP has been chided for confusing

‘dissent’ with ‘disruption’. People of such eminence have written all this in such subtle language— almost like the Urdu of old Lucknow—that the meaning is lost. Nobody in today’s Mumbai wants to take panga with UPA 2’s Delhi any more.

Look at the stature of the people who have to raise their voice. Two of them, Ashok Ganguly and Deepak Parekh, were members of the prime minister’s Investment Commission. (The third, Ratan Tata, is of course in the Supreme Court asking who leaked his private phone conversations even if he

as wire-tapped legally.) Bimal Jalan and M. Narasimham are former RBI governors. Sam Variava and B.N. Srikrishna are two of our most respected former Supreme Court judges, and Azim Premji is not only one of our greatest IT czars, but also our most pre-eminent Muslim entrepreneur and the largest philanthropist. These are not odd-ball busybodies, or retired, marginal people fulminating. Many are UPA favourites. Anu Aga is on Sonia Gandhi’s NAC, a body today more powerful than the cabinet, which it routinely attacks. Justice Srikrishna’s report on Telangana has just been accepted by the government. Deepak Parekh’s wisdom is routinely sought by government, even during a hopeless crisis like Satyam. And Ashok Ganguly is not just a Rajya Sabha member nominated by this government, but also has the ear of Sonia Gandhi.

You wonder, therefore, just what is going on. India’s growth is robust in spite of stalled governance, widespread negativity and ‘noise’, and it is fuelled almost entirely by its private enterprise—and yet its most respected leaders feel so left out and vulnerable. The government is led by several business-friendly people, including the prime minister. Yet there is a disconnect between

corporate and political India, between the Congress and business, between Mumbai and Delhi. One of the two ‘sovereign republics’ has recovered the ground it had lost to the other because of reforms, but the two still haven’t established diplomatic relations.

That job cannot be done by Murli Deora, the new corporate affairs minister, even though Somnath Chatterjee once described him as the MP from Nariman Point. The prime minister will need to start talking. The drop in FDI figures lately has been precipitous; and if more Indian entrepreneurs, demoralised by the Congress’s pinko newspeak and corruption, take their investments overseas,

growth will stall 2012 on.* Besides the great India growth story, you can then also kiss the NAC freebie fantasies goodbye.