Posted by: John Elliott | March 15, 2011

India’s ‘jugaad’ means its nuke power plans should be dumped

Japan’s unfolding nuclear disaster must surely lead to a complete re-think of India’s $175bn plans to build a new generation of nuclear power plants with technology from France, Russia and the US. It is inconceivable that India could begin to match Japan’s far from successful attempts, since last weekend’s earthquake and tsunami, to limit the impact of such a disaster, so the plans should surely be halted for the foreseeable future.

This is because India has shown in recent months that it is not capable of efficiently managing mega events, planned or unplanned, despite economic growth of approaching 9%, great successes in information technology and manufacturing, and undoubted scientific skills,

It would therefore be terrible for the country to go ahead with the nuclear programme that it has been planning since it struck a historic nuclear accord with the US in 2008, which gave it access to international nuclear power and allied dual-use technologies. In a moment of apparent euphoria after the deal was signed, Manmohan Singh, the prime minister, even talked scarily of India increasing its nuclear power capability 100 times over the next 40 years to yield 470,000 megawatts of power by 2050.

“This event may be a big dampener for our program,” Shreyans Kumar Jain, chairman of the government-owned Nuclear Power Corporation, told Bloomberg news agency. “We and the Department of Atomic Energy will definitely revisit the entire thing, including our new reactor plans, after we receive more information from Japan.”

Ageing reactors

Currently India has 20 ageing nuclear reactors supplying such 3% of its total power generation. Two of the reactors were built by GE in the late 1960s to the same possibly risky designs as those at Fukushima in Japan.

The new programme envisages at least doubling capacity within 20 years. Three months ago, $9.3bn plans were signed for two nuclear reactors to be built by France’s Areva group, plus more to be built by Russia. US companies such as GE are also urgently chasing contracts.

The Nuclear Power Corporation has said that its plants are all capable of surviving substantial earthquake tremors and at least two had done so, including the big 2001 Gujarat quake. It is checking to ensure that currents plants would “be able to withstand the impact of large natural disasters such as tsunamis and earthquakes” – but that is not enough. India is of course capable of checking such things in the normal course of events, but what is needed here is efficient management to avoid crises, and quick and efficient responses when disaster strikes.

Jugaad – ‘we’ll manage’ – no longer works

There is an assumption in India that, to use the British theatre phrase, “everything will be alright on the night”. The Hindi word is jugaad which implies innovative and sometimes rule-bending fixing so that “we’ll manage”. Then there is kaam chalao meaning “make do”.

Till recently, one could indeed rely on India turning chaos into last-minute success in the Monsoon Wedding film’s sort of way. But it has begun to look over the past year or so as the country’s growing corruption and managerial inefficiencies have shown it incapable of responding effectively to the quickening pace of high technology and other changes in many areas.

Jugaad, in effect is no longer enough. This was shown most dramatically with the Commonwealth Games’ corruption and managerial fiascos late last year. Other examples include extensive flooding every monsoon in Mumbai and elsewhere, discovery last year of radioactive steel scrap in a Delhi recycling yard, Delhi’s inability to manage the crowds and road congestion caused by an annual auto fair, gross inadequacies in police readiness and functioning, a disastrously inefficient reaction to a massive fire in Kolkata a year ago, countless railway crashes, yearly fog problems at Delhi airport and so on.

The list is endless, with each example showing, in different ways, the impact of a combination of waning government authority, lack of managerial focus and authority, poor and unsustained training, unwillingness or inability of professional experts to challenge the often-corrupt dominance of self-serving top officials and politicians, and over-riding greed and corruption.

Nuclear power is already controversial in India.  Opposition has been building up against the imminent construction of an Areva nuclear plant in an earthquake-risk zone in southern India. The government was also forced by opposition parties last year to buck international practice and  make nuclear plant suppliers liable for accident compensation claims.  Now it will be difficult for political parties to authorise construction of most nuclear plants.

This is indeed one of those moments when India can be thankful that it has a powerful, if fragmented, political democracy. As Uday Bhaskar, director of the New Delhi-based National Maritime Foundation, said yesterday, “Democracies are reactive and an accident of this magnitude will raise concerns among the population about the safety of the technology”.

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Posted in environment, GE, India, India corruption, India land, India nuclear, India US relations, Manmohan Singh | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by: John Elliott | March 10, 2011

Elephant hits it’s second thousand centuries

Hi everyone – Riding the Elephant has just passed a total of two thousand centuries, to put it in World Cup terminology – that’s 200,000 hits since I took it over from Fortune.com in August 2008 . It hit that score on Tuesday night when I was putting up my post on David Cameron’s diplomatic gaffes, and is now over 200,700 – the current total is in the column on the right.

So thanks to all of you who have joined the growing list of readers in the past year – including quite a few from The Independent (UK-based) newspaper  bloggery, where shortened versions of my pieces now appear at the same time as they go up here. Earlier, some posts appeared on FT.com’s India page.

 Thanks also to those of you who followed me here from Fortune.com in 2008, and to everyone else who has piled in to read the total since then of nearly 250 (this is the 249th) posts or articles.

It took a year after August ’08 to clock up the first 50,000 hits (or views as they are called in the blog world), but just seven months till February last year to double that figure, and just over another year to double it again.

Average views have gone from about 60 a day in August 2008 to over 200 a year ago and nearly 300 a day in the past three months.

The busiest single day, with 764 hits, was December 8 last year just after I had written a piece headlined Radia tapes highlight media flaws that fit with modern India on the country’s mini-Wikileaks scandal that was uncovering power links between businessmen, politicians, lobbyists and journalists, all merging their ambitions and motives behind the scenes. The Economist magazine ran a piece that included a link to my post and that brought in floods of readers.

The bulk of the hits – about 27,500 in the past year and 62,000 since 2008 – come to the home page . After that, the statistics show how some posts keep pulling in viewers ages after they were written and it’s not always the most serious posts that generate the most attention – a mischievous headline can always help.

Heading the list since 2008 with over 9,000 hits (see table below), is a promotional piece on an anthology of foreign correspondents’ articles that I co-edited and Penguin India  published three years ago  to coincide with the Delhi-based Foreign Correspondents’ Club’s 50th anniversary.

Next, with over 5,000 views, is a piece on Jawaharlal Nehru period photographs. Readers are presumably partly pulled in by the headline – Nehru was lost for years in a trunk, which wasn’t of course quite true – find out why by clicking below.

Top hits since 2008 – (click on the titles to read the pieces)

 Home page   62,168
“Foreign Correspondent” – a best selling anthology   9,178
Nehru was lost for years in a trunk ………   5,204
Tina Ambani pays record $2.5m at Christie’s Indian art auction   3,921
25th year of Maruti Suzuki that transformed India’s motor industry   3,082
About this blog   2,911
Mukesh Ambani builds a monument to his wealth   2,622
Christie’s has good India sale as auctions adjust to tougher times   2,306
The Gods will encourage you to gamble   2,300
     

 Top hits for the past 365 days include most of those above plus more topical subjects (listed below) that reflect interest in India’s on-going corruption scandals and controversial big companies, as well as the modern Indian art market that I write about occasionally.  

Delhi judders leaderless towards the Commonwealth Games   2,239
India’s scam-ridden IPL cricket is a national celebration     1,646
An IPL tweet exposed phone tapping, Tata’s pr, prime ministerial weakness     1,632
S.H.Raza follows Souza’s auction success with £2.4m record Indian art price     1,614
Ambani & Sons – revived from the Polyester Prince they pulped     1,518
Commonwealth Games fall apart – bridge collapses and village condemned      1,471

 

So keep coming back……lots more to write about – je

 

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Posted in Contemporary art, India, India corruption, India politicians | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by: John Elliott | March 9, 2011

David Cameron’s ‘diplomatic’ gunboats misfire in India and Libya

 If the Indian government looks as if it’s in a spiral of never-ending crises, come to London (where I am this week) and have a look at Britain’s maladministration headed by David Cameron.

A UK “diplomatic” (actually MI6 spies) mission to woo Libyan rebels arrived unexpectedly one night last week by helicopter and was instantly arrested. There is a royal crisis over Prince Andrew, Britain’s roving trade ambassador’s links with a paedophile and call girls, which are being splashed across the front pages, with Cameron’s Downing Street public relations machine contradicting its own briefings on whether the prince should lose his trade job.

David Cameron in India last July

And – of special relevance for this blog – a badly planned letter that Cameron wrote last month to Manmohan Singh moaning about the Indian government’s lack of commercial transparency has been leaked in India this week, which means it will probably be doing more harm than good.

All that should have led to interesting conversations this evening at the British High Commissioner’s annual Queen’s Birthday Party on the lawns of his Delhi residence that was attended a year or two ago by Prince Andrew.

Last July, when Cameron visited India with an over-large posse of six cabinet ministers and accompanying businessmen and academics, I suggested on this blog that Britain was punching above its weight. The current (peaceful) gun boat diplomacy of the Libya helicoptered emissaries and the letter to Manmohan Singh shows again that the UK is getting its diplomacy wrong and expecting too much, given the country’s declining economic importance.

Whoever advised Cameron to send the letter last month does not understand that the best way to score goals with the Indian government is not to send gripes and warnings of declining trade ties. Most other countries seem to accept this, which makes it even sillier for Britain to send such letters.

The letter listed three cases:- a $2.5bn tax demand against Vodafone’s mobile phone business; delayed regulatory approval for the $9.6bn sale by Cairn Energy of its Indian natural gas fields to Vedanta (an Indian-controlled UK-listed company) that might soon be cleared; and late payment for work done by British companies at last November’s Commonwealth Games. Such problems risked “affecting the wider business climate” warned the British prime minister, who implicitly complained about India’s lack of “transparency in the business environment”.

‘Not done old chap’

There is a telling editorial in today’s pro-Congress government Hindustan Times newspaper mocking Britain under the headline “Not done, Old Chap”. It uses cricketing metaphors to chime with the current World Cup and notes that “Britain doesn’t happen to be among India’s top ten trading partners,” saying:

“It’s not cricket, British prime minister David Cameron has told India while the game’s greatest spectacle is underway here in the old colony. British lads Cairn and Vodafone – and sterling fellows too – are playing on a queer pitch in the subcontinent, the Conservative resident of 10 Downing Street has written to Manmohan Singh. The umpiring isn’t up to scratch. Energy company Cairn is being bowled a bodyline every second delivery and nobody seems to notice. Before that, telecom company Vodafone was declared leg before wicket when it obviously wasn’t. Gentlemen don’t use tax googlies and regulatory bouncers on the Oval! Surely, good chaps don’t get too nosy about details like tax dodges and unpaid royalties, do they?”

Those words were not very eloquently crafted, but they make the point.

Vodafone’s problems

Vodafone’s $2.5bn tax demand stems from its $11bn purchase in 2007, through offshore tax havens, of a Hong Kong-held controlling stake in what was then the Hutchison-Essar mobile phone business. It is widely believed, based on circumstantial evidence, that this demand was initiated by the finance ministry with encouragement from a rival Indian telecom company boss, who had good political connections in the ministry. This allegedly led tax collectors to find a novel interpretation of regulations, which then led to Vodafone being told it should have set aside $2-2.5bn that Hutchison owed as corporate gains tax. This is now going very slowly through the Indian courts, with the next hearing due in July.

Cameron’s appeal on Vodafone’s behalf is just the latest of a series of unsuccessful bids for help. Early on, the company appealed to the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) in Delhi, and then sought redress from India’s Supreme Court. These moves however seemed merely to make the finance ministry and its tax collectors even more determined to win. Expecting the PMO to step into a court case, is scarcely sensible – nor were warnings issued by Vodafone’s ceo, Vittorio Colao, in two Indian newspaper interviews last October that the case was having a negative impact on foreign investment (though curiously he also said at the same time that he planned to invest more!).

Colao said the tax case offered “an opportunity for India to reverse its position and assure global investors that it will not offer them an unfriendly and unpredictable environment”. But no-one in India took any notice, and court hearings have been delayed for much longer than had been expected. Perhaps Vodafone hoped the government law officers would be advised to go soft on the case. Such advice can apparently sometimes be issued, but it is not likely, I am told, on a highly technical tax case – and certainly not when there is the prospect of $2bn or more landing in the government’s kitty.

One can feel sorry for Vodafone. It genuinely had no idea that it should have set the tax aside, and it argues that it should not be forced to pay for what it sees as a retrospective change of tax policy. The government says it is not a change of policy, but a new legal interpretation of existing regulations. Either way, Vodafone has done itself no favours with its legal bids and hollow investment threats.

Cairn and Vedanta

Vedanta, a rapidly emerging and relatively new international metals group, has been facing a myriad of mining regulatory blockages on major Indian projects, as well as opposition to the buy-out of Scotland-based Cairn Energy’s Indian gas field business. It shares a dreadful reputation for corporate ethics and environmental reputation that its Indian sister company, Sterlite, has had for a decade or more.

Cairn, by contrast, has operated in India successfully and without much fuss or trouble since 1996, when it bought an Australian company’s exploration rights. So I was amazed when Cairn announced it had chosen to sell control to such an accident-prone company as Vedanta, though apparently the $9.6bn offer was too good to be turned down.

It was however inevitable that the sale would arouse behind-the-scenes opposition from three different areas – foreign metals companies that wanted to curb Vedanta’s growth, at least one of India’s big family groups with similar motivations, and other Indian public sector oil interests, including ONGC, the government-owned oil and gas company, that claimed pre-emptive rights to the Cairn shares and raised other issues.

Cairn also appealed to the PMO for help, and did not receive much encouragement, though it is now expected that the Indian cabinet might clear the deal this week or next – subject to important qualifications on contentious issues including payment of royalties. That was however going to happen anyway around this time, and seems to owe little if anything to the Cameron letter.

There has been a decline in foreign investment into India, and the country’s international image is slipping, as I argued here last week. Despite what the companies have been saying however, that has been caused not by the Vodafone and Cairn problems, but by a spate of big corruption cases and examples of poor governance. It is also beginning to look as if the combination of Sonia Gandhi, leader of the Congress Party, and Manmohan Singh, the prime minister, is not working effectively at the top of the coalition government.

But these are different issues and do not in any way justify a Cameron-style letter. Indeed, when the Indian government is being hit almost daily by stories revealing an appalling lack of transparency, it was scarcely tactful of Cameron to goad the government with a transparency-based letter.

The British government needs to realise that, though there are close emotional as well as economic ties binding India and the UK together, they only work to the UK’s advantage if it does not throw its weight around.

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Posted in British politics, India, India British relations, India corruption, India environment, India FDI, India investment, India telecoms, India UK, Manmohan Singh, Vedanta | Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by: John Elliott | March 2, 2011

Finance minister Mukherjee in a time warp as India’s success story wobbles

Hidden away in the timid and inconclusive but mildly populist annual Budget speech that Pranab Mukherjee, India’s finance minister, delivered on Monday, were a few tiny sops for the country’s blighted environment. Just Rs 600 crores ($130m) was allocated for clean energy and cleaning rivers, and there were some customs duty cuts for solar lanterns and for “laundry soaps which conserve water and are gentle on the soil”.

In a caring tone, but with words and a focus that smacked of the early 1980s when he was first finance minister, Mukherjee (left), 75, added: “The solar lantern enables our countrymen in far-flung villages to partake of developments in green technology”.

The thoughts matched the emphasis of the speech on boosting agriculture and improving the food supply chain with a Rs14,700 crore ($3.3bn) allocation, but they displayed a time warp that ignored all that has happened – much good and some bad – in the 20 years since India’s economic reforms of July 1991. The speech failed to tackle primary post-reforms problems of galloping corruption and appalling governance, both issues that are at the centre of major scandals and controversies.

A braver more inspired finance minister than Mukherjee could have said:

“We are approaching the 20th anniversary (on July 24) of the momentous opening up of India’s economy. In the past 20 years, India has come a long way……but we have left half our population under-fed, under-educated and with poor health care, and we have become a corrupt and badly run country, which is causing concern among investors. We must mark the anniversary with a new approach to these social issues, and I intend to today to map out a series of legislative and other changes that will be as significant as those of July 1991.”

Then, he could have added: “Corruption and mal-administration has done our environment much harm and I salute today my young (56) colleague Jairam Ramesh, the minister for environment and forests, who is doing more than most in the battle for the future of India. He is trying to bring order, stable policies, and clean government to this vital area, which is a lesson for us all in what needs to be done in many areas of government.”

Mukherjee of course did not say that, nor could he. He is the government’s most important, skilful and risk-averse politician, which stops him making big statements that might rumble into controversy. More importantly, no-one in the government dares speak up for Ramesh because he has trodden on so many powerful toes, as I wrote in an earlier article when I voted him India’s most significant ministerial achiever in 2010.

Changing government

I explained how he has tried to impose clean and effective policies and how this has upset many powerful environmental spoilers, both politicians and businessmen. Ramesh’s success – and his problem – is that he has been actually changing how the government works, whereas Mukherjee mostly tiptoed around ideas and committees and possible future changes.

I am returning to Ramesh here because, since I wrote that piece in January, he has been blamed for spoiling India as an investment destination by creating uncertainty here and abroad about project approvals.

He has cancelled or questioned environmental approvals for steel works planned in Orissa by Posco of Korea and a politically influential branch of India’s Jindal business family, an aluminium works run by Indian-controlled Vedanta of London, a multi-storey block of flats called Adarsh in Mumbai built for top army officers and other public officials under a recently exposed corrupt and environmentally-unauthorised deal, and a partially built “hill station” (a romantic euphemism for lucrative urbanisation of rolling hills) called Lavasa in Maharashtra that, he says, had no environmental approvals.

Critics rounded on him, trying to rein him in, and starting a phoney economic debate about whether economic growth or protecting the environment was more important. They included Montek Singh Ahluwalia, the country’s top economics bureaucrat who runs the Planning Commission. Ironically, Ahluwalia has worked with Ramesh in promoting economic reforms since the 1980s.

Even India’s august central bank, the Reserve Bank of India, appeared to condone reports that a major reason for a decline in foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows was “environment sensitive policies……in the mining sector, integrated township projects and construction of ports”.

The RBI later explained that it was only quoting what was being said in the commercial capital of Mumbai, allegedly by people linked with institutional investors but more probably those involved in Lavasa and the other projects. The RBI said it would now do some concentrated research on why FDI had declined. That the RBI should have uncharacteristically entered the fray shows the fear that Ramesh has struck among top companies, even though all he is doing is implementing environmental regulations that have been in force for years.

“It is time for India to make some tough choices,” Ramesh said recently at Delhi’s Foreign Correspondents’ Club (FCC). “We can’t pollute our way to prosperity. We have to find a way that is ecologically sustainable. In 1991, the focus was on fiscal stability. 20 years later it is ecological sustainability, so we face tough political choices”.

India story unravelling

It is true that India’s performance is wobbling. “Foreign institutional investors do fear the India story is beginning to unravel, asking if we are losing control of the process,” a senior government official told me. Although economic growth is still around an internationally high figure of 8-9%, industrial growth slowed at the end of last year and FDI inflows fell more than 30% in 2010 to $24bn.

“If foreign investors see local companies having problems (with the environment regulations), then they stay away,” said another official, arguing that Ramesh was affecting investment. But that is surely wrong, as has been proved by BP’s recent $7bn-plus natural gas deal with Reliance Industries.

Of course, the FDI inflows would have been bigger if Posco had started its $12bn steelworks (though it does not have any iron ore mining rights for the project). Ramesh however has not been at work for long enough to affect inflows significantly. What he has done however is to expose how the rule of law, usually said to be one of India’s investment strengths, is frequently undermined by companies, government officials and politicians in India.

Foreign investors’ real worry is the current series of corruption scandals that are hitting the Indian media seemingly every day, and making them wonder if the Indian system is coming apart. These scandals cover army generals, senior judges including even a former chief justice, and sport as well as business and, most recently, the chairman of a government-owned aluminium company (NALCO) accepting $500,000 bribes in gold bars.

World Cup  chaos

Bad governance – and repetitive failings that could be avoided – are also making India look unreliable. To take a simple example, look at the chaos over the organisation of the Commonwealth Games last November with late (as well as corrupt) projects and chaotic ticketing and other arrangements. That has now been repeated on the current cricket World Cup, with Kolkata’s famous Eden Gardens cricket stadium not being ready in time and chaotic ticketing arrangements for matches in Bangalore that led to police viciously beating angry crowds.

Ramesh is undoubtedly enjoying the fuss he has caused. For 20 years, he has been a sometimes controversially outspoken figure on India’s economic reforms scene and was, until five years ago, always an economic adviser and never a minister. In his current job, which he has held since the 2009 general election, he has had a chance to make a significant difference, not only to domestic environmental policy where he has also tried to rescue wildlife conservation from the grip of corrupt officials and traders. He has also transformed India’s approach to international climate change negotiations, co-operating as he proudly says with both the US and China to make sure India plays a role in finding a solution.

He has had to strike some high profile compromises on most of the controversial projects mentioned above, and this has cast doubt on whether he is in fact making the major changes to environmental protection that he claims. Answering that allegation, he says he has laid down strict conditions on all the projects. “All I am doing is implementing the laws of the land and looking afresh at old regulations that need changing,” he said at the FCC.

And he is still a success, despite the compromises. Biswajit Mohanty, who runs the Orissa-based Wildlife Society of Orissa and rarely praises governments, is outspoken in his praise .

“He is the best environment minister we have ever had, and probably the best we will ever have,” he says.

Who else in the government deserves such an accolade for trying to push through change? Not many, and certainly not Mukherjee in his time warp.

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Posted in India, India corruption, India economic reforms, India economy, India environment, India investment | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by: John Elliott | February 22, 2011

BP deal is both a victory and a test for Mukesh Ambani

Feel sorry for Anil Ambani, the debt-strapped head of the Reliance ADA group (ADAG). He has just seen his elder brother Mukesh sign up with BP for a natural gas exploration and marketing deal that will bring at least $7.2bn, and maybe as much as $20bn, into Mukesh Ambani’s already financially-strong Reliance Industries’ (RIL).

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BP is to buy a 30% stake in RIL’s extensive Indian off-shore natural gas fields. Subject to government approval, the deal will generate India’s biggest inflow of foreign direct investment, comparable only with a yet-to-happen $12bn steelworks planned by Posco of Korea.

It will provide RIL with BP’s much-needed skills in deep water oil and gas exploration, where RIL has had technical problems, and help the British company to emerge from the miseries of last year’s Gulf of Mexico environmental disaster.

It will also give Mukesh Ambani (left) funds to reduce RIL’s already small debt burden and to go for fresh investments – and it also gives him an opportunity to prove he is a steady joint venture partner.

But perhaps most significantly, it makes it clear that Mukesh is the winner in what has been a long-running feud between the brothers. Anil Ambani (below) must now realise that, fight and strive as he might, he has no chance of keeping up with his elder brother, who is the world’s fourth richest man with wealth of approaching $30bn, let alone overtaking or beating him.

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Anil Ambani’s problems extend far beyond $4bn-plus debt that is centred on his Reliance Communications mobile phone business. Last week he made a highly publicised visit to India’s Central Bureau of Investigation to be questioned about possible involvement in an ongoing multi-billion dollar telecom licence fraud case that has widespread political and corporate ramifications. His companies’ share prices have been hammered on Indian stock exchanges.

He is also failing to push ahead effectively with various power and other infrastructure projects, despite $16bn credits signed up at end of last year from China and the US to support power equipment purchases and maintenance.

He is six months late opening Delhi’s Airport Express railway that he holds as a franchise from the highly successful public sector Delhi Metro Railway Corporation. The Express is now scheduled to start services this Wednesday. It is the metro corporation’s first serious late completion, and the six-month delay runs counter to the excellent record of completion-on-time that has been attached to the Reliance corporate name for decades.

Brothers split

The two brothers split the Reliance group in 2005, three years after the death of Dhirubhai Ambani, their father and the group’s founder, who combined entrepreneurial brilliance with deft handling of government relationships. They had a long and bitter row that was led by Anil, who felt he was being elbowed out of his share of the combined business by his ruthless brother. The row continued after the split, mainly over gas from fields controlled by Mukesh Ambani, and was only settled last year.

Mukesh Ambani’s most successful business areas are oil and gas exploration and refining, textiles, and petro chemicals. He has been less successful with retail stores, petroleum retailing, and special economic zones but is expanding into telecoms, financial services, the media and other areas.

Anil Ambani has had most success in financial services, where he has a $24bn mutual fund, India’s largest, but has been facing tough competition with telecoms. Last year he had hoped to clear the telecom debt by floating mobile towers into another company, and selling 26% of the main business to the UAE’s Etisalat. But these interdependent deals collapsed, partly because of high valuations.

That says much about the differences between the two brothers. Before the split, Anil Ambani, who has a short attention span and likes to fix problems quickly, was the group’s financial deal-maker and was in charge of corporate communications.

His elder brother was the focussed project manager committed to producing quality and delivery on time. He only failed to do so when he entered new consumer-oriented areas, where he had little or no experience. He would never have allowed Delhi’s airport railway to open late and must now be regarding the delay as one of several examples where Anil Ambani’s actions have weakened the Reliance brand.

The markets will now wonder how RIL will use BP’s billions of dollars. One rumour likely to be revived is that Mukesh Ambani will buy out his younger brother’s telecoms business, which he founded before the split and gave up reluctantly.

Mukesh’s first big partnership

The BP agreement is also significant because it is Mukesh Ambani’s first major partnership. He has mostly shied away from joint ventures, preferring to buy-in managerial and technical expertise. He has also been avoided by some potential partners because he has an extremely tough reputation. Consequently, RIL has often not been seen as a wise choice for companies seeking co-operative joint ventures and investment partners in India.

The BP deal is his latest, and by far the most successful, of a series of attempts to establish international oil and gas links. RIL failed last year with a $2bn bid for a Canadian oil sands business and with a $14.5bn attempt to buy Lyondell Basell, a US petrochemicals company. But it did buy stakes in three US shale gas joint ventures

RIL also has some older oil and gas link-ups for individual fields with companies such as Hardy Oil, Niko, BG, and (since 2009) BP. A small financial investment by Chevron in an RIL company in 2006 failed to lead to a closer relationship and Chevron sold out.

In retail, companies like Marks and Spencer’s have tie-ups for specialist stores, and there is also a new and surprising investment in India’s Oberoi hotel group.

So while the BP deal shows that Mukesh Ambani has beaten his younger brother as a consistently successful businessman, it also opens him up to new international scrutiny by those who will be wondering how BP will fare in such a partnership.

 



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Posted in Ambanis, Anil Ambani, India, India investment, Mukesh Ambani, Reliance Industries | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by: John Elliott | February 16, 2011

Manmohan Singh is weak on corruption so spotlights the media

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India’s prime minister, Manmohan Singh, has today sadly displayed how weak he is in dealing with corruption at all levels of his coalition government.

In a one-hour carefully-managed televised meeting (right) with tv news channel editors, he admitted that he could not control all his ministers, and indirectly appealed to the media not to play up the many corruption scandals that are now being unearthed across the country.

There are two points here. As I have often written before, Mr Singh has little control when choosing many of his ministers, and has limited control over what many of them do once they are appointed – as has been evident in a current multi-million dollar corruption scam over awarding of 2G telecom licences. Second, the government’s media relations are weak, which means that it is bad at managing India’s international image that is currently being questioned because of corruption and ineffective governance.

“An impression has gone round that we are a scam-driven country and nothing good is happening in our country, that we are weakening the self-confidence of the people of India. I do not think that is in the interest of anyone in our country….This sort of atmosphere is not good. It saps our own self-confidence. It also spoils the image of India,” said Mr Singh (left), appearing to blame lack of objectivity in the media rather than the government’s failure to tackle issues, for India’s corrupt image.
 
As Reuters’ correspondent Alistair Scrutton tweeted from Delhi just after Mr Singh had spoken, “Blaming media is often the action of a cornered leader. India’s PM has just done that by criticising coverage of the corruption scandals,” to which Andy Buncombe, The Independent’s Delhi correspondent replied “Didn’t Mubarak also blame the media?”.

 

Mr Singh of course is not nearly as vulnerable as Mr Mubarak was, nor is his democratically elected coalition government, and he had a good story to tell on the country’s strong 8-9% economic growth and moves to curb terrorism.. But a politician does neither himself nor his government any good by appearing in front of the media when he cannot stamp his authority on events. Mr Mubarak did not have that authority, when he appeared on tv the day before he was ousted, because of the crowds in Tahrir Square, especially at a time when international opinion had turned against him.

Mr Singh, who has been criticised for not speaking out earlier, does not have the authority because of the coalition weaknesses that he admitted. His authority is also weakened by the fact that he is not actually the head of the governing coalition – that mantle is held by the even more silent Sonia Gandhi, head of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty who is president of Mr Singh’s Congress Party.

He is a shy (though sometimes stubborn) academic at heart, and is not a strong public performer when under pressure, as he showed today. This is the second time in a year that he has failed to run an adequate press conference. He did the same last May at a big media event, where he said virtually nothing new and developed no themes on major issues. It is unfair however just to blame Mr Singh, when it is Mrs Gandhi who ultimately calls the shots.

Jairam Ramesh tackling corruption

I had been planning to write today about Jairam Ramesh, India’s minister for environment and forests, who is engaged in a battle for a key part of the future of India. He is doing this by trying to bring order and clean government to the application of environmental controls that has been riven by corruption and appalling mis-governance for more than ten years.

I will return to Mr Ramesh in another article, but the point to make today is that he is trying to stamp out corruption in the most effective way possible – by implementing laws and regulations honestly and as fairly as he can, and by setting an reputable example to his officials. He has the authority to do so because, as a long-term Congress Party policy maker and adviser with a clean image, he is backed by Mrs Gandhi. He is also backed by Mr Singh who, however, is concerned that Mr Ramesh’s actions might delay new projects and investment and slow down economic growth.

Mr Singh cannot force other less honest and policy-oriented ministers to be so effective. ”In a coalition government, you can suggest your preferences [for cabinet ministers] but you have to go by what the leader of that coalition partner ultimately insists,” he said today, explaining why he reappointed the now-jailed Andimuthu Raja from Tamil Nadu’s DMK party as telecommunications minister after the last general election, even though it is assumed he did not want him.

“I did not feel I had the authority to object to Mr Raja’s entry because quite honestly in May 2009, although complaints were coming from all sides…I was not in a position to make up my mind that anything seriously was wrong”. Presumably, he was “not in a position” to make up his mind primarily because Congress, headed by Mrs Gandhi, needed the DMK as a coalition partner. “Some compromises have to be made in managing a coalition,” said Mr Singh, after carefully detaching himself from personal responsibility for Mr Raja’s actions.

Mr Singh admitted that corruption scams “do bring out the weaknesses in the processes of governance”, adding, “You may call them ethical deficits”. That echoed remarks made recently by Palaniappan Chidambaram, the home minister, that there were “governance deficits”. Mr Singh added that he did not “deny that we need to improve the quality of governance,” but failed to go further and spell out Ramesh-style clean-ups in other areas.

He admitted that some people said “that we are a lame duck government, that I am a lame duck prime minister”, but did nothing to address that, apart from a promise that the  “government is dead serious in bringing to book all the wrongdoers, regardless of
their position they may occupy.”

That has been said before, though there are signs that the government is planning to curb ministers’ discretionary powers that are not properly monitored, and to speed up corruption investigations.

So we wait to see how the government and the legal system deal with those involved in current corruption scandals – which Mr Singh referred to simply as “some aberrations” in his opening remarks. The scandals range from the telecom licences to last year’s Commonwealth Games preparations, real estate and land allocation deals in various states (including one involving top army generals), and illegal mining.

Mr Singh did not say enough to raise much hope that “all the wrongdoers” would be brought “to book” – nor that, as he said when asked specifically about the Games’ corruption, that “the wrongdoers will not escape.”



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Posted by: John Elliott | February 11, 2011

India’s protection against Tahrir Square style rebellions

Questions have frequently been asked in India during the past three weeks about whether the type of uprising seen in Cairo’s Tahrir Square could happen here, with a street-level rebellion occupying a city centre and spreading across the country to such a degree that it topples the national government.

Surely, it is generally said, India’s democratic systems, though flawed, make the country immune to such social and political upheavals. As a last resort, India’s non-political army could step in as a benign temper-calming longstop, as it does from time to time around the country.

India, people say correctly, is not an autocracy, so surely it has enough checks and balances in its parliamentary system to stop such an event happening. Indeed the nearest thing to an autocracy is the Congress Party under Sonia Gandhi, who heads the governing coalition and whose dynastic writ crosses swathes of government policy. Along with her heir-apparent son Rahul, she is however a directly-elected member of the parliament’s Lok Sabha (lower house), and her influence on the country depends on Congress winning national parliamentary and state assembly elections.

To an outsider, India must seem ripe for an Egypt-style eruption. Its parliament is frequently closed down by political rows, as happened for almost the whole of the pre-Christmas winter session. Its governing coalition is rudderless and steeped in corruption, and the ineffective opposition is so irresponsible and desperate to gain attention that it even tried to whip up unrest in the riot-prone state of Kashmir over whether the national flag should be flown on Republic Day.

More than 300m people live on a dollar a day or less, and twice that number on less than $2. Food prices have been rising at 18%. There has been frequent regional unrest over the poor losing their land to rampant speculation and industrial development, and top judges and army generals have joined politicians and other officials in building up illicit personal wealth.

The young are restless and ambitious and, though many are enjoying an upwardly mobile lifestyle that their parents could only dream about when they were young, many are underemployed or just without work, even after some form of tertiary education. Those under 35 account for about 60% of the 1.1bn population and, like Egypt’s youth, they are heavily into electronic communications and social media. Some have not just one but two cell phones – there are over 750m mobiles in use in the country.

Anti-corruption rally at Delhi's Jantar Mantar - India Today photo

This leads to two questions. First, what sort of subjects could trigger a rebellion? Second, could there be a national rebellion and, if not, could government-threatening uprisings develop in individual states, and might that lead to nation-wide contagion.

Land is most likely to trigger unrest, as has been seen in many parts of the country, notably in West Bengal’s violent eruptions that started four years ago over a Special Economic Zone (SEZ) at Nandigram and a Tata Motors factory at Singur. (Both projects were abandoned.)

The trouble starts with small farmers and landless labourers giving up land they have held for generations. They often waste the small amounts they are paid and then see developers making massive profits in later deals. Tribal people lose their village land in mineral-rich forests and mountains to companies like Vedanta, a controversial UK-based mining company, and to many more Indian operators that move in illegally with the support of local politicians and officials.

When 25,000 landless workers marched to the edge of Delhi in November 2007, I wrote on this blog that land “looks like becoming India’s most explosive social issue in the future, as those who benefit from land grabs become more greedy and those who lose out feel even further left behind”.

Until now however, democratic forces have calmed protests, negating chances of a mass rebellion. West Bengal has had all the seeds for a popular uprising after 30-plus years of rule by an increasingly corrupt and self-serving Communist-based Left Front state government. The Nandigram and Singur unrest was encouraged for political reasons by Mamata Banerjee, leader of the regional Trinamool Congress opposition party, and was inflamed by Maoist Naxalite rebels.

Democracy has now asserted itself in two ways. Mamata Banerjee hopes to oust the Left in state elections due in April this year. And Mrs Gandhi said during the protests over Nandigram and other SEZs that agricultural land should not be grabbed for development. That was a good and positive example of her influence, and it halted many projects as well as quelling the unrest. Since then, national and state governments have been working on new policies to give those who lose their land a permanent stake in industrial and mining developments, though progress is slow.

Corruption

Corruption is another potential issue, but millions of people enjoy the spoils down through the system to village level (which is why 70% or more of economic aid is lost in transit), so it arouses condemnation and protest demonstrations (see pic above), but not potential revolt. Anger about corruption is also defused by elections, which politicians frequently lose if they are perceived themselves to have benefited excessively. Lalu Prasad Yadav, the once-jailed former long-term chief minister of Bihar, who was involved in multi-million dollar scams but did nothing for mass development, was trounced for a second time in state elections last year after his successor had smartened up the state’s performance.

Much is forgiven if there is development. Corrupt leaders of two parties, the DMK and AIADMK, have between them run Tamil Nadu state assembly coalitions continuously for 44 years. Operating in the style of Malaysia’s former prime minister Mahathir bin Mohamad, they have led strong economic, social and industrial development (including respectable SEZs). At the same time, their relations and friends have been awarded jobs and business contracts in the state and ministerial posts in Delhi – as has been dramatically evident in India’s current telecoms scam. This may not be ethical government, but it is a model of development that works.

The biggest threat to India of course comes from Maoist Naxalites, who are active in a third of the country’s districts and conduct armed terrorist attacks that security forces have not been able to quell. Home minister Palaniappan Chidambaram admitted recently that the two sides had reached “a stalemate”. The rebels thrive in tribal and other under-privileged areas where there is a lack of development and where India’s often-brutal security forces and forest officers harass the poor. They have yet to gain a hold in an urban area, though they occupied Lalgarh, 100 miles from Kolkata, in 2009.

Social issues

There are of course other major social issues, as well as ethnic and religious clashes, that cause often-violent riots, for which India is famous. But the size and diversity of this voluble and argumentative country means it is very difficult to build a unified view on anything, and the main Hindu religion does not unify people to anything like the same extent as Islam. Protests usually peter out once the demonstrators have been placated with promises, or the vested interests that encouraged and facilitated them have achieved their political, monetary or other targets. Most recently, Gujjar tribals who blocked road and rail access between Delhi and Rajasthan for days at the end of December, eventually went home with just vague promises of action on their demands for economic advancement.

None of these issues is likely to lead to a nation-wide rebellion in Delhi. If the Gujjars or the 2007 landless had broken through police barricades and got to the centre of Delhi, there could have been bloody clashes, but they would not have been joined by the hundreds of thousands of motivated youth needed to challenge the structure of government. Indeed, a recent survey suggests that the youth are “highly risk averse, more politically right-wing than before, extremely socially conservative and disinclined to opt for rebellion”.

Another factor negating national unrest is the fact that different regions of India have different priorities. Patrick French recently told me that the questions he was asked in the south on his Portrait of India new book tour focussed much more on business issues than on Delhi’s preoccupation with politics. Concern about India-Pakistan rows similarly seems to dwindle as one travels south. And perceptions of corruption, as I said above, varies.

Kolkata's Victoria Park and Memorial

Since independence, no event has united the country in protest. Two of the worst outbreaks were based on religious divisions. North India’s anti-Sikh riots were encouraged after Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984 by leading Congress politicians but, after a few days retribution, the government stepped in.

Anti-Muslim riots at the end of 1992 after the Babri Masjid demolition in Ayodhya faded away after some weeks. In the far north-east states such as Assam and Nagaland, there have been local uprisings for years which have no resonance or impact elsewhere. Even 21 years of unrest in Kashmir has been largely contained to that state.

It looks therefore as if there is no prospect of Tahrir Square being replayed in Delhi’s majestic Raj Path that leads past parliament to the presidential palace, nor even in the traditional Jantar Mantar protest area (photo above) off Parliament Street. Regionally it will not happen at Shivaji Park in the commercial capital of Mumbai, where Hindu and Marathi chauvinist demonstrations are held, nor in Bangalore where there are frequent Hindu-Muslim clashes and one of the country’s most corrupt state governments.

But, if democratic forces continue to fail to serve the people of West Bengal better, might the Naxalites draw closer to Kolkata’s Victoria Park (above) that houses the monumental Victoria Memorial? That would be a neat location in the former imperial capital for an uprising by the poor about how badly they have fared since the British left.

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Posted in India communist, India corruption, India democracy, India dynasties, India politicians, Naxalite, Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, Rahul Gandhi, terrorism, West Bengal | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by: John Elliott | February 7, 2011

A historian’s sketchbook becomes a Portrait of India

BOOK REVIEW: India, A Portrait – An intimate biography of 1.2 billion people by Patrick French. Penguin Books India Rs699   Penguin Allen Lane UK £25

Foreign journalists are often criticised in India for rarely travelling far from their comfortable homes and offices in New Delhi, apart from visits to big cities, disasters, and war zones. The criticism is usually unfair, but few have travelled as widely as Patrick French did for his new big book, India, A Portrait – an intimate biography of 1.2 billion people, that has just been published in India and the UK.

French’s visits range  from remote areas that are controlled by Maoist Naxalite rebels to dabbawallas (lunch “tiffin” delivery boys) in Mumbai, and from Delhi’s Tihar jail, where he meets convicted Kashmiri terrorist Mohammad Afzal, to Kashmir itself where he interviews Shakeel Ahmad Bhat (above) who had been portrayed on international television as “Islamic Rage Boy”.

He meets stone crushers at a Karnataka quarry that neatly contrast with the high tech millionaires of nearby Bangalore, has coffee with a male stripper and pimp in Delhi, meets a shampoo sachet tycoon in Tamil Nadu, and finds a Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader, Rajnath Singh, who only talks to him about “integral humanism and humanity’s integration”. He also tracks down telecom entrepreneur Sunil Mittal of Bharti AirTel in shiny London offices that Mittal had just acquired when Bharti took over Zain, a pan-Africa telecom business.

Along the way, there is a notable story of how Sonia Gandhi, dynastic leader of the Congress Party and India’s governing coalition, decided as far back as 1999 that Manmohan Singh, who she made prime minister in 2004, would be given that job if Congress won a general election. French also reveals amusingly how, as a teenage student travelling In India in 1986, he sold smuggled electronic gadgets and exchanged dollars in Delhi’s underground Palika Bazaar.

French garnered these encounters and stories, plus countless other interviews, over many years, some going back to 2002. He  met Bhat in Kashmir in 2007 and has edited the report he wrote then in the UK’s Daily Mail into the book. Sharpened with more recent research, these stories fill the 400 pages of India, a Portrait in a fascinating and often revealing kaleidoscope.

French is primarily a gifted historian and biographer, with two specially acclaimed works – a fascinating portrait of Sir Francis Younghusband, an early-1900s British explorer and spy, in Younghusband: The Last Great Imperial Adventurer and, more recently, a penetrating biography of V.S.Naipaul, the writer, in The World is What It Is.  French’s new book picks up the history of modern India in 1947, where an earlier work, Liberty or Death, India’s Journey to Independence and Division, ended.

He combines an historian’s broad sweep and research with a journalist’s interviewing skills and eye for detail, but he does not deploy the Younghusband book’s sense of history-in-the-making, nor the Naipaul book’s critical assessments.

Instead, his mix of history and reportage leads him sometimes to shy away from interpretation and comment, failing sufficiently to examine and interpret the real argumentative conflict-ridden India.

An important part of the book covers India’s economic and business development but, having interviewed Sunil Mittal, he misses an opportunity to illustrate India’s intense corporate rivalries. The Reliance group’s two Ambani brothers tripped up Mittal twice – first when he was building the business in competition with Mukesh Ambani, and then when Anil Ambani (after the two brothers had split) undermined his negotiations to buy South Africa’s MTN telecom company.

Historically important events in the 1980s, such as Punjab’s Khalistan terrorism, the Bofors gun bribing scandal, and India’s intervention over Sri Lanka’s Tamil separatists, are dismissed in just a few lines, even though the Punjab and the Tamil troubles triggered the assassination of former prime ministers Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi, and Bofors continues to rattle the Gandhi’s and Congress.

There is little examination and assessment of the impact of corruption that is dragging down Indian society at all levels, compounding appalling misgovernance. Poverty is understated, and there is a parallel question of how the country will develop and cope as the hundreds of millions of people who still do not share in India’s modern economy gradually do so. There is a teeming, complex, selfish and often cruel side to India, along with the brilliant brains, entrepreneurial achievements, economic success, and culture richness shown here.

Dynastic surge

The book’s most important contribution to current history (as I noted here last month) is its detailed research into how dynasties have swept across Indian politics in the past few years. This research was done with the help of regional journalists and a brilliant young statistics cruncher in Delhi, Arun Kaul.

Led by the ruling Gandhi dynasty, more than a third of Congress Party’s MPs elected in 2009 came into politics through a family link. Even worse, literally all the MPs (not just Congress) aged under 30, and more than two-thirds of those under 40, were from hereditary families. All five of north India’s Rashtriya Lok Dal Party (RLD) MPs had family links, as did seven out of nine MPs of the Maharashtra-based Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) led by Sharad Pawar and Praful Patel.

French suggests wryly that Parliament’s Lok Sabha (House of the People), is becoming a “Vansh Sabha – a House of Dynasty”. This tendency to “turn politics into a family business”, he says, “was being emulated across northern India at state level, with legislators nominating children and spouses.” Sadly however, French pulls his punches and does not explore why this has happened. When I asked him at the launch in Delhi, he admitted he was puzzled, especially about why the trend boomed in the 2004 and 2009 general elections.

It is important to know why it has happened because this dynastic surge is partly both the cause and effect of a sharp decline in the standards of Indian politics and governance that began in Indira Gandhi’s time as prime minister. Standards have worsened enormously in recent years as personal greed has replaced many politicians’ concern for the country – especially in regional parties, whose role expanded dramatically after the 1980s when Congress declined.

People sometimes seem scared to tackle this subject because they might be thought to be attacking The Family, as the Gandhi dynasty currently headed by Sonia Gandhi and her son Rahul is known. But it is surely easy to draw a distinction between families that do seem to have a sense of service and destiny, led by the Nehru-Gandhi’s and including some of the younger politicians such as Jyotiraditya Scindia, Sachin Pilot, Omar Abdullah, and Jay Panda, and those who look as if they are primarily interested in maintaining the power and illicit wealth that comes from prestige, patronage and corruption.

This is a well written book, though readers new to India may find there is insufficient context, while other may regret the limited analysis and interpretation. It stands alongside and updates, with colourful reporting, In Spite of the Gods (2006) by FT journalist Ed Luce and the thought provoking older The Idea of India (1997) by Sunil Khilnani.

A shorter version of this review appeared in India’s Mail Today Sunday newspaper on January 23, 2011

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Posted by: John Elliott | January 30, 2011

Incredible India’s Literary Woodstock

The Jaipur Literature Festival that ended last Tuesday is a splendid example of India at its best. Over 50,000 people crowded into the grounds of the elegant old city’s Diggi Palace for five festive days of brainy entertainment, occasional intellectual and political controversy, many conversations, and vibrant music, but with minimal security and hassle. Nobel laureates, Booker and Pulitzer Prize winners and over 200 other speakers mingled with local people, schoolchildren and visitors from elsewhere in India and abroad for an event that has pulled literary discussion out of quiet academic seminars.
 
You may marvel at India’s economic growth rate of around 8% or 9%, but the Jaipur Lit Fest’s six-year growth rate since it started with an audience of a few hundred in 2006  averages about 20% – with little advertising or marketing. The crowd has jumped six-fold in the past three years from 10,000 in 2009 to 60,000 this year (including open air evening concerts) – leading to the tag “India’s literary Woodstock”.
 
In January 2006, at the first festival, I walked into Diggi Palace’s majestic Durbar Hall (pictured below last year) and sat on a faded sofa with Namita Gokhale, one of the festival’s two co-directors, to listen to the flowing cadences of Urdu traditional Dastangoi story telling. This was on the fringes of the Jaipur “Virasat” Arts Festival, which was led by Faith Singh, a doyen of Rajasthan arts and crafts. There was a magic mixture of dance, music, and art exhibitions. “Later, we sat on the lawns and talked about the (literature) festival and how we hoped it would be a little larger next year,” wrote Ms Gokhale. 
 

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She needn’t have worried. By 2009, it was becoming internationally famous and attracted people like US-based historian Simon Schama and editor-writer Tina Brown (who had just launched the Daily Beast news website), as well as Vikas Swarup, an Indian diplomat who wrote the book Q&A that became the award-winning Slumdog Millionaire film. Last year, with some 33,000 people, speakers ranged from Dalit writers at the bottom of India’s social strata to Ashi Dorji Wangmo Wangchuck, the Queen Mother of Bhutan, and four raucous Scottish writers led by William Dalrymple, the festival’s other co-director.
 
One can easily yearn for the simplicity of that first relaxed year, now that the Durbar Hall has become just one of four over-flowing concurrent locations. But the energy is irresistible.

Market forces at work

Market forces are delightfully and brutally at work, as I realised when I moderated a session on Brand India. People standing at the back and sides of the seated areas move around as boredom strikes and word filters out about particularly good or bad sessions, so you can instantly see how you’re being rated. Fortunately, Brand India’s crowd grew, thanks to the sometimes-combative eloquence of the three speakers – Amitabh Kant, a remarkable bureaucrat who master-minded the development of Kerala tourism as God’s Own Country brand and then ran the (albeit ambiguous) Incredible India campaign, William Bissell who runs his family’s booming FabIndia shops, and Suhel Seth, an eloquent and outspoken branding guru. Basically, we all agreed that Brand India needs to smarten up.

Literary stars included Nobel laureates John Coetzee (who held his audience with a 45-minute reading from his The Old Woman and the Cats) and Orhan Pamuk, Swedish crime fiction writer Henning Mankell, Martin Amis, Richard Ford, and many others. Palestinian writer Dr Izzeldin Abuelish read from his book I Shall Not Hate. Iconic Indian poets and lyricists from Bollywood such as Gulzar and Javed Akhter drew huge crowds, and prominent Hindi writer editor Mrinal Pande spoke eloquently about the literary scene in Hindi and other Indian languages.

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In a popular session on Tamil pulp fiction, some erotic reading was discreetly censored when schoolchildren (like those on the right) walked in. That led one boy mischievously to ask what he could or should read, admitting he was into an odd mix of Enid Blyton and Dan Brown. “Just read whatever you can get and throw away what you don’t like,” was the unanimous reply.
 
Last year, there was a theme running through the festival about the appalling unevenness of India’s economic growth, sparked by Dalit writers’ stories of exclusion. This year there was much agonising about the partition of India and Pakistan at independence in 1947, whether that could have been avoided, and if so who was to blame – and about Pakistan’s imploding crisis and allied unrest in Kashmir.
 
This was partly sparked by the recent launched Tinderbox, the past and future of Pakistan by M.J.Akbar, an Indian newspaper and magazine editor, who talked about Pakistan with Mani Shankar Aiyar, an author and diplomat-turned-politician. Mr Akbar floated the idea that, in the run-up to 1947, some people had hoped that India’s relationship with Pakistan would be as easy and open as it had been with the Princely States under British rule. A Muslim and an ardent opponent of partition, he told how his father had moved from India to East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) in 1947 but quickly returned, explaining years later that there had been “too many Muslims” there. Rebuking laughter in the audience, Mr Akbar said his father had meant he missed the “multi-culturalism of India”.

Ahmed Rashid, a Pakistani journalist who has made his name internationally since 9/11 as the foremost authority on Afghanistan and the Taliban, had no time for what he saw as India’s irrelevant “obsession” about partition and the political leaders of the 1940s. The current crisis of Pakistan and Kashmir should be the focus now, he told me. Pakistan’s current crisis was “of its own making…..and bad management”.
 
That opens up a much bigger subject, but here’s a final word on Lord Mountbatten, the much-criticised governor-general who presided over India’s independence and partition, and whose wife had a close and much debated relationship with Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s independence leader and first prime minister.

Namita Gokhale, Willie Dalrymple, Sheuli Sethi, Sanjoy Roy

Alex von Tunzelmann, who has written a controversial book, Indian Summer, on the subject, suggested that Mountbatten tolerated his wife’s Nehru relationship because he knew she could not leave him for the Indian leader. When asked whether she disliked any of the characters in her book, Ms von Tunzelmann said she had been “irritated” by Mountbatten.

Even Philip Ziegler, Mountbatten’s official biographer, she said, “had to have a note on his desk saying ‘Remember, despite everything, he was a great man’”.

The crowds have now dispersed, and Diggi Palace has returned to its usual role as a quiet secluded Jaipur hotel, with its owner Ram Pratap of Diggi and his wife waiting to hear how many more people might be coming next year. Some visitors complain about the large numbers, but the crowds contribute to the ambience, and it is a tribute to the Diggi family and to Namita Gokhale and Willie Dalrymple, plus producers Sanjoy Roy and Sheuli Sethi of Teamwork Productions, that the festival brings stimulation and enjoyment to so many. Here’s to next year!

closing debate on the right to information

The Jaipur Lit Fest earlier on this blog:
2011 opener: https://ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com/2011/01/21/crowds-flock-to-delhi-art-summit-and-jaipur-lit-fest-%e2%80%93-with-husain-on-show/
2010 at the end: https://ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com/2010/01/28/enthusiastic-literary-and-art-events-celebrate-india%e2%80%99s-success/
2010 opener: https://ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com/2010/01/24/books-and-crowds-in-sunny-jaipur/
2009: https://ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com/2009/02/02/india%e2%80%99s-top-young-author-chetan-bhagat-wants-to-make-change-happen/

 

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Posted by: John Elliott | January 27, 2011

Delhi’s Art Summit a huge international success with 128,000 visitors and good sales

Delhi’s Art Summit was a massive success, closing last Sunday with the organisers announcing an astonishing total of 128,000 visitors over four days. This vastly exceeded expectations, and the figure has even surprised some exhibitors. It makes the event one of the world’s most popular art fairs, even though it was only the third time that it had been held.

Substantial sales were reported by many galleries, including five works above Rs4.5 crore ($1m, £650,000). Several private and institutional collectors bought art works for double that amount.

Neha Kirpal, the founder and director of the show, says that the unexpectedly high attendance figures, which more than trebled the last summit’s 40,000 in August 2009, were partly the result of extensive marketing to India’s art community, schools and colleges, and cultural organizations over the past year.

Visitors came from 17 Indian cities and from 67 cities globally – both high figures that demonstrated growing interest in modern and contemporary Indian art. The attendance peak figure given by the organisers was a surprising 70,300 last Saturday.

Police guard on MF Husain works

But the art fair ended untidily when, without warning, the organisers discovered last Sunday afternoon that Sonia Gandhi, leader of the Congress Party and India’s governing coalition, had arrived and that the police had blocked entry to the exhibition hall without warning. That meant that entry was barred 40 minutes before the scheduled time of 4pm.

Ms Kirpal takes a philosophical view on this, regretting the inconvenience but stressing how valuable it was to have Mrs Gandhi’s interest and government support for such a private sector venture.

Hemi Bawa figures

“I am delighted that she came – it was very important for us,” she says, adding that India’s recently appointed Culture Minister, Kumari Selja, was there earlier.

The show’s 84 galleries (from 20 countries) sold an average of four to five works each, and some said they had sold all they had on display. At the top end, works by F.N.Souza,  one of India’s most celebrated and highly priced modern artists, accounted for the largest number sold with prices from Rs500,000 ($11,000) to over Rs9m ($200,000).

Anish Kapoor mirror sculpture

Several international museums commissioned contemporary works. Among European modern artists, six works by Pablo Picasso topped the sales with prices rising to over Rs2m ($44,000). Other international sales were booked for later completion abroad.

At the same time, works priced between Rs100,000 and Rs500,000 (roughly $2,000 to $11,000 or £1,400 to £7,000) sold most, which tallied with some galleries reporting that up to 80% of sales went to new and first time buyers.

This shows, as I’ve written before, that the Art Summit neatly fulfils twin tasks . It is putting Delhi and India firmly on the international art circuit at a time when the market is picking up after the slump of two or three years ago. It also makes modern and contemporary art accessible for people who would not happily venture into a smart gallery but feel comfortable in Delhi’s Pragati Maidan exhibition grounds.

A great success – as was the Jaipur Literary Festival that will be up next on this blog.

See also https://ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com/2011/01/21/crowds-flock-to-delhi-art-summit-and-jaipur-lit-fest-%e2%80%93-with-husain-on-show/

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