A history lesson on India Inc for Manish Tewari

http://www.firstpost.com/politics/a-history-lesson-on-india-inc-for-manish-tewari-773197.html

Information and broadcasting minister Manish Tewari has sent out a word of advice for Corporate India through the media. Be careful of whom you support, he is supposed to have said while addressing journalists in Mumbai, according to this report in the Economic Times.
He also gave our industrialists a lesson in history. Remember Europe in the 1930s, he warned. The leader European businessmen supported wholeheartedly then “caused a lot of harm and destruction all over the world.” He left the leader unnamed but the Economic Times rightly identifies him as Hitler. And we all know who the Indian `One Who Tewari Did Not Name’ is. The Economic Times identifies him as well.
But why does Tewari have to go back eighty-odd years? And to a different continent, at that? Why not look within the country and go back just forty-odd years? Specifically, India in the 1970s?
Tewari was only ten years old during a certain dark chapter in India’s democracy and so he may not have any memories of this period. The history books he would have studied in school also would not have dealt with those events, so a lesson for him in recent Indian history is in order.
India was then ruled by the Congress Party and Mrs Indira Gandhi was the undisputed supremo of the party and the government. Buoyed by the stupendous mandate that she had got in the 1971 elections, Mrs Gandhi went about systematically destroying every autonomous institution that the founding fathers of the Constitution had created. The mess that the country now finds itself in has its roots in that period, when the notions of committed bureaucracy and committed judiciary were used to pack the civil and police service and the judiciary with loyalists. Loyalists not to the country, but to the Congress Party and by default Indira Gandhi and by further default a certain Sanjay Gandhi.
The arrogant disdain for democratic processes kept escalating, finally culminating in the declaration of Emergency in 1975. The Congress likes to paint the ‘One Whom Tewari Did Not Name’ as a dictator, but he will only be India’s second. Just as it has been the trend-setter in the case of dynastic politics, it is the Congress again which has the dubious honour of giving India its first dictator. India is Indira and Indira is India, we were told. (Before people turn apoplectic at the thought of equating Mrs Gandhi with a certain maut ka saudagar, I concede that there were no killings on the scale of the 2002 riots during her time.)
But the real point about this history lesson relates to the businessmen and entrepreneurs to whom Tewari dished out advice. As Mrs Gandhi went about making a mockery of India’s democracy, India Inc. of those days did not utter a squeak in protest. Worse, they went all out to back the Congress Party and Mrs Gandhi. When it was believed that she would resign following the Allahabad High Court setting aside her election in 1971 for electoral malpractices, a delegation of Indian businessmen went to her and pleaded that she stay. These were not small-time businessmen. They were respected industrialists, led by none other than K. K. Birla.
Why should we think these industrialists were better than those who, thirty years later, hugged the One Tewari Did Not Name and called him king of kings (disgustingly servile as that was)?
There’s only one thing that’s clear from all this. Industrialists and businesspersons aren’t bothered about the ideology of the party or leader in power. All they want is a stable business environment, tax sops and other freebies and if they can indulge in some crony capitalism, well, that’s icing on the cake. They are not even interested in parties or persons who espouse their cause if they are not in power. What else can explain the fact that the Swatantra Party, which kept championing the cause of free markets, hardly got any funding from business houses? Businessmen preferred to pay fat bribes to ministers and bureaucrats in return for assured licences and pour money into Congress coffers to ensure favourable competition-killing policies.
In the 2006 West Bengal assembly elections, it was well known that a significant section of businessmen in the state were hoping that the Left Front would return to power because Mamata Banerjee was not seen as a very credible leader. In fact, there’s talk now that during the next election, they will once again back the Left Front.
Nor are they unduly bothered by things like genocide. The only thing that worries them about riots is how it disrupts their supply chains and affects their business operations. Forget Gujarat, Indian businessmen have no qualms about setting up manufacturing bases in China, never mind a certain problem called Tibet.
This apparently cold-blooded attitude is not unique to Indian businessmen. The change in the United States attitude to China in the seventies and its silence over human rights violations in that country is dictated by the agenda of American businesses. So is its support of tinpot dictators everywhere from South America to West Asia. China will never be faced with an economic blockade, something other dictatorships with less attractive markets are subjected to.
So if you want India Inc. to stop singing the praises of the ‘One You Did Not Name’, Mr Tewari, just get your government to take away his USP. In the remaining months that your government is in power, get it to create an environment that is investment-friendly (no, that does not mean encouraging cronyism), end the policy paralysis, take policy and other measures to set right the infrastructure sector. Get the economy back on track and deliver results. When you do that, India Inc. will come running back into the Congress fold.

A Red Rag Called Modi

Two things have prompted this post.
The first is an article a friend posted on Facebook. It is an open letter to Madhu Purnima Kishwar by a Gujarati Muslim writer, Zahir Janmohamed, in kafila.org. Kishwar had apparently visited Gujarat recently and posted favourable tweets about Gujarat under Narendra Modi. Janmohamed details all that is wrong in Gujarat, especially the status of Muslims there. The friend who posted this article had this to say in his status message: “A must read for 1. all Modi bhakts 2. all poor sods who believe in activists.”
That reminded me of an incident that is the second reason for this post. Last week, a report, Economic Freedom of the States of India, 2012, was released. Gujarat topped in that. At the launch ceremony, the noted agricultural economist and currently chairman of the Commission on Agricultural Costs and Prices, Ashok Gulati, was speaking about the role of rural infrastructure in promoting agricultural growth and mentioned that the rate of growth of agriculture in Gujarat was 9.6 per cent a year for six years, which was unheard of. A friend sitting next to me, scoffed and whispered, “then how come BJP didn’t do well in the rural areas in the elections?” I pointed out that Gulati was citing figures. “No, but I’ve seen villages in Gujarat, some are worse than Bihar.”
The sub-text in my friend’s status message, Janmohamed’s article and my other friend’s refusal to accept agricultural growth figures for Gujarat is the same: How can anything good be happening in Gujarat, considering Narendra Modi is the chief minister? How can a man, during whose reign the 2002 riots happened, ever do anything good at all?
The way people get worked up whenever something positive is said about Modi or about Gujarat under his rule reminds me of the reaction in the Congress whenever the Gandhi family is criticised. All sense of perspective is lost as people scramble to deflect criticism (or praise in the case of Modi). Facts are ignored or (if they can’t be) some completely unrelated fact is quoted as a counter.
I am not getting into a debate on the facts about Gujarat. For one, I don’t know enough about the state. Besides, this post is less about Gujarat or Modi and more about how we refuse to accept facts if they don’t confirm our perceptions about something. I am using the Modi example only to show how a phenomenon that was largely limited to those committed to an ideology or political party has extended to general discourse.
Take Janmohamed’s open letter. He starts by saying he was keen to meet Kishwar because he had heard that she had once signed a petition calling for Modi’s dismissal after the 2002 riots. Shouldn’t that establish the fact that she is no Modi admirer and she is definitely not endorsing his government’s failure to control the riots? Why does the fact that she was once critical of the Modi government mean that she should not give credit where she thinks it is due?
Or take the case of my friend, who questioned the figures on Gujarat’s robust agricultural growth only because the BJP fared poorly in rural Gujarat. So now the soundness of official data has to be tested against electoral verdicts? Besides, why can’t Gujarat have a 9.6 per cent agricultural growth rate and also have villages whose conditions are worse than those in Bihar? How does one fact disprove the other? Going by that logic, India could not have posted over 9 per cent growth for three years in a row because there are parts of the country where conditions are worse than in sub-Saharan Africa. India is a land of contrasts and nowhere is this more obvious than in the economic condition of its people. If Mumbai can have an Antilla and Dharavi, why can’t Gujarat have both great agricultural growth and pressing poverty?
Take also the reactions when Tata Motors shifted its Nano plant from Singur in West Bengal to Sanad in Gujarat. (See my 2008 post on this.) Industrialists hailing Modi as prime minister material and king of kings is sickeningly over the top, yes, but what is wrong if they decide to put their money in a state with a good business environment? I am surprised that even people who criticise CSR (corporate social responsibility) as a concept on the grounds that businesses should be concerned only with profit are uncomfortable with Corporate India’s endorsement of Gujarat as an investment destination. If companies’ sole motive should be to run a business profitably, why should they bother about the ideology of the government in power? If they can invest in China, why not in Gujarat?
This kind of double standards does not augur well for debate and discussion in the country. When an innocuous tweet about Ahmedabad’s auto-rickshaw drivers going by the meter is seen as an endorsement of Modi, when his disgusting comment about Sunanda Tharoor is linked to her being groped (it turned out later that the groping happened before), it’s time to stop and reflect. Isn’t there a danger of such constant, and at times unfair, bashing backfiring? It allows Modi to paint himself as a victim of a biased mindset and, worse, convince people of the fact.
Keep the heat, by all means, on Modi on the 2002 riots and discrimination against Muslims and other real failures. But give credit where it is due. And don’t paint everyone who talks about one positive aspect of him or of Gujarat under him as a Modi admirer or BJP-RSS supporter in denial about the riots.
Kishwar also tweeted: “If I as much as say Gujarat roads are best in country, see Modi’s inclusive development for urself I become political untouchable. Why?”
Why, indeed?
Many readers of this post would have stopped reading mid-way, convinced that I am a Modi-bhakt. Earlier, whenever I would counter such biased views, I would preface my statement by saying I am not a Modi supporter, but today I wondered why I should do it. This blog is called Beyond Labels and the reason I started writing it is to air my views without the fear of being labelled (see Why this blog and why this name?). So go ahead and call me a Modi-bhakt. Because the Modi-bhakts call me a pseudo-secular. Chew on that.