It’s nearing that time of the year when nominations will be made for all
kinds of awards, including the Padma
awards of the GOI. There are many honourable men and women who have won the
Padma awards; Girish Karnad, Shekhar Gupta, Rajdeep Sardesai,
Barkha Dutt, Teesta Setalvad. The list is really in thousands. Sometimes an
honour list is intriguing because of the notable absence of some names. MKGandhi’s name doesn’t have a Nobel
against it. In an informal poll CNN once checked with film-direction students
who they would like to interact with the most. The answer was unanimous: Martin Scorsese. Surprisingly, this
legendary American director didn’t win an Oscar for 30 years. When they finally
did give him an Oscar it wasn’t really for his best film at all. Ironically,
most of the guys who won over Scorsese were actually actors who turned
directors. This is one of those enduring Oscar conspiracies. The good thing,
though, about the Oscars is that it it’s not a govt award. Conspicuous by
absence in the list of Padma awards are some great names from Indian industry.
No Samir Jain, no Vineet Jain – both media leaders and
heads of the Times Group (TOI). I’m
not sure, but I don’t think the current Ambanis figure either. Most shocking of
all; Dhirubhai Ambani doesn’t figure.
I often find the clamour for the Bharat
Ratna for Sachin Tendulkar excessive and not entirely warranted. I also
believe in due course of time Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi will be awarded the
Bharat Ratna following Nehru, Indira and Rajiv. They are far more “entitled” to it than Sachin. Yet the
one man who changed the face of Indian industry, got the ‘Aam Aadmi’ to
participate in the equity cult, never failed to reward the small investor and
is truly an extra-ordinary business story never got any such awards.
Businessmen have been involved in politics from the time of our independence
movement but it’s largely to the credit of Dhirubhai that politicians were
turned into servants of big business. In this part let’s deal with DA and in
the next part we will get to Samir & Vineet Jain of TOI.
I am a great admirer of Dhirubhai. I share something with him but that
is of no public interest. Despite all his faults he is truly the Aam Aadmi who
inspired a whole new generation of Indians and Indian businessmen. I consider
DA a far bigger legend than even Bill Gates. This is simply because DA
succeeded in what was nearly a “business
prison” called India for private entrepreneurs. So it wasn’t surprising
that all our news channels so quickly jumped to defend Reliance and the Ambanis
when Arvind Kejriwal made his latest
allegations on Black Money. In normal course, if allegations are made against
anyone our media would never present the facts or alternative points, at least
not so promptly.
There are a thousand times that Digvijay Singh has uttered nonsense
that our news channels have reproduced without a challenge and without
scrolling the facts when they carried his moronery. For all the frequent
accusations by a Manish Tiwari they never fact-checked anything. Rajdeep Sardesai was more than happy to
carry MT’s nonsense over and over again even in interviews with others without
bothering to present facts. But when it came to the Ambanis CNN-IBN was the first to flash
headlines that HSBC had apologised for
wrongly listing Mukesh Ambani in their Swiss accounts list. This was even
as AK was speaking at his presser on November 9. How the HSBC list was made,
stolen and got out and the allegations are not of any interest in this post.
What is of interest is that this time AK had touched a raw nerve and life-line
of our TV channels. If CNN-IBN was the first, TimesNow and NDTV weren’t
far behind to immediately carry the HSBC apology to Ambani as part of the
headlines during AK’s presser.
If you thought only TV channels were pointing to HSBC’s apology,
correct yourself. From some corner of the world someone woke up to tweet that
information without any loss of time. In this century it’s not just the
politico-business complex but it’s the politico-business-media
complex that threatens the nation. Of these, I consider the media, at least parts of it, the gravest danger.
They are the specialist cover-up agents for all other crimes. Recently someone
suggested jokingly that Mukesh Ambani runs the GOI much to the discomfort of
the Congress. Although it was meant to be a sarcastic comment it’s not really that
far from the truth. So how did all this come to pass? Let’s start around the
same time something was changing in America. USA, the temple of Capitalism and
Free Market. USA the liberal democracy that our media can’t help orgasming
over. This small clip is from Michael
Moore’s documentary ‘Capitalism: A
love story’ (2.20 mins):
Don Regan, the late Chairman
of Merill Lynch, became Treasury
Secretary under President Ronald Reagan
and then his Chief of Staff. As the Treasury Secretary, Don worked hard to get
tax cuts for the rich. Somewhere in this video clip above Don even tells the
president to “speed
it up”. Nice, eh? Who runs
the govt? Now is it hard to understand how much corporate America
influences the govt? Is it any surprise then that corporate India virtually
runs the GOI? This same Merill Lynch
crashed in 2008 along with many other companies and was sold to Bank of America
for less than a dollar per share.
Dhirubhai not only started the culture of rewards and gifts for
politicians but also for journalists. Post the Emergency when the Janata Party
govt wasn’t friendly to his businesses he helped Indira Gandhi to unseat Morarji
Desai. Who runs our govt? He helped Indira Gandhi to install Charan Singh as PM. The story includes
trading of huge amounts of cash. Who runs our govt? And finally Charan Singh too
was brought down and Indira Gandhi returned as PM. Naturally it would be fair
for Dhirubhai to be rewarded for his help and support. When Pranab Mukherjee became the FM in 1982
things got even better. Now, can you imagine Dhirubhai telling Pranab: “Speed it up”? Quite possible, isn’t it?
Since then Reliance has grown bigger and bigger. It now has a wide web of
petroleum, communications, education, retail and many other businesses. It has
also a strong web of media investments. You expect a CNN-IBN or NDTV to ever
report on Reliance or Ambani? Even if Ambanis didn’t have direct or indirect
investments in these media companies they are simply too big as even just
advertisers.
I sent out this tweet last evening and quite a few were perturbed. No,
not because they disagreed but because they believed Ambanis aren’t “invincible”.
Well, nobody is. But let’s try and deal with realities rather than hypothesis.
Even if the govt had any proof for Kejriwal’s allegations and wanted to raid or
investigate RIL why would they dare? In all probability RIL or Ambanis would
have more dossiers on politicians and media persons than any govt investigating
body. That’s conjecture but not far-fetched. Dhirubhai had to do business in a
time when he not only had to fight the system but also circumvent it and also
take care of many politicians and politics. After the Janata Party experience
it didn’t matter which govt was in power.
So why wasn’t Dhirubhai given any major awards? Interesting question!
When he died in 2002 every Congress bigwig and every BJP bigwig was up and
strongly recommended a Bharat Ratna for Dhirubhai (Read Here). He directly changed the lives of millions of
Indians far more than some of the recipients so far. Not just govts but many
small and big entrepreneurs depend on Reliance for their livelihood and
earnings. Dhirubhai didn’t create the
systems or the govt. On the contrary I would say if not for him many other
entrepreneurs who would have been victims of our systems may have never
sprouted. One way or other our media survives on crumbs from RIL as much as any
politician or political party. Why would the media be interested in biting the
hands that feed them? As for who really runs the govt and minds its store, your
guess is as good as mine. AK would do
far better first investigating the media before fiddling with big business
houses. But he too believes the media is his friend.
To be continued..
