June 29, 1998

A Nehruvian socialist's tribute to a Nehruvian capitalist

Mani Shankar Aiyar

Dear Tavleen, Perhaps you were there. I looked but could not find you. It was, I should have thought, your kind of occasion. Then again I might be wrong. For, after all, this was not the celebration of some scion capitalist's first balance sheet. It was Wharton, one of America's premier business schools, honouring an Indian petrol pump attendant who has made it to assets of Rs 3,000 million ("Dollars," whispered someone behind me furiously; I wouldn't know).

To explain why an Indian businessman had been picked for this signal honour, Wharton had sent along a self-exiled Indian member of their faculty, a man who had begun life as the unremarkably named Jitendra Singh of Lucknow, now elevated from humdrum anonymity to Professor Jitendra V. Singh of the University of Pennsylvania, the middle initial being America's enduring contribution to human civilisation.

To go by Singh's remarks, Dhirubhai Ambani's astronomical fortune appeared to be no more than a convenient peg on which to hang Wharton's larger ideological mission. Till 1991, said he, India's cloistered mentality had curbed what Indian enterprise, unleashed, could achieve. A brave new world, he emphasised, had started opening with the reforms. The reforms -- if persisted with, he added menacingly -- would lead to a thousand Ambanis taking us to unrealised progress.

Since Ambani, as we were told later, is keeping four million shareholders in delighted contentment, the Singh-Wharton strategy meant we would have 4,000 million contented Indians as soon as Nehruvian socialism stood dismantled. That is only four times more than we need to cover our country's modest needs.

I am ashamed to say I failed to applaud Vice-Dean Singh with the enthusiasm my fellow guests displayed. The fact is I was deeply embarrassed. For sitting row upon row in front of the podium were unending ranks of those who had been personally responsible for preventing a thousand Ambanis from blooming. I counted one former prime minister and three former finance ministers, a dozen Union ministers, past and present, four chief ministers of today and yesteryear and numerous yes-men of "the socialist pattern of society", holdovers like me from the Avadi Congress of 1955.

They were there, right up in front. They also happened to be the same persons who had set the stage for one Ambani to bloom. I am writing to ask you to help me unravel the puzzle of whether we should join Singh in his searing condemnation of the system that failed to give us a thousand Ambanis -- or condemn his appalling bad manners in not congratulating the front row for giving us one Ambani.

As befits a sixth-rank politician of my standing, I was seated in the sixth row. But before I could begin feeling sorry for myself, someone plonked top industrialist Keshub Mahindra next to me, Wharton's senior Indian alumnus. Since no one invites me to the plutocratic parties, I had to get someone to identify for me the millionaire glitterati present: Kumaramangalam Birla, Adi Godrej, Ajay Piramal, Sashi Ruia. To my astonishment, not one of these shining symbols of Whartonism was even invited to speak. Almost every politician of any notoriety was called to the podium. Not one industrialist. So was chairman Murli Deora telling Wharton, thank you for the Dean's Gold Medal, but no thanks for Singh's proselytising zeal? Or was this Congressman Deora's subtle way of saying that Ambani was an authentic swadeshi product of Nehru's swadeshi socialism?

Old money will, of course, sneer that Ambani is no entrepreneur. He just knew better than others how to massage the licence-quota-permit raj. But if that is true, then has Wharton been fooled into honouring a man who is no tribute to free-market capitalism but to crony socialism?

The fact is Nehruvian socialism never beggared private enterprise. On the contrary, it promoted it through protection. Singh, of course, deplores protection, as he emphasised in his oration. But I can't recall the Wharton faculty going on a fast-unto-death because rich and inefficient US textile magnates have for decades been protected from the depredations of underdeveloped and, moreover, coloured sweatshop garment makers.

It is Nehruvian socialism that has enabled Indian capitalism to come of age. Through the worst excesses of Congress socialism, the Birlas and the Modis (and, oh yes, Rahul Bajaj too) went to business school in the US and returned ready to take on the world (after first founding the Bombay Club, of course). While the Whartons honed the gene-induced skills of these young men, Ambani, son of a penniless village schoolteacher, quit his job as a sales manager in Aden and travelled not west to the fabulous West but east to Nehru's India.

There, instead of cribbing to columnist companions about how these topiwallahs were ruining Bharat Mata, Ambani decided to get on with actually doing what they only teach at Wharton. Which is why the collapse of the east Asian "miracle" does not make this Nehruvian capitalist burst into tears. He knows Nehru is better. Fondest regards, Mani.

The author is secretary, All-India Congress Committee.

Issue Contents | Write to us | Subscriptions

© Living Media India Ltd