Amitav Ghosh, The Times of India, November 27 2016 when
asked "Is the business biography then just a creation of a
mythology?":
"It's completely the creation of mythology. The whole
history of capitalism is the creation of mythology. The way it is written is
like this heroic tale of great entrepreneurs. It's nonsense. Opium was produced
in India under an East India monopoly. The only part that entrepreneurs played
was taking it from here to China and selling it. It was essentially a smuggling
trade.
The history of capitalism is sold to us as a great history
of financial innovations. That too is nonsense...”
Jon Wilson, ‘India Conquered: Britain's Raj and the Chaos of Empire’, 2016: “...The most powerful and enduring business to benefit from the Swadeshi upsurge was the Tata Steel Company, the firm that dominated (and still dominates today) the Indian metals industry. The Tatas were Parsi priests from the small town of Navsari in Gujarat. They moved into business and made money from trading opium and then cotton in the middle of the nineteenth century. The names of the mills which Jamsetji Tata first built indicate his hope for imperial patronage: first Alexandra (after the Prince of Wales’s new bride) then Empress Mills. But by 1905, the Tatas had turned to other forms of capital...
... Small merchants and factory owners had supported
Congress from the early 1920s, setting up a nationalist commercial
organization, the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, in
1927. But India’s growing cadre of large factory owners had been wary of
publicly opposing British power. Tata Steel and the big Bombay mill-owners had
been too worried about losing government orders to support Gandhi’s civil
disobedience campaign, for example. But these were men who had done well out of
India’s disconnection from the global economy during the depression. They were
angry with Britain for financial policies which kept domestic demand low. As a
result, they began to think of the economic possibilities of a nationalist
government interested in expanding consumer spending. Despite his hostility to
industrialization, Gandhi’s belief that the rich held their wealth as trustees
of the community as a whole legitimized business involvement in Congress.
Business leaders were a vital source of money for nationalist campaigns, but
the price of their support was that the left’s anti-capitalist rhetoric needed
to be toned down, and that Congress participate in the new constitution. Unlike
Nehru, Congress’s pro-business right wing thought the organization should form
ministries in India’s soon to be self-governing provinces...”
Yasmin Khan, ‘RAJ AT WAR: A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF INDIA'S
SECOND WORLD WAR’, 2015: “… In Jamshedpur, the home of Tata Steel - India's iconic
steel plant - towering chimneys smoked day and night. During the Battle of
Britain, Tata Steel made a voluntary donation for the purchase of two
Spitfires, so keen was the Indian-owned business to display its loyalty to the
war effort…”
John Keay, ‘India: A History’, 2010: “…In accepting power in the provinces, Congress-men had soon
found themselves having to compromise on some of their principles. Plans for
agrarian reform were diluted and links with the trade unions were strained by
loyalties to industrialists, like the Tata and Birla families, who had
substantially funded Congress…”
William Dalrymple, ‘The East India Company: The original
corporate raiders’, The Guardian, 2015: “…Multinationals still have villainous reputations in India,
and with good reason; the many thousands of dead and injured in the Bhopal gas
disaster of 1984 cannot be easily forgotten; the gas plant’s owner, the
American multinational, Union Carbide, has managed to avoid prosecution or the
payment of any meaningful compensation in the 30 years since. But the biggest
Indian corporations, such as Reliance, Tata, DLF and Adani have shown
themselves far more skilled than their foreign competitors in influencing
Indian policymakers and the media…”
Gillian Tett, FT, Feb 3 2012: “In today’s world Corporate Social
Resposibility programmes have become a useful salve for a troubled corporate
conscience.”
Arundhati Roy: “...RIL is one of a handful of corporations that run India.
Some of the others are the Tatas, Jindals, Vedanta, Mittals, Infosys, Essar,
and the other Reliance, Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group (ADAG), owned by
Mukesh’s brother Anil. Their race for growth has spilled across Europe, Central
Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Their nets are cast wide; they are visible and
invisible, over ground as well as underground. The Tatas, for example, run more
than one hundred companies in eighty countries. They are one of India’s oldest
and largest private-sector power companies. They own mines, gas fields, steel
plants, telephone, and cable TV and broadband networks, and run whole
townships. They manufacture cars and trucks and own the Taj Hotel chain,
Jaguar, Land Rover, Daewoo, Tetley Tea, a publishing company, a chain of
bookstores, a major brand of iodized salt, and the cosmetics giant Lakme. Their
advertising tagline could easily be You Can’t Live Without Us.
According to the rules of the Gush-Up Gospel, the more you
have, the more you can have.
The era of the Privatization of Everything has made the
Indian economy one of the fastest growing in the world. However, as with any
good old-fashioned colony, one of its main exports is its minerals. India’s new
megacorporations, Tatas, Jindals, Essar, Reliance, Sterlite, are those that
have managed to muscle their way to the head of the spigot that is spewing
money extracted from deep inside the earth. It’s a dream come true for
businessmen—to be able to sell what they don’t have to buy...”
"...But which of us sinners was going to cast the first
stone? Not me, who lives off royalties from corporate publishing houses. We all
watch Tata Sky, we surf the Net with Tata Photon, we ride in Tata taxis, we
stay in Tata Hotels, sip our Tata tea in Tata bone china, and stir it with
teaspoons made of Tata Steel. We buy Tata books in Tata bookshops. Hum Tata ka
namak khatey hain. We’re under siege..."
(‘Capitalism: A Ghost Story’, 2014)
Russ Juskalian, The New Yorker, Feb 9 2014: “Was Carnegie
Right About Philanthropy?…the eighty-five richest people in the world together
own more than a trillion dollars in wealth, according to Oxfam. Many of them
use that wealth in ways that keep current power structures in place—for
instance, by supporting political candidates who prefer lower taxes for the
rich and smaller government spending on social programs—which ultimately hurt
the poor.
The real way to address poverty, Reich said, is through a
democratic system that keeps tabs on the excesses of capitalism yet harnesses
the engine of the economy to help improve the lives of the least well off, pays
attention to issues that are important to the poor and middle classes, and
works to prevent the accumulation of power in the hands of the few. “As the
great Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once said,” Reich told me, “we can
have great wealth in the hands of a relative few or we can have a democracy—but
we can’t have both.”...”
Amitav Ghosh: “The first opium war was a very Indian war. It was fought by Indian sepoys and largely funded by merchants from Bombay, using many weapons developed by Indian soldiers and kings such as Hyder Ali, fighting against the British army. Yet, the opium war is hardly talked about in India, unlike China, where the war is remembered and so is the Indian contribution…”
“We have forgotten the Opium Wars, if ever we remembered it.
But China has not. They are a civilisation with great historical consciousness,
it is something they pay great attention to. The war is extensively
memorialised in China. And they are intensely aware that Indians participated
in the war, and against them.”
Mr. Girish Kuber (गिरीश कुबेर) writes in Loksatta (लोकसत्ता) on November 6 2016:
“...सायरस यांचं जाणं आणि
नंतरचे त्यांचे आरोप यांनी
नाही म्हटलं तरी
कटूपणा आलाच.
तो टळायला हवा होता.
याचं कारण भारतात
मुळात उद्योगपती वर्गात
एकही मानक.. आयकॉन..
नाही. अपवाद फक्त
टाटा. एक टाटा
वगळता भारतीय उद्योगविश्व
हे बनियांनी भरलेलं
आहे. सरकारदरबारी लांडय़ालबाडय़ा
करून दुनिया मुठ्ठी
में घ्यायची, ही
आपली उद्योगसंस्कृती. ती
बदलण्याचा आदरणीय प्रयत्न टाटांचा.
सायरस मिस्त्री प्रकरणानं
त्यात अडथळा आलाय,
हे निश्चित. तो
लवकरात लवकर दूर
व्हायला हवा. कारण
प्रश्न फक्त टाटा
समूहाचा नाही. तो उद्योग
क्षेत्रातील या नायकशून्य
देशाचा आहे. या
एकमेवाद्वितीय मानकाचा मानभंग देशाला
परवडणारा नाही. तसे एरवी
अन्य अनेक क्षेत्रांत
‘सारेच
दीप कसे मंदावले
आता..’ ही अवस्था
आपण अनुभवतो आहोतच.
तेव्हा आहे तो
दिवा तेवता राहावा
यासाठी संबंधितांनी निदान जेआरडींचं
वाक्य आठवावं.. ‘We don’t do that at Tatas.’...”
The conflict of interest that is not disclosed by the
newspaper at the end of the article should read something like this: "Mr. Kuber has
written a 'bestseller' in Marathi titled 'टाटायन',
2015." (I have put quotes around the word bestseller because I don't know
how one defines bestseller, especially in Marathi.)
The publisher introduces the book of Mr. Kuber thus:
"टाटा,
भारतीयांसाठी
ही केवळ दोन
अक्षरं नाहीत.
त्यांच्यासाठी
ते आहे लक्ष्मीचं
दुसरं नाव.
सचोटीच्या,
विश्वासाच्या भक्कम पायावर उभी
राहिलेली,
सव्वाशे वर्षांची मूल्याधिष्ठित परंपरा
लाभलेली,
पाच पिढ्यांनी परिश्रमपूर्वक जोपासलेली
भारताची निरलस उद्यमशीलता म्हणजे
टाटासंस्कृती.
टाटांनी केलेली संपत्तिनिर्मिती म्हणजे
लक्ष्मी-सरस्वतीचा संगम.
सालंकृत तरीही सात्त्विक.
ऐश्वर्यवंत
तशीच नीतिमंत.
जमशेटजी आणि दोराबजींपासून
जेआरडी आणि रतन
टाटांपर्यंत
सा-यांच्या कर्तबगारीनं सतत
चढतं राहिलेलं
उद्योगतोरण
म्हणजेच
टाटायन!"
I don't how Indian Express group, to which Loksatta belongs,
is run. Indeed, I know very little about the group because it's not a listed
entity on Indian bourses but when I read a praise for any corporate like the way above, I
often remember what 'The Economist' said on Dec 13th 2006: “But real life is
messy and real people are complicated.”...what is true of people is even more true of businesses and corporates...
I also am not sure about the claim that: "एक टाटा वगळता
भारतीय उद्योगविश्व हे बनियांनी
भरलेलं आहे. सरकारदरबारी
लांडय़ालबाडय़ा करून दुनिया
मुठ्ठी में घ्यायची,
ही आपली उद्योगसंस्कृती."
Widely tracked BSE Sensex has 30 companies in it.
Surely Sensex companies like Asian Paints, Hindustan Unilever,
Infosys don't belong to the category of : "सरकारदरबारी
लांडय़ालबाडय़ा करून दुनिया
मुठ्ठी में घ्यायची,
ही आपली उद्योगसंस्कृती."
Every big corporate has an apparatus that lobbies the incumbent government to
get a favorable policy and Tata's are NOT an exception to that.
I have worked in corporate sector for 15 years and none of those years in, what Loksatta calls, 'trader' (बनिया)
company and I can assure you that every corporate around the world behaves more
or less the same when it comes to government policy, profit, employees,
competition and self preservation.
Some obviously are more dignified than the
others, especially at the lower rungs of a corporate ladder but the difference
at the top is best summed in a Marathi proverb : उडदामाजी
काळे-गोरे...there may look as different as black and white
among the blank lentil but they all taste the same!
"भारतात
मुळात उद्योगपती वर्गात
एकही मानक.. आयकॉन..
नाही...Many who idolize corporate honchos such as Mr. N. R. Narayana Murthy or Mr. Nandan Nilekani or many others would not agree with this assessment.
Review of the book in Loksatta on Nov 8 2015 and Mr. Kuber now claim: "सचोटीच्या, विश्वासाच्या भक्कम
पायावर उभी राहिलेली,
सव्वाशे वर्षांची मूल्याधिष्ठित परंपरा
लाभलेली,..."सालंकृत तरीही सात्त्विक.
ऐश्वर्यवंत तशीच नीतिमंत."...."
एकमेवाद्वितीय मानक"...
"सरकारदरबारी
लांडय़ालबाडय़ा करून दुनिया
मुठ्ठी में घ्यायची,
ही आपली उद्योगसंस्कृती.
ती बदलण्याचा आदरणीय
प्रयत्न टाटांचा"...etc....what a baloney!
Remember 'The Radia tapes controversy'?
Siddharth Varadarajan wrote in The Hindu on November 29
2010:
“Welcome to the Matrix of the Indian
state: The Radia tapes reveal the networks and routers, the source codes and
malware that bind the corporate and political establishments in India.
As squeamish schoolchildren know only too well, dissection
is a messy business. Some instinctively turn away, others become nauseous or
scared. Not everyone can stomach first hand the inner workings of an organic
system. Ten days ago, a scalpel — in the form of a set of 104 intercepted
telephone conversations — cut through the tiniest cross-section of a rotting
cadaver known as the Indian Establishment. What got exposed is so unpleasant
that several major newspapers and television channels that normally scramble to
bring “breaking” and “exclusive” stories have chosen to look the other way.
Their silence, though understandable, is unfortunate. Even unforgivable.
After all, the tape recordings of Niira Radia's phone
conversations have come to light against the backdrop of the recent Comptroller
and Auditor General of India (CAG) report on the allocation of 2G spectrum,
which demonstrated how the rules were arbitrarily bent by the then Telecom
Minister, A. Raja, in order to favour a handful of private companies at
government expense. Among the beneficiaries of Mr. Raja's raj were Anil Ambani.
And also Ratan Tata...”
On the same subject, Mr. David Pilling wrote in FT dated
February 9 2011:
“...Dhirubhai Ambani, the legendary
entrepreneur who built the Reliance empire now split between his sons, was
notoriously good at “managing the environment”, in the euphemistic words of one
commentator. So pervasive is alleged influence-peddling that even Ratan Tata,
chairman of the Tata Group and considered an Indian businessman above reproach,
has not been able to keep clear of controversy. In a tape of a 2009
conversation between Mr Tata and Niira Radia, a powerful corporate lobbyist, Ms
Radia is heard explaining her efforts to persuade the then telecoms minister
not to allocate spectrum to Anil Ambani’s Reliance Communications before
dishing out some to Tata’s Teleservices. Mr Tata, who is trying to get the
tapes suppressed by the Supreme Court, says the leaks are a character
assassination...”
Swaminathan S Anklesaria Aiyar writes in The Times of India,
October 25 2016:
“‘The Idea of Tata’ has long
transcended mere corporate aims and aimed far higher. That idea has been
eroding for some time, and has now received a body blow from the events leading
to the ouster of Cyrus Mistry as chairman of Tata Sons."
And all Mr. Kuber is ready to concede, rather reluctantly, is : "सायरस यांचं जाणं
आणि नंतरचे त्यांचे
आरोप यांनी नाही
म्हटलं तरी कटूपणा
आलाच.तो टळायला
हवा होता."
T. N. Ninan writes in Business Standard on November 5 2016:
“...There are advantages in
belonging to a group — a small group company would be able to command better
financial terms, and hire better talent, than if it were a stand-alone venture.
Even a large company like Tata Motors would enjoy group advantages when it
acquires something like Jaguar-Land Rover. But this can be a mixed blessing;
Tata Steel would have been saved from buying the much bigger Corus if it did
not have the financial backing of the group, since most of the acquisition
price was debt-financed.
On balance, how has it worked? Not very well, as made clear
by an excellent report in the Economist (“Mistry’s elephant”, September 24,
2016). This said that seven of the nine largest listed companies in the group
earn a return on capital that is less than the cost of capital — in other
words, they are destroying economic value. This spectacular under-performance
has been masked by the stellar performance of one company, TCS, whose sales
revenue, profits and market value account for the bulk of group numbers.
Jaguar-Land Rover contributes most of the rest.
Would individual companies, freed from group control, have
done better? They would certainly have faced greater pressure to perform. Some
would have responded well to pressure, others would have gone under or been
sold — the creative destruction that is at the heart of capitalism. If you look
around it is evident that conglomerates have not done as well in recent times
as stand-alone enterprises. It is the old comparison, between the banyan tree
that has multiple roots and gives cover to a wide area, and the sequoia which
stands alone — with some sub-species usually taller than the Qutb Minar...”
Seven of the nine largest listed companies in the group earn
a return on capital that is less than the cost of capital — in other words,
they are destroying economic value.
Artist: Alan Dunn, The New Yorker, September 7 1963
