Alienación y praxis social. El concepto de alienación al igual que el de

everyone whose side the new India is on.

22 October 2005

22 October 2005

It is easy to be disgusted with H.D. Deve Gowda’s tirade against N.R. Narayana Murthy, his Infosys, and the entire IT industry. Is it just the frustration with his own dismal politics at the moment, having become a former prime minister at an age too young to retire from politics and at a juncture where he

is forced to be the supporting actor even in his own state? Is it just his resentment at the IT industry’s ability to stand up to his political bullying? Or could it just be that he is punch-drunk having lost his deputy Siddaramaiah* and has jumped in panic on the stale, old rural versus urban, humble farmer versus rich techie agenda?

What is more significant, Narayana Murthy has not backed down. He has resigned as chairman o Bangalore International Airport Ltd. In a pithy letter to the chief minister (Dharam Singh), he has also asked him somesearching questions. All right, Mr Deve Gowda attacked me because he may be like that only . . . but what about you, and the Congress party? If Murthy too had gone down on his knees, as you would normally expect an Indian industrialist to do, there would have been no story. That he has not is the story. It marks a change in our political and social evolution that we must cherish.

In a reforming Indian economy, this is our first experience of an inevitable clash, between old politics and new economy. Our traditional politician was at peace with the old economy, where the businessman depended on him for licences, quotas, permissions and clearances, to protect him from

Inspector Raj and finally to keep the taxman off his back. The new economy businesses need none o that.

The IT sector came up before our political class thought of even setting up a ministry for IT. Our political class has never accepted this. Given half a chance, it would have tried to ‘rectify’ it by bringing the regulation and restrictions into the sector to give itself discretionary powers. That it can

do no such thing, given the iconic status the new economy has acquired, is galling for old politicians. Gowda exemplifies this. The mutually comfortable arrangement of the old economy was underlined so profoundly by the late Dhirubhai Ambani in an interview to T.N. Ninan (then at India Today) with his ‘I will salaam anybody’ quote. So dramatically has the situation changed today that both his sons

ould tell you they no longer need to call on anybody in Delhi for anything. And even when they were having their bare-knuckles fight over what was, after all, an industrial empire representing 4 per cent of India’s GDP, no politician, under two successive governments, saw the scope or the need to meddle.

That is not an equation politicians of Gowda’s generation relish. They hate to cede power to the entrepreneur like this. They still see the businessman as the archetypal sethji orlala who has to wait

outside their door, pay their personal and political bills, and say thank you. The new economy has demolished that paradigm. It needs almost nothing from the government, except decent infrastructure and some land which, in our country, is still either controlled by the government or must be acquired by it. This is the one power old politics still has. And this is what Gowda is flaunting. Hence the

attack on Murthy is to do with real estate—he wants to grab land and make profit on it (‘at the cost o the poor farmers’).*

But I would reckon Gowda is too shrewd not to know this won’t work in the long run. Fifteen years of reform may not have drawn out all of the pseudo-socialist venom in our system, but it is no longer easy to paint a Murthy, a Tata, a Premji or an Ambani as a mere capitalist usurper and to turn the jobless millions on him. New India values its entrepreneurs more than it trusts its politicians.

I cannot conclude this without sharing a story from the brief period of Gowda’s prime ministership. Praveen Jain, the Indian Express photo editor in Delhi, and his team had figured early on that the greatest serial photo-op at the time was the prime minister caught asleep at his public appearances. They would catch him sleeping at functions, felicitations, in cabinet meetings, even hile meeting foreign dignitaries. And, sure enough, the front page was theirs for the asking. So one day, inevitably, I got invited for tea by C.M. Ibrahim, then information and broadcasting minister and Gowda’s closest confidant and hatchet-man (though now they are estranged).

‘ Arrey bhai, Shekharji,’ he said, ‘aap apne photographer ko bolo na kyon us bechare ke eechey pade hain?’ (Why don’t you ask your photographer why he is stalking that poor fellow?)

‘What can I do, Ibrahimji,’ I replied. ‘If the prime minister is found sleeping in public, it is front- page news. Why don’t you reason with the prime minister instead to be more alert?’

Ibrahim’s answer was as honest as it was—it now turns out—prescient. ‘ Arrey bhai, yeh aadmi saara din prime minister nahin hai’ (This man is not a full-time prime minister), he said. ‘From 9

a.m. to 7 p.m., he is prime minister of India, from 7 p.m. to midnight he is chief minister of Karnataka, from midnight to 2 a.m., he is district magistrate of Hasan, then at 4.30 a.m. he has to get up for puja, then breakfast, and then back to being prime minister of India. So when can he sleep?’

From being the lord of all of Bharatvarsha, from Hastinapur to Hasan, Gowda is now wallowing in his own isolation and irrelevance and taking his frustration out in a totally lost cause on the one industry the Right and the Left of our politics woo desperately.

Postscript: At the height of the Murli Manohar Joshi versus IIM battle, which in many ways was part of a similar old politics versus new economy phenomenon, I had written a National Interest (‘Wireless Wimps’, IE, 21 February 2004) accusing our new economy leaders of not standing up to him, of protesting in decaffeinated English. It’s time I took that back now as far as Narayana Murthy is concerned.