If despite the natural entrepreneurial bent of the population, capitalist ideology hasn’t struck deep roots in Indian soil, it’s because the captains of post-independence Indian industry and trade seem hell-bent upon exposing the ugly face of capitalism to the public.
A case in point is Keshub Mahindra (86) who together with his brother Harish built the Mumbai-based Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd (sales revenue: Rs.14,983 crore in 2008-09) from modest beginnings into one of India’s largest automotive (jeeps, tractors, motor-cars) companies. On June 7, Mahindra who has devolved management of M&M to his nephew Anand, was sentenced to two years in jail in his ex officio capacity as chairman of Union Carbide India, the company whose Bhopal factory leaked deadly methyl isocynate over the town and killed over 5,000 citizens and injured an estimated 3.5 lakh, way back in 1984.
Out on bail, in a press interview Mahindra expressed the view that it had always been his “desire to do something concrete for the gas victims” of Bhopal. This belated charitable impulse drew a stinging lead editorial response from the Indian Express. “That, Sir, is amazing talk,” says the IE editorial (July 9). “What prevented Mahindra in these 26 years from doing whatever he could for the victims? Scores have donated their money and time, if not more, to help the survivors and their kin cope. Where was he? Apart from moving on in life that is?” queries the editorial.
These questions are valid and overdue. In Mahindra’s case his “amazing talk” — and little else — is entirely in character. Way back in 1980, when following the second OPEC oil price hike in a decade, M&M was in deep trouble with the price of the company’s equity share plunging precipitously, Mahindra requested your correspondent, then editor of Business India to write a cover story outlining the company’s revival strategy. We readily obliged in the national interest and partly because of that intervention the company survived, revived and prospered. Yet when 20 years later this publication was struggling and desperately needed help, a letter to Mahindra — a loud champion of education — for advertising support drew a detailed response pleading poverty and adverse business conditions, and we never heard from him again.
A self-serving bon vivant typical of the greedy primitive capital accumulators of Indian industry, Mahindra has always been quick to get but reluctant to give. Now it’s a case of just desserts with none — except CII, FICCI grandees and usual apologists — willing to sympathise with this lion turned bleating lamb of Indian industry.
Sawdust caesar
The sharp rap that Union minister for roads and highways Kamal Nath administered upon the beefy knuckles of Montek Singh Ahluwalia, the perennially pontificating vice chairman of the defunct Planning Commission, dismissing him as “an armchair activist” was long overdue. One of the architects and loud champions of the neta-babu-driven licence-permit-quota regime that sentenced the Indian economy to the Hindu rate of economic growth (3.5 percent of GDP), this ‘committed’ bureaucrat experienced few of the hardships that beggar-thy-neighbour socialist economic policies shaped by him imposed upon hundreds of millions of post-independence Indians.
On the contrary from New Delhi’s bureaucratic warren he wormed his way in the 1970s into the World Bank, where he worked unsung until his dollar pension was secured. Then in the Rajiv Gandhi era he returned to India in a new avatar of liberaliser, deregulator and great white hope of the Indian economy. And in the Congress-led UPA-I and UPA-2 governments he has done little of note except enjoying the perks of office as deputy chairman of the wholly sidelined and obsolete Planning Commission.
If from the above you suspect that your correspondent has an axe to grind, this suspicion is correct. Some two years ago while writing EW’s ninth anniversary cover story, your editor ill-advisedly attempted to ascertain the views of this over-hyped worthy on a matter related to education. Despite making over a dozen telephone calls to his office and home, Ahluwalia failed to respond despite his phone bills being paid by the public. Now ironically the truth that this saw dust Caesar wears no clothes of consequence and is battening on public sufferance, has been uttered by his own party and cabinet colleague. An overdue comeuppance.
Sad sunset
Alas, poor george fernandes. once upon a time he cut quite a dash as a young firebrand well-versed in Marxist rhetoric which was fashionable in the ’60s and ’70s. But Fernandes is also a (barely) live case history of the accuracy of Lord Acton’s famous dictum that power corrupts. I met with and interviewed ‘George the giant killer’ shortly after as Union minister of industry of the Janata government in 1977, he had expelled America’s two most iconic companies — Coca Cola and IBM — from India for refusing to comply with a government order to reduce their shareholding in Indian subsidiaries to 40 percent. The outcome was a path-breaking cover story aptly titled ‘The enigma that is George Fernandes’ in the summer of 1978.
Fernandes soon proved that he was an enigma wrapped inside a riddle within a conundrum. On the last day before the Morarji Desai-led Janata government was voted out of office in 1979, he mounted a brilliant defence of the government. The very next day he defected to the minority Charan Singh government which limped along for six months with floor support from the Congress. Subsequently, for a decade or so after Indira Gandhi’s return to power, Fernandes was active in splinters of the Janata party and surfaced in the mid-nineties in the short-lived Deve Gowda and Gujral coalition governments before — despite his diehard socialist credentials — clambering aboard the rolling BJP bandwagon, and was inducted into the Vajpayee cabinet as Union defence minister. Inevitably he did little to distinguish himself in his new office. On the contrary, his lady friend Jaya Jaitley was outed accepting a bribe in a sting operation.
Since then, following the defeat of the BJP-led NDA coalitions in 2004 and 2009, it’s been downhill all the way for Fernandes with his wife Leila and Jaya fighting over his “legacy” and mysteriously acquired property, even as he lies debilitated by Alzheimers.
A sad sunset for a life in which much was promised, but little achieved.