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).

.

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.

.

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.

 



3 Comments

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

.

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.”



9 Comments

Posted in India, India corruption, India politicians, Manmohan Singh | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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.

17 Comments

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

3 Comments

Posted in Ambanis, Book Reviews, dynasty, India, India books | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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. 
 

.

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.

.

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/

 

3 Comments

Posted in India, India books | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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/

Leave a Comment

Posted in Contemporary art, India, Indian contemporary art, Indian modern art | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by: John Elliott | January 21, 2011

Crowds flock to Delhi Art Summit and Jaipur Lit Fest – with Husain on show

It’s a great weekend for the arts with a big Art Summit in Delhi and a Literature Festival in Jaipur. Both events are expecting to pull in crowds of 60,000 to 70,000 between today and when they close – the Art Summit on Sunday and the Jaipur festival next Tuesday.

Rodin’s $1.17m ‘The Thinker’ + Henneke Beaumont $60,000 figures

The Art Summit has had a tremendous first two days, with most of India’s leading collectors mingling with people from international galleries and auction houses and hundreds of local art buffs. Many of the 85 Indian and foreign galleries reported substantial sales. It is therefore clear that the Summit has put Delhi on the international map as a centre for international as well as Indian modern and contemporary art, with foreign galleries bringing masters such as Pablo Picasso and Auguste Rodin (right, on Robert Bowman Sculpture stand) and contemporary artist Damien Hirst to attract publicity and tempt India’s richest collectors.

The Jaipur festival, which opened this morning, was originally conceived as an Indian celebration of local language as well as Indian English writing, but it now brings in top leading international authors – this time they include Nobel prize winners Orhan Pamuk from Turkey and John Maxwell Coetze from South Africa. Foreign visitors include literature festival organisers from Edinburgh, Berlin, Australia, Poland and elsewhere, as well as countless publishers and literary agents. I’ll be there on Monday to moderate a session on Branding India, so more from Jaipur then.

The especially good news at the Art Summit is that works by 95-year old M.F.Husain, India’s leading living modern painter, are on display for the first time for several years in a major public show. Three of his works were withdrawn this morning after right wing Hindu fanatics continued their campaign against the artist because of his depiction of Hindu deities. At least one gallery, and the summit organisers, had threatening phone calls and messages yesterday, so the organisers decided that to avoid the risk of trouble, despite a heavy police presence. Senior government and other officials were consulted during the day and the works were going back on display this evening, demonstrating what Jawhar Sircar, the government’s secretary for culture, described as India’s freedom of expression being supported by its “strength of pluralism and elasticity”.

Anish Kapoor explains….

The best point about both these art and literature events is that they both attract people who would not usually have access to top art works, or to meet and listen to leading artists and literary figures. At the Art Summit, they include Anish Kapoor, the sculptor, who will speak at a summit session tomorrow, and this morning took visitors round an exhibition of his works at the National Gallery of Modern Art –  explaining (right) that “red is my favourite colour”.

The access point is especially significant for the Art Summit (it should be called an Art Fair) which is being held for the third time in the fading concrete jungle of Delhi’s Pragati Maidan exhibition grounds. Many Delhi residents, who would be nervous going into an art gallery, feel comfortable at Pragati Maidan because they are used to going there for trade, book and autos fairs.

Neha Kirpal – FT photo by Abhishek Bali

Neha Kirpal, a 30-year old pr executive (left) who conceived the Art Summit three years ago and now directs it, reckons that 40% of the Rs26 crore($5.4m, £3.3m).sales at the last event (in August 2009) went to first time buyers. There were over 40,000 visitors. This time prices of works by 570 artists shown by 84 galleries from 20 countries range from Rs20,000 ($440) to Rs7 or 8 crore (about $1.5m).

That confounds critics who suggest the Summit has become a champagne-bubbly event for the rich and elite. There are of course fringe events at galleries all round Delhi, which are mostly accessible by invitation and where champagne does flow.

The best so far was the opening three evenings ago of the refurbished Delhi Art Gallery in Hauz Khas, with an amazing exhibition of more than 250 works by the veteran Progressive artists’ group that includes names such as Husain, F.N.Souza and Hari Ambadas Gade. The gallery has published a big book of the works (below) and the show is on until March 8 and is an essential visit to see how modern Indian art has evolved since independence.

The Progressives are a recurring theme around the fringe events, reflecting the fact that India’s modernist painters are the safest buy at a time when the market is still recovering from the economic slump of two or three years ago.

F.N.Souza on cover of Delhi Art Gallery book

Another party was held by the Saffronart on-line auction house, which opened a new gallery in Delhi’s Oberoi Hotel last night with a rare show of Vasudeo S. Gaitonde’s works. The Vadehra Galley has an exhibition of Tyeb Mehta’s works and has published a book of what is on show. The Kiran Nadar Museum of Art – one of two big privately-funded art centres in Delhi – opened in a new location, and Oxford University Press earlier this week launched a new book by Yashodhara Dalmia, a curator and art writer, called Journeys of Indian Artists – Four Generations of Indian Artists in their Own Words.

Neha Kirpal’s big achievement over the last couple of years, in addition to adapting Pragati Maidan’s decrepit infrastructure (including rainproofing the roof with a plastic cover) for an international show, has been to bring India’s jealous and status-conscious art fraternity behind the Art Summit, and to get government backing with minimal interference. That is partly because she and her organisation have no stake in the art market, so can keep jealousies at bay.

Her work has helped to stimulate a debate about how India‘s art activities should be improved with better run and funded government museums, more encouragement for private sector initiatives, a stronger educational and academic base, arrangements for foreign acquisitions and other issues. These were debated this evening in an open forum where the summit’s energy generated demands form action – and a proud statement from Mr Sircar that “the Husain pictures are back up on show”.

Leave a Comment

Posted in Contemporary art, Hindu extremists, India, India books, Indian contemporary art, Indian modern art | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by: John Elliott | January 20, 2011

India’s Government has a spineless reshuffle

The Indian government’s political weakness was demonstrated last night when prime minister Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi, who presides over the Congress Party and the coalition, carried out a reshuffle of medium-senior ministers without generating any new energy. The weakness was most evident in the failure to retire ageing ministers, sack those most involved in corruption, and promote able young parliamentarians in their late 30s and early 40s who would add dynamism to a tired administration and rudderless party.

Overall, there was some good news in the reshuffle and some not so good news.

The good news was that Praful Patel, a leading and wealthy Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) politician, was removed as Aviation Minister, and that his NCP leader, Sharad Pawar, lost responsibility for Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution, though he retained Agriculture and Food Processing Industries.

This means that the plight of Air India and problems of new airports can be tackled afresh by someone not sullied by actionless pr spin and rumours of long links with private sector airlines. Moves can also be started to curb food price inflation, now running at around 18% under Mr Pawar’s ineffectual care.

More good news was that Murli Deora lost Petroleum and Natural Gas, where he was seen to have mishandled blockages on Vedanta, a controversial mining company, taking over Scotland-based Cairn Energy’s Indian gas field business. His successor, S. Jaipal Reddy, an experienced and respected politician, will not have the overlay of Mr Deora’s close business links – especially (reportedly) with Reliance Industries.

Jairam Ramesh stays

It is also good that Jairam Ramesh, Minister for Environment and Forests, holds on to his job and can continue to bring some order to a hitherto corrupt and uncontrolled area of government. He has clashed with many ministers including (unsurprisingly) Mr Pawar and Mr Patel over projects they have been promoting, but is now showing more willingness to find a way for big deals to go ahead without breaking environmental regulations.

Kapil Sibal also stays with education and telecoms as the Human Resource Development Minister, and at Communications and Information Technology.

Less good news is that Mr Patel, who moves to the unexciting slot of Minister of Heavy Industries and Public Enterprises, has got a seat in the cabinet, which can only be seen as a pay-ff for him and his boss losing Aviation and Food.

Other key moves were Kamal Nath, who was demoted last year from Commerce and Industry to Road Transport and Highways, slipping sideways to Urban Development, where much needs to be done in terms of urban planning and renewal. It is not clear however if he has the energy and incentive to tackle it. Nath was named in the recent Radia tapes leaks as someone who could “make his 15%” on highway contracts..

Salman Khursheed, who was first a minister in the 1980s, has given up Company Affairs but has taken on Water Resources, where major work is needed to secure future supplies, in addition to his existing charge of Minority Affairs

C.P.Joshi, a Rajasthan  politician, takes over at Highways, where he has the difficult job of reviving the pace of road construction. Vayalar Ravi adds Aviation to his existing Overseas Indian Affairs portfolio. It is too early to guess how well either minister will do, though they are sure to spend less time than their predecessors camouflaging their work with media leaks and briefings.

Ajay Maken, a younger politician from Delhi, becomes Minister for Youth Affairs and Sports, replacing the veteran bureaucrat-turned politician M.S.Gill, who presided somewhat ineffectually over the recent Commonwealth Games preparations with their widespread corruption. There were also changes at the Steel and the Mines ministries.

The major portfolios of Finance, Home, Foreign Affairs and Defence were unchanged in what was the first cabinet reshuffle since last year’s general election. Mr Singh is talking about a bigger reshuffle in a couple of months time, when it is assumed some of the demands from state-based parties such as Tamil Nadu’s DMK for lucrative prestigious posts might be met.

Lack of political skills

The reshuffle came at a time when Mrs Gandhi and Manmohan Singh seem to be losing energy and authority, not because they are disagreeing with each other but because they lack the guile and political sure-footedness needed to run a multi-party coalition and tackle endemic corruption and poor governance.

Rahul Gandhi, Sonia’s son and a future dynastic prime minister, is failing to emerge as a national leader and shoulder the responsibilities that might be expected of a 40-year old heir apparent. He is an MP, but spends his time touring the country, trying to build up the Congress Party’s regional organisation and making occasional public statements, but not shouldering any accountable responsibilities.

The Gandhi-Singh joint weakness is demonstrated by the failure to retire even M.S.Gill, a septuagenarian who has been moved to Statistics and Programme Implementation to do a job that is best done by a young politician gaining experience of government.

A group of 14 businessmen, a judge, and a former central bank governor warned in a public letter earlier this week that corruption and bad governance threatened India’s growth. “We are alarmed at the widespread governance deficit almost in every sphere of national activity covering government, business and institutions,” said the letter.

Last night’s reshuffle did do something to tackle these worries by moving ministers renowned for corporate cronyism. But, while that might improve the running their old ministries, it did nothing to tackle the government’s overall problems because they all got new jobs in potentially lucrative (kick-back) ministries.

5 Comments

Posted in Anil Ambani, dynasty, India, India airlines, India corruption, India dynasties, India politicians, Manmohan Singh, Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, Rahul Gandhi, Reliance Industries | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by: John Elliott | January 13, 2011

‘If Salman Taseer had been Indian he would still be alive’

India’s ‘House of the People is a House of Dynasty’

Two important books have been launched in Delhi this week, one on Pakistan and the other on India. Both have been written by serious respected authors and both have strong history that is relevant at a time when Pakistan is sliding deeper into irrational religious-based murder and terrorism, and India’s massive economic success is being undermined by rampant and debilitating corruption and poor political leadership.

Both books had launches with brief seminars and cocktail receptions. The first was for Tinderbox, the past and future of Pakistan by M.J.Akbar, a leading newspaper and magazine editor. MJ, as he is generally known, is the author of several books including a biography of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister.

The launch was attended by top politicians, academics and others, and speakers included India’s vice president, the finance minister, and opposition leader. Few kind words were said about Pakistan and, though the criticisms were generally well-meaning, coming as they did from an anxious neighbour, they would sound condescendingly critical to an outsider.

The second launch was for India – A Portrait by Patrick French, a younger and well-known London-based author who has strong links with India and first made his name 16 years ago with a memorable portrait of Sir Francis Younghusband, an early-1900s British explorer and spy. More recently, he proved his skills with a trenchant biography of V.S.Naipaul, the controversial writer adopted as an icon in India. This was a lower-key launch, somewhat trivialised by unfocussed questions. Patrick is now on a book tour round India, which ends at the Jaipur Literary Festival in ten days time, so has plenty of opportunity to spell out the strengths of his country portrait that runs from independence in 1947 to today.

I’ll be reviewing his book later next week for an Indian newspaper and will put that review up on this blog. Here, I’ll just mention that Patrick’s main contribution to knowledge of the current political scene is a devastating detailed analysis of the escalation of dynastic politics.

“India is going back to monarchy,” commented Outlook magazine (right) under the headline “The Princely State of India” when it ran lengthy excerpts recently. Patrick wrote that Parliament’s Lok Sabha (House of the People), was becoming a “Vansh Sabha – a House of Dynasty”.

Led by the ruling Gandhi dynasty, more than a third of the 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. More on that next week.

Returning to the Pakistan book, the most memorable quote at the launch came from MJ, who opened a powerful and reasoned speech with the bald statement: “If Salman Taseer had been an Indian Muslim, he would still have been alive today”. Speaking as an Indian Muslim himself, MJ was referring to the governor of the Pakistan province of Punjab, who was gunned down last week by one of his guards for supporting a Christian woman sentenced to death under draconian blasphemy laws.

Taseer was no saint. He had a chequered professional and private life, and would never have become a leading politician if the current Pakistan president, Asaf Ali Zardari, had not made him the Punjab governor. He was an independently minded character and this led to his death because he bravely stood out against Islamic extremism. His killing has made him a hero figure, and the dreadful way in which his opponents applauded his death has assured him a tragic place in the history of Pakistan’s decline. No Muslim cleric would preside at his funeral and lawyers (his own profession) threw flower petals approvingly at his killer.

Picking up MJ’s remark, that would never have happened in India, despite the country’s deeply ingrained history of ethnic cruelty and violence, and recent evidence that Hindu extremists have been responsible for some of the country’s terrorist attacks.

The irony, as MJ (below) points out in his book, is that in 1947 Muslims opted for a separate homeland because they believed they would be “physically safe, and their religion secure”, in a new nation. “Instead within six decades, Pakistan had become one of the most violent nations on earth, not because Hindus were killing Muslims but because Muslims were killing Muslims”.

MJ starts his “history of an idea” in the 1750s with the collapse of the Mughal Empire’s Muslim rule. That created a “mood of anguish” among the north Indian elite and led, “out of a fear of the future and pride in the past”, to the search for a new Muslim space. “Indians and Pakistanis are the same people; their nations were the first to win freedom from the mightiest empire in history,” he writes.

“Why then have the two countries moved on such divergent arcs since 14 and 15 August 1947? The idea of India is stronger than the Indian; the idea of Pakistan is weaker than the Pakistani. Secular democracy, a basis of the modern state, was the irreducible ideology of India, while the germ of theocracy lay in Pakistan’s genes.”

Among India’s Muslims, MJ is possibly the most erudite critic of 1947 partition. That leads to damning remarks such as “Pakistan is an idea that is regressive. India is an idea that is progressive”. This of course, sadly, has been proved right as India’s economy booms and Pakistan’s stability declines.

But India has deep problems too. There is a map of Pakistan on the inside cover of MJ’s book that highlights the areas to the north and north-west that are under Taliban influence. That’s quite scary, but so are maps of India that highlight areas under Maoist Naxalite control, which amount to a third of India’s districts.

Pakistan is suffering from a deeply flawed political system and corrupt often brutal administration that cannot cope with rising Islamisation. Despite its many successes, India is suffering from a deeply flawed pattern of economic growth and corrupt often brutal administration, which is failing to cope with the growing aspirations of the poor, leaving room for a Maoist rebellion.

As MJ points out, Pakistan’s slide into Islamic extremism began in the late 1970s under the then military dictator General Zia-ul-Haq. That’s over 20 years ago. What will India look like in 20 years time if it does not tackle its own weaknesses?

4 Comments

Posted in dynasty, India, India corruption, India economic reforms, India politicians, India politics, Naxalite, Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, Pakistan, Pakistan politics, Pakistan terrorism | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by: John Elliott | January 4, 2011

Jairam Ramesh wins in 2010 for tackling India’s corrupted environment

“Truth”, a top opposition politician said yesterday, “is very inconvenient – the more you suppress it, at some stage it comes out”. Arun Jaitley, one of India’s top lawyers and a former Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) minister, was referring to a verdict from India’s appellate tax tribunal that bribes were paid 25 years ago to an Italian businessman on a Bofors gun deal. That businessman was (and may still be) close to the Gandhi family that ran the Congress government in the 1980s and still does so today.

Mr Jaitley’s remark has a wider resonance for the Congress Party and government, which was hit in 2010 by a series of corruption scandals that dwarf the $50m bribes believed to have been paid in the 1980s on India’s Bofors gun deal when Rajiv Gandhi was the prime minister.

Jairam Ramesh

It neatly provides me with a new intro to a blog post that I had started writing about who made the most difference in India in 2010.

Certainly, I was suggesting, not prime minister Manmohan Singh nor his lady boss, Sonia Gandhi (Rajiv’s widow) and her heir-apparent son Rahul.

They have stood aside allowing messes like the Commonwealth Games preparations and a host of corruption scams to go ahead. They have won international applause for hosting the leaders of the US, China, Russia, France and the UK in Delhi during the past few months, but banquets, trade deals and investment memoranda do not run countries.

Now, sensing the political price they might have to pay later this year in five state assembly elections for allowing such rampant sleaze, they are proposing new regulations and procedures that look good but are likely to have little effect in the current state of Indian society and politics.

Pranab Mukherjee, the veteran finance minister, does not qualify either. Aside from the finance job, his political skills have kept Mrs Gandhi’s undisciplined and often corrupt coalition government in business, thus allowing offending politicians and officials to get richer and remain free.

In a negative sense, the biggest achiever could be Niira Radia, a lobbyist and public relations consultant, whose wheeler-dealing has flooded across media headlines in a “truth comes out” torrent of leaked audio tapes. This has exposed a massive telecoms-based scandal and revealed networks of politicians, officials, fixers – and a few journalists. It has personally embarrassed Ratan Tata, India’s top businessman and one of Ms Radia‘s main employers, as well as various contacts and associates such as N.K.Singh, a rich and controversial former top Finance Ministry and Prime Minister’s Office bureaucrat, Tarun Das, creator and former head of the Confederation of Indian Industry, and Pradip Baijal, a proud former senior telecoms bureaucrat.

Some observers suggest that Nitish Kumar, recently returned after state elections for a second term as chief minister of Bihar, made the most difference by turning round that beleaguered state. Or maybe it should be Kapil Sibal, the human resources minister who is tackling the country’s grossly inadequate education system and is now also cleaning up the telecoms administration. But these are still works in progress – Mr Kumar has to embed change in Bihar, and Mr Sibal has to implement good intentions and plans.

Jairam Ramesh – economic reformer

My choice is Jairam Ramesh, minister for the environment, who has used more than two decades of personal experience as an economic reforms adviser to bring some order and ethics to a previously policy-starved and corrupt area of government.

He has, to return to Mr Jaitley’s words, showed that “truth comes out”, not by directly accusing those involved of evading and bending environmental laws and administration, but simply by rigorously implementing those laws and personally reforming the administration.

Consequently, the truth has come out about how Vedanta, a London-based mining and metals group headed by India-born Anil Agarwal, has breached environmental regulations with bauxite mining and other projects, and a proposed university in Orissa. A long-delayed $12bn iron and steelworks project planned by Posco of Korea has come unstuck, also in Orissa, because of possibly faulty environmental and land-use approvals. A politically influential branch of the Jindal business family has been told it has ignored requirements on another Orissa steelworks. A partially built “hill station” (a romantic euphemism for lucrative urbanisation of rolling hills) called Lavasa in Maharashtra, which is promoted by powerful political and business interests, is also (as the Indian media terms it) “under the scanner”.

Mr Ramesh’s approach has also helped the truth to come out about massive illegal mining in other states such as Karnataka and Jharkhand, tied in most cases to corrupt politicians.

His success can be measured by looking at who he has upset – Sharad Pawar and Praful Patel, both powerful politicians and fixers from Maharashtra and currently ministers (respectively) for agriculture and aviation, Kamal Nath, minister for highways, the coal and steel ministries, chief ministers of various states, and the companies named above plus dozens of smaller mining operators.

Montek Singh Ahluwalia (right) and Jairam Ramesh – PTI photo

He also has more respectable critics, notably Montek Singh Ahluwalia, who runs the Planning Commission, works closely with the prime minister, and has been a government economic adviser since the 1980s.

Mr Ahluwalia objects to Mr Ramesh’s plans for “no go” coal mining areas, suggesting this would hit economic growth.

The two men have been rubbing shoulders professionally for over 20 years (seen together, left, this week laughing at their first public meeting since Mr Ahluwalia’s remarks). They know that neither is anti-growth and that both are committed economic reformers. “We cannot deforest our way to prosperity and we cannot pollute our way to prosperity,” says Mr Ramesh.

Mr Ahluwalia’s remarks do however reflect the opposition that Mr Ramesh has stirred up. There are rumours that this has triggered a campaign to have him removed from the environment ministry in a cabinet reshuffle that might happen in the next few weeks, but that seems unlikely to be successful, given his high-level backing. “I am not doing something that is alien to what the prime minister and the Congress president [Mrs Gandhi] want me to do,” he said recently.

In the first year as minister, Mr Ramesh (below) seemed to be blocking every dubious project, courting controversy, secure in the support of Mrs Gandhi and, usually, the prime minister. I assumed then that, once he had established his new approach, he would start to be more accommodating and that now appears to be happening, forced maybe partly by the force of opposition.

He did for example compromise last month with Mr Patel about a new airport for Mumbai, achieving he says 80% of what he wanted. He might also let at least part of the Posco’s plans go ahead later this month. He has approved an environmentally controversial Indo-French nuclear power project in Maharashtra, and is reviewing coastal development zoning to allow some development while protecting vulnerable coastlines.

Overall he says, projects are divided into “yes”, “yes but” and “no” categories, with 95% being approved, which is “down from 99.99% earlier”. Only 5% receive a “no”. In addition to less controversial work he has done on wildlife conservation, he is planning two new environmental assessment authorities and tribunals. He also plans to amend forest laws to benefit tribal communities that have been driven by bullying officialdom into the hands of Naxalite rebels.

’Ultimate strategic maverick’

So I have no doubt that he is the public figure who has made the most difference in the past year. Perhaps the best tribute came last week from Lumumba Di-Aping, Sudan’s United Nations representative and a leading climate change negotiator. Having clashed with Mr Ramesh, who has also been courting controversy over climate change, he said he is “the ultimate strategic maverick”.

“He is a leftie on the right, he is a global nationalist and at the same time, he is unaccountable to anyone but to the pursuit of the national economic interests of India. That is the only thing that shapes his ultimate strategy”.

Mr Ramesh doesn’t like being called a maverick because, he says, all he is doing is implementing the laws. Nevertheless, it is a good tribute and surely puts his powerful political and business opponents in their place, which can only be for the country’s good.

7 Comments

Posted in environment, India, India corruption, India economic reforms, India mining, India wildlife, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Manmohan Singh, Naxalite, Orissa | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »

Categories