Ma Bell, Ma Adani, Ma Ambani

The festival season of the “Mata” is around the corner. Adi Parashakti is known by different names and celebrated differently in Hindu communities in India – Durga, Amba, Bhavani, Kali, Bhairavi, Narayani, Nandini, Naina etc. The list is long and could be as many as 108 or more. Even “Santoshi Ma” who achieved fame with a movie is also supposed to be a form of Durga. For Hindus, “Ma” is the ultimate symbol of victory of the good over evil.

However, in modern times the “Mas” in the corporate and gangster world are EVIL themselves and the corporates are sponsored and supported by none other than the govts. They were innovated in America, the land of the “New Ma” and then copied by India. Even Kate Barker the dreaded female boss of a violent gang that Hoover of FBI dreaded earned the title “Ma Barker”. So, the Americans do love Matas.  Ma Rockefeller, Mama Duke and Ma Bell are American Gods that have been dismantled:

Of these Mas, only “Ma Bell” was publicly called Ma Bell because unlike Standard Oil or American Tobacco, which were corporate Trusts, Ma Bell was the Mother of a conglomerate of absolute MONOPOLY of the telephony systems in the US (and Canada). It’s not just telephone lines, but its vertigal integration ensured all the cables, instruments, accessories – everything in telephony was made by “AT&T” and the entire network in the US was run by its zonal companies with differrent names but same surnames, under Ma Bell. And it had the legal support of the US govt.

All this lasted till a tiny company called “Microwave Communications Inc” was created in 1963 by one Jack Goeken who wanted to compete and provide long distance calls cheaper. Predictably, he ran out of money soon and found a friend in Bill McGowan, a Chemistry grad, Harvard grad, worked in the army, aerospace, auto industry and became a venture capitalist. You may have never heard the name of McGowan but he is the main reason that you today have optical fibers, emails, smartphones etc. He was too ahead of times. Being of Irish origin, Bill naturally had a “warrior” mindset. Thus the nickname – The Long-distance Warrior, and also for his battles with Ma Bell. McGowan became a co-founder, renamed the company MCI and long partnered Goeken before they parted ways. McGowan then took on Ma Bell with an anti-trust case and finally the US govt had to relent and break up AT&T into some 7 different cos.

It’s long story so you can read it online anywhere. But McGowan forced Ma Bell into price war on long-distance calls and made the telephone industry a lot more colourful than the bland black phones. That’s how innovations in telephony started since late 1960s. He constantly advertised everywhere on how AT&T was charging much higher than MCI and it finally woke up consumers to the fact there is life after Ma Bell and, trust me, there is also life after Ma Adani, Ma Ambani and Ma Modi too:

After McGowan died, MCI was taken over by a bunch of raiders called WorldCom (for $37 bn – for a company that was a tiny speck vs Ma Bell) which became famous during the initial Dot.Com boom but they got too greedy and the top management and its accountants fudged their books to dupe investors worth around some $11 billion. The frauds ended WorldCom and its CEO Bernard Ebbers & others who ended up in jail:

After all this, do MCI and AT&T survive in the US and do business? Fortunately, yes they both are doing quite well. MCI has since been acquired and is now famous in the US and the world as “Verizon” and AT&T increased its spread worldwide with the mobile business including in India. Some changes and mergers may have since happened but both are strong in the US markets along with 100s of smaller mobile companies that act as distributors and retailers of the bigger companies and are also doing well. That’s what competition does for the benefit for consumers:

In India, the reverse has actually happened. Instead of encouraging more players so that costs are competitive and consumers benefit, the Ponzi operator Modi has been doling out all national resources to one Ma Adani or in a few cases to Ma Ambani since he got to power in Gujarat in 2001 and then the GOI in 2014. This one tweet by someone actually made me write this post and write on how the criminal Modi-govt has created monopolies or duopolies in airports, aviation, mining, mobile service, oil and gas and snuffed out all other players or potential players:

All the businesses that Adani group is in is mostly made up of natural resources handed over to the Ma on a platter: Mining, Airports, Oil & Gas, Seaports, SEZs, Logistics parks, Rail-Road, Power, Defence, Aerospace and in businesses where there was competition, Modi used the CBI,ED, IT to arm-twist the occupant to sell to Adani like airports, Cement or Media. This is how criminal enterprises are run in India. Ma Ambani is not different – Oil, gas, mobiles, Infrastructure, Animal-trade, Healthcare and even sundry businesses of lower value competing with smaller players. Both these groups are PURE EVIL for the consumers and for India in the long run. While Ma Ambani had a lot of illegal favours from the Congress, Ma Adani has a lot of favours from the BJP. A look the growth of these two groups in wealth – corporate and personal, tells a story of its own:

Their total turnover combined is roughly 30% of India’s annual budget of 53 lakh crores. That’s just an indicator without reading too much meaning into it. These are just 2 groups that we are talking about. If you add up other big erstwhile and current giants like Tata, Birla etc, India is concentrated in very few hands and that is a CERTAIN DEATH-KNELL FOR THE WELL-BEING of the country and its citizens and consumers. Though there’s a large private economy in India the unorganized “small people” and their businesses don’t count for much.

And if at all Reservations in the future are to be brought into the private sector, the criminals of politics don’t need the consensus from all private players. They just need to arm-twist these criminal monopolies or duopolies like Ma Adani, Ma Ambani, Phufa Tata, Bua Birla and other Aunties like Airtel, Indigo and other operators of SEZs, airports and seaports. So, you know what EVIL rules this country. I have consistently stated that both Ma Adani and Ma Ambani have to be broken up into smaller pieces with divested ownerships by the public for the well-being of India:

Before I wrote this blog, I did a casual check on Google whether there was actually any similarity between Ma Bell, Ma Adani and Ma Ambani. I tried this just to make sure that the EVIL that once occupied America is now a disease that infects India. Believe it or not, Google gave me more comparisons than I could have made myself:

It is not just in these businesses that the monopolies and duopolies have to end. Even in politics there are just 2 main criminal and corrupt parties that have been mostly ruling India. Currently, the BJP under Modi has far exceeded any other party in Corruption, Gundaraj and dictatorial conduct. Every democratic freedom, electoral sanctity and citizens’ rights have been compromised and squandered. And that’s a dangerous sign for India which desperately needs new national parties to come up with greater integrity and honesty.

Tailpiece: Hindus have been gullible of any idiot that appears as a saffron-clad thug or a fraudster in white or saffron. This is not from recent times. This goes as far back as the Ramayana times. Even Sita was fooled by a thug appearing as a Rishi at her doorstep. The criminal couldn’t cross the Lakshman-Rekha so he lured the Rishi-believing Sita outside the LOC by appealing to her devotional emotions. India is still being ruled by such criminals who constantly wear saffron and fool Hindus. It will take another Ramayana against these criminals to wake them up.

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Who's Minding The Store? - Part 1

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..