Anticipating India (The Best of National Interest) by Shekhar Gupta

Author:Shekhar Gupta
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

IS ANYBODY OUT THERE?

Mumbai’s most powerful frantically dial the Dilli darbar; why nobody’s taking the call.

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 desperate appeals 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

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