In Narendra Modi big money backs the wrong man in India
No one seems to have more influence and prestige among Narendra Modi’s boosters, though, than India’s richest businessmen. Photo: Mint
There is a great, virtual storm blowing through India
today, and the most frantic people in the country seem to be those
trimming their sails to it. I refer to the shrewdly concerted campaign
to make Narendra Modi seem
like India’s natural and inevitable leader—a veritable miracle worker
who, emerging triumphant in elections due by May, will raise
despondently low growth rates and restore the country’s pride and
international reputation.
The chief minister of Gujarat is trailed by accusations of his
complicity—and that of his closest aides—in the massacre of hundreds of
Muslims in 2002, and barred, consequently, from travel to the US It is
far from clear if Modi can jettison India’s unique model of
collaborative capitalism and unleash entrepreneurial energies in the
stagnant manufacturing sector, let alone push through much-needed
investments in infrastructure and agriculture.
Furthermore, three months is a long time in politics. The
rise of Modi seems much less inevitable after the stunning performance
of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in New Delhi state elections. Even a
favourable recent poll puts Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) at least
80 seats short of a majority in the Indian Parliament; a BJP-led
coalition may prove to be even more inefficient than the tottering
regime under current Congress Party Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
Nevertheless, Modi already seems to have been anointed in
many moist eyes as India’s redeemer. The perception is a triumph of
network power, involving chieftains of sectarian religious groups,
politically ambitious columnists and corporate-owned TV anchors as well
as the public-relations firm APCO. Armies of cyberthugs rampaging
through Twitter and the comment sections of online articles have
synergistically contributed to it as much as the man himself with his
superb oratory and admirable hair transplant.
No one seems to have more influence and prestige among Modi’s boosters, though, than India’s richest businessmen. As The Economist
put it, “Private-equity types, blue-chip executives and the chiefs of
India’s big conglomerates all think he can make the trains run on time.”
“If he says it will be done, it will be done,” Ratan Tata has asserted. At the Vibrant Gujarat business summit last year, Mukesh Ambani, the chairman of Reliance Industries Ltd,
proclaimed, “In Narendra bhai [brother], we have a leader with a grand
vision.” Ambani’s younger brother Anil added to the moment of fraternal
bonding by hailing Modi as a “leader among leaders, a king among kings.”
It shouldn’t be hard to understand this cheerleading—or, as The Economist
put it, “creepy sycophancy.” For a long time foreign investors
preferred China’s business-friendly environment—easily acquired land,
low wages, nonunionized labour—over India’s inept and venal
bureaucracies. Modi, whom I have described elsewhere as “the primary
Indian exponent of capitalism with Chinese characteristics,” is adept at
cutting through regulatory systems, seizing land, building
infrastructure and offering other concessions to big industrialists.
It is not surprising that Ford Motor Co. and General Motors Co.
have flocked to Gujarat, and that Tata has only praise for Modi. The
Hindu nationalist famously rescued Tata’s cherished small car (Nano)
project from the intransigent fury of dispossessed farmers in West
Bengal by texting him an invitation to build his factory in Gujarat.
But can we plausibly credit tycoons with political
sagacity? Neither the trust-busting Republican Theodore Roosevelt nor
the New Dealer Franklin Delano Roosevelt thought much of their
collective wisdom. Confronted in the 1930s with the hostility of the
American League, which Alfred Sloan Jr.
of General Motors and members of the Du Pont family supported, FDR
denounced what he called “selfish big business.” He warned the American
public that large corporations were prone “to consider the Government of
the US as a mere appendage to their own affairs.”
Recent history shows that the tendency to seek profits
wherever they are found, regardless of political circumstances, has
consistently led to awful misjudgments. The modern technocrat is not
trained to see that the ability to make trains run on time may be part
of a much less commendable zeal for authoritarian control. As James W. Prothro
noted in “The Dollar Decade: Business Ideas in the 1920s,” many
American business leaders thought fascist Italy “the most creditable
development in human history” and Mussolini, the original maestro of
punctual trains, “a fine type of business executive.”
Scholarship has altered the Marxist caricature of
bloodthirsty capitalists bankrolling Hitler’s rise to power. But, as the
American historian Fritz Stern has argued, businessmen in Germany
“shared with other members of the German elite a nondemocratic bias, a
remarkable degree of political illiteracy” and “a self-assured civic
amorality.”
General Motors remained deeply invested in Germany’s
heavily militaristic economy long after the Nazis had revealed their
fangs. In April 1939, Sloan, chairman of the GM board, summarized his
political indifference in a letter to a stockholder: “To put the
proposition rather bluntly, such matters should not be considered the
business of the management of General Motors. … An international
business operating throughout the world, should conduct its operations
in strictly business terms, without regard to the political beliefs of
its management, or the political beliefs of the country in which it is
operating.”
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