An image makeover: New face of India Inc.

Amulya Ganguli

STRUGGLE: The Left parties changed their position on private investment under Basus chief ministership in West Bengal.

In a recent interview, West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee expressed a view which can only be regarded as heresy by a genuine Marxist. ‘Private capital is the only way forward,’ he said. ‘Socialistic alternatives look good on paper, but are not practical alternatives.’

It is worth noting, however, that this preference may not have been articulated if there had not been a significant change in recent years in the image of the corporate sector. Public perception about businessmen is now noticeably different from the time when Jawaharlal Nehru famously called for hanging every blackmarketer from the nearest lamp post.

It was a call which resonated in every household since the Indian merchant class did not enjoy the best of reputations. If the popular films tended to show politicians as corrupt, the trader was invariably projected as unscrupulous and greedy.

Even today, the standard Marxist charge against the corporate sector, which is voiced by the CPM leaders in Delhi, is its supposedly insatiable greed. The centre’s ‘neo-liberal’ policies, they say, pander to the profit motive of the entrepreneurs at the expense of the common man.

It is patent enough that at least these leaders continue to believe that their diatribes will be widely appreciated.

Among those who apparently share this view is Kerala Chief Minister V. S. Achuthanandan, who put on display his anti-private sector commitments by tearing down a Tata signpost in Munnar. Yet, if the same industrial group is feted by another chief minister of the same party, there has to be a valid reason born of bitter experience.

As a young CPM leader, Bhattacharjee saw the steady decimation of flourishing industrial enterprises in his state such as jute, cotton, tea, paper, foundries, factories, engineering and chemical units, railway workshops and even hotels.

All these closures were justified on the grounds that they were run by fly-by-night, asset-stripping operators, who cheated the workers by not paying adequate wages and the government by not paying taxes.

In political terms, these businessmen were also seen to be in league with the Congress, the party of vested interests in the eyes of the Left. The symbol of this reactionary group was the Syndicate against which the ‘socialist’ Indira Gandhi was supposedly waging a battle. The working class was egged on by the communists, therefore, to join the struggle against the business sector and the party associated with it.

What was more, the battle was seen by the Left as a prelude to the overthrow of the landlord-capitalist state and the establishment of socialism.

Since revolution was not a tea party, as Mao Zedong said, violence was also seen as an integral part of the struggle against the class enemy.

All of this has been politically rewarding for the Left, as its 30-year-rule in West Bengal demonstrates.

However, the comrades have been also helped by the fact that the Congress has had no leader of stature who could effectively confront them, especially after Indira Gandhi’s ‘socialism’ ran into the dry sands of the Emergency.

After Siddhartha Ray’s defeat in 1977, neither Pranab Mukherjee nor Abdul Ghani Khan Chaudhury could present themselves as credible alternatives to the towering figure of Jyoti Basu.

And yet, notwithstanding the Left’s political success, the steady decline of West Bengal’s industrial position in the aftermath of the flight of capital because of militant trade unionism meant that the state had to look for ways of employment generation.

The change in the Left’s stance on private investment had taken place even when Basu was the chief minister. The inadequacies of the ‘socialistic alternatives’ were becoming clearer by the day. It was obvious that loss-making had become synonymous with the public sector.

It had become nearly impossible for the state government to continue subsidising their existence with no respite in sight. Yet, although the Left had begun to pay the price of its dogmatic follies, it was a reality to which most of its leaders chose to turn a blind eye.

Bhattacharjee’s pro-industrialisation policies still face resistance from within both the CPM and the Left Front as well as from Leftist economists, whose objections have been dismissed by the chief minister as ‘academic’. The other parties of the Left Front such as the CPI, the RSP and the Forward Bloc are openly critical.

The chief minister’s task, however, has been made relatively easy by the change in the customary image of the businessman as dishonest. It is a phenomenon which is not confined to West Bengal. Across India, the corporate sector has gained a respectability which it had never had in its entire history.

How this transformation has taken place is not easy to define. Part of it is perhaps due to the new generation of young and articulate men and women at the head of their companies.

They are entirely different in their easy-going attitudes from their dour predecessors, whose secretiveness may have been due to the prevalence of the licence-permit raj, when businesses could not be conducted without subterranean links with politicians and bureaucrats.

The other aspect which has helped the business world is its efficiency, which is in striking contrast to the experience of the average person with the public sector before 1991.

But for this new image, it might not have been possible for Bhattacharjee to say that ‘it was very difficult for me to convince Ratan (Tata)’ to invest in West Bengal because Uttarakhand had made an attractive offer. In an earlier period, it would have been unthinkable for a politician to express such eagerness in courting a tycoon. But not in today’s brave new corporate world.

(Deccan Herald)