WHEN YOUR CORRESPONDENT WAS A LAW student in London over four decades ago, if someone had predicted that the day would come during my lifetime when a Paki Muslim would be elected lord mayor of London, I would have dialled 100 for the men in white coats to come and take him away. But that’s exactly what’s happened in the city of my somewhat wild and exuberant youth. On May 7, Labour Party’s Sadiq Khan, not only a Pakistani Muslim but son of a bus driver and seamstress, was elected chief executive of London, defeating Zac Goldsmith, the snotty, closet racist candidate of the Conservative party, by a landslide.
Your correspondent would never have entertained this possibility because I was living in London at a time when hatred, ridicule and contempt for sub-continental immigrants in Blighty was at its apogee. Therefore, in those troubled times when Conservative MP Enoch Powell had made an infamous speech predicting “rivers of blood” on the streets of Britain because of the immigrant influx, your correspondent was convinced the natives of that cold, rain-soaked island were incorrigible and would never overcome their racial prejudice.
Evidently, I was wrong. To their credit, the ‘limeys’ have proved to be the best Europeans and have got over their master race delusions. In the 1970s when New Delhi typically washed its hands off them, the UK accepted and re-settled over 70,000 Indians expelled from Uganda by that country’s loony dictator Idi Amin. Since then, they have elected several sub-continentals to parliament and the House of Lords. And I believe the kindness of British landladies — a sharp contrast to grasping and uncaring lumpen bourgeois PG (paying guest) rentiers here — has done more for the survival of the Commonwealth (former British (mis) ruled colonies) than all efforts of politicians combined. Almost half a century later, I feel I misjudged my erstwhile hosts. Perfidious Albion isn’t quite so perfidious after all.
Unwelcome imposition
MANUFACTURED URGENCY AND FRENZY — a distinctive feature of India’s English language news television — has prompted the voluntary return from self-exile of former Sunday and Hindustan Times editor Vir Sanghvi to primetime television.
Sanghvi is one of the five same-old expert political commentators of the CNN News 18 channel (formerly CNN-IBN) which has given itself a makeover by forcing its formerly personable women anchors to adopt ill-fitting western attire. Earlier, after he was exposed by the infamous Nira Radia tapes as a super-lobbyist and bag man of several industrial houses which wanted A. Raja — the unprecedentedly corrupt former Union telecom minister in the Congress-led UPA-I government — to be re-appointed telecom minister when the UPA-II won General Election 2009, Sanghvi went into a sulk and self-imposed exile for over two years. Now, since nobody missed him, this kiss-up-kick-down lobbyist who brought journalism into disrepute, has resurfaced in print and television media.
This vitriol has a history behind it. In the mid-1980s when your correspondent was editor of Businessworld, I introduced Sanghvi — then the inconsequential editor of an obscure city magazine — to the Kolkata-based media mogul Aveek Sarkar of the Ananda Bazar Patrika Group, which owned Businessworld. Sarkar was sufficiently impressed by Sanghvi to appoint him editor of the then best-selling Sunday weekly magazine from which platform he launched himself to the editorship of Hindustan Times where he admittedly did a good job and revamped the then floundering daily. However almost a decade later when your editor requested Sanghvi for an introduction to HT’s high and mighty proprietor, Shobhana Bhartia for business reasons, Sanghvi not only didn’t respond but himself declined to meet with your then struggling scribe.
But God pays his debts. When he was in HT, Sanghvi appointed himself its wine and food critic to avail free wining and dining opportunities. The outcome is that excessive gormandising has bloated his visage to enormous porcine proportions which even expensive cosmetic surgery can’t conceal. Despite these several disqualifications, the CNN News 18 management has ill-advisedly imposed this unsavoury bagman upon the long-suffering public. God bless the inventor of the TV remote.
PSE pusillanimity
THERE’S AN ELEMENT OF WISHFUL THINKING-gone-wild in Union finance minister Arun Jaitley’s recent release of a list of public sector enterprises (PSEs), of which he wants to sell tiny tranches of equity to raise Rs.56,500 crore. According to Jaitley, by selling small percentages of shares in PSE behemoths, he can raise Rs.40,000 crore in short order. But finding buyers for PSE shares is not as easy as Jaitley believes. In 2015-16, against the Rs.69,500 crore Jaitley had budgeted to raise from PSE disinvestment, actual receipts were a mere Rs.25,312 crore.
The reason why neither Jaitley nor his predecessors have succeeded in attaining disinvestment targets for the past six years, is that they naively believe that retail investors are ready and willing to snap up shares in PSEs managed by government bureaucrats with one hand in the till and dancing to the tunes of crooked business-illiterate politicians. Nobody in his right mind believes the cooked up books and balance sheets of PSEs, so why would they purchase the shares of public sector companies which are the happy hunting grounds of their commissions and kickbacks chasing managers and directors?
The solution to raising funding for public causes is not pusillanimous ‘disinvestment’ but privatisation — lock, stock and barrel — of PSEs through global auction. That was the bounty conferred upon the British public by the late and under-appreciated two-term prime minister Margaret Thatcher, who completely turned the faltering UK economy around through a massive industry privatisation programme in the 1980s. But unlike this redoubtable iron lady, none of India’s netas and babus across the political spectrum, is willing to give up the commissions, kickbacks and powers of patronage that flow out of captive PSEs.