The crowd that assembled at Delhi’s Vigyan Bhawan was the who’s who of Indian industry. Reliance Industries boss Mukesh Ambani, till the other day Asia’s richest man until Jack Ma of Alibaba beat him to that spot by a couple of billion dollars with his $25bn initial public offering in New York, Dilip Shanghvi of Sun Pharmaceuticals, Azim Premji of Wipro, Cyrus Mistry of Tata Sons, Kumar Mangalam Birla of the Aditya Birla Group and Sunil Mittal of Airtel were just some of the big names taking the front row seats. Then there were some equally big names from Japan, Germany, South Korea and, of course, the US.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi strode in confidently, the crowd of nearly 2,000 rose to a man - there were quite a few already standing in aisles as there were not enough seats inside - and applauded. Modi spoke brilliantly and the applause soon transformed into a standing ovation. The occasion: launch of Modi’s “Make in India” initiative. It looked such a well-organised programme. And then it was found that the hundreds of USB flash drives containing the electronic versions of the brochures that were distributed among the delegates were made in, where else, China!
It turns out that India imports as many as 55mn USBs from China alone every year. Statistics compiled by the government show that 65% of the country’s electronics requirements are met through imports, an unnerving prospect that projects India’s electronics import bill to be in the region of $300bn by the year 2020. That would also mean that if some major manufacturing revolution does not happen in the next six years, electronics will beat oil as the biggest import component in India’s foreign exchange balance by the turn of the decade.
No wonder Modi is worried. At the same time he is aggressive. Luckily for him India’s space scientists came up with a timely gift, putting a spacecraft in Mars’ orbit at the very first attempt, a feat never achieved by any other nation. Modi took full advantage of this when he told the Vigyan Bhawan audience - something he repeated time and again to audiences at several forums during his visit to the US - that “everything about the Mars attempt was indigenous.” Meaning, if we can make a spacecraft with such precision, what is a USB?
If Modi’s “Make in India” thrust was aimed at denting the “Made in China” label that the world has grown accustomed to over the past decade or so, then India’s space scientists can rightly claim to have contributed to his efforts because China’s similar attempt a couple of years ago ended in embarrassing failure. To top it all, India put its spacecraft in orbit on a shoestring. (Rs7 per km as against the three-wheeler scooter-rickshaw rides in Ahmedabad that costs Rs10 a km, Modi told his US audience). The message is clear: if China can make it cheap India can do it cheaper! Will India’s democratic liberalism, as opposed to China’s single-party authoritarianism, be a hurdle? Well, that, and many such, is the imponderable.
On the day the much-feted achievement in space happened, the Supreme Court set aside licences, some issued as long ago as 1993, to some 214 coal mines across India sending shivers down the spine of not just the power sector but a host of major banks that had loaned as much as $16bn to these coal companies. Telecom major Vodafone is faced with a retrospective taxation issue that it has been fighting in courts for the past three years but with no immediate end in sight. Finance Minister Arun Jaitley in his budget speech had declared that the government would not resort to this law without providing adequate protection measures to private companies but he stopped short of scrapping the law altogether, leaving corporates wary of the government’s intentions.
Some feel that if the government was not looking to impose legislation retrospectively, then the courts would and cite the Supreme Court verdict on coal mines. The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) is also getting into the act by trying to pick holes in deals that had been concluded between government agencies and the private sector a decade or more earlier.
The World Bank’s annual indexation of the “ease of doing business” has put India in an unflattering 134th position out of 189 countries evaluated. Modi raised this point at his “Make in India” speech. He did not dispute it, but promised he would see to it that this figure is bettered by at least another 50 places. “It is the government’s responsibility,” he said. Minister of Commerce Nirmala Sitharaman, taking a leaf out of Modi’s penchant for wordplay and smart turn of phrases, promised the Vigyan Bhawan audience, and the investing world at large, that instead of red tape they would soon find a red carpet waiting for them. Maybe, she can start with good carpeted roads!
Ideologically opposite regional parties that spare little thought for the greater common good, mostly anti-entrepreneurial labour laws enacted in the days of Nehruvian socialism, wildly swinging land acquisition laws that make it nearly impossible to set up large-scale manufacturing units, a justice system that can take decades to call a spade a spade and a bureaucracy notorious for lethargy and corruption; all these and more make it a long and arduous road for Modi. For now, India can only hope that Modi’s manufacturing revolution will follow in the footsteps of ‘Amul’ Verghese Kurien’s white revolution in milk production and M S Swaminathan’s green revolution in agriculture, both unqualified successes.
‘Double divorce’
gives voter
more choice
If, as Harold Wilson said, a week is a long time in politics, 15 or 25 years must seem like eternity. That sort of time space breeds familiarity and you know what familiarity breeds.
The Bharatiya Janata Party and Shiv Sena in Maharashtra have been more than familiar, they have been ideological cousins. They have been together for 25 years. The Nationalist Congress Party’s (NCP) relationship with the Congress is more filial than fraternal because, after all, the former is only a breakaway branch of the latter. And they have been together for 15 years or, ironically, from the day the two parted ways in 1999!
Political partnerships are always marriages of convenience. As is often said in these parts, there are no permanent friends or enemies in politics, only permanent interests.
These permanent interests are on show in Mumbai these days. The BJP’s fairy-tale showing in the parliamentary elections - it won 23 of 25 seats it contested against an 18/24 scoreline for the Sena - has given it the confidence that it can do better alone than in the company of the Shiv Sena. The party must have also felt that Narendra Modi’s “development for all” agenda will once again bring rich dividends, especially in cities like Mumbai and Pune. Modi, in turn, will only be too eager to campaign because Mumbai, being the country’s financial capital, is vital to his plans to attract industrial investment.
On the other hand, the Shiv Sena, especially its leader Udhav Thackeray, has a point to prove. This will be the first state assembly elections that the Sena will be fighting without its founder supremo Bal Thackeray who died in November 2012. Udhav also needs to prove that the legacy of Bal Thackeray is rightfully his and not his cousin Raj Thackeray’s whose breakaway Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) had somewhat surprisingly won 13 seats in the last assembly elections. For 25 years the Shiv Sena had worked in the shadows of ‘big brother’ BJP. Udhav Thackeray, much assisted by his 24-year-old son Aditya, feels it is time the party, whose raison de’tre is Marathi nationalism, asserted itself.
The NCP perhaps has the shrewdest Indian politician in Sharad Pawar as its leader. Never one to go overboard with his statements, Pawar has been dropping enough hints that he is not happy with the way the Congress Party is being run by a still wet-behind-the-ear Rahul Gandhi. His nephew and Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar has never kept his ambitions a secret. He wants to be the chief minister. Playing second fiddle to the Congress will not help his cause in any way. He had even suggested - and the Congress has rejected - that the NCP and the Congress share the chief minister’s chair in rotation if the coalition was voted to power again. More importantly, there are several inquiries by federal agencies in which NCP leaders like Praful Patel are likely to be hauled up soon. Clinging to the sinking ship of the Congress will not help the cause of extricating these leaders without too much damage.
Of the four major parties, the Congress’ lot seems to be the worst. The anti-incumbency is definitely going to hit it most. Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan is A K Antony-like in his obsession with a clean image and, as a corollary, ineffectiveness. If farmer suicides in the rural areas had affected his government’s image, it has done itself no favour in urban centres like Mumbai and Pune where stifling regulations have created humongous artificial housing shortage. And by sticking to its guns in seat-sharing talks with the NCP, the Congress seems to have thrown away the baby with the bathwater.
That the Indian voter has come of age has been much in evidence in the past few elections. The “double divorce” in Maharashtra after the marriages of convenience has given the voter more choice. As she/he treads to the polling booth in a fortnight’s time, there is ground for one doubt to persist though: is the double divorce also one of convenience?