It’s hardly surprising that master manipulator and skilled practitioner of corporate intrigue and machinations, Ratan Tata has emerged victorious from the dramatic October 24 boardroom coup in Bombay House, Mumbai, head office of the globe-girdling Tata Group and India’s largest business conglomerate (annual revenue: Rs.726,000 crore). In the coup d’etat, the unsuspecting Cyrus Mistry, chairman of Tata Sons Ltd — the holding company of the Tata group — was peremptorily dismissed by a packed board without any notice at the end of a routine board meeting of the company, clearing the deck for the re-appointment of Ratan Tata who had retired as chairman of Tata Sons after a 21-year innings in 2012.
The official (leaked) reasons for Mistry’s unceremonious ouster are declining revenue and profitability of Tata Group companies during his four-year tenure and in particular his decision to sell the bleeding Tata Steel Europe Ltd, UK, and a bitterly fought arbitration battle between Tata Teleservices Ltd and the Japanese telecom giant NTT Docomo which is purportedly against the undefined Tata culture. However, it’s pertinent to note these “legacy hotspots” were inherited by Mistry.
Indeed, it’s now becoming increasingly apparent the real reason behind Mistry’s peremptory ouster is that he naively misread Tata’s real intent to control Tata Sons even after retirement. Significantly, after he retired as chairman of Tata Sons, Ratan unprecedently retained chairmanship of the Tata Trusts which own 66 percent of the equity of Tata Sons. Therefore, when Mistry started acting too independently for Ratan’s comfort, he played the major shareholder’s card to stage-manage a coup against his own hand-picked successor.
Yet even if Mistry was surprised by Tata’s boardroom putsch, your editor isn’t. Over two decades ago when the late JRD Tata was dithering about selecting his successor as chairman of Tata Sons and the late Russi Mody was publicly ridiculing Ratan’s business track record, the latter persuaded your editor to argue his (good) case in several columns I was writing in the media. Years later when I attempted to cash his IOU by way of advertising support for this then struggling publication, Ratan declined on the ground of poverty. Now with Mistry hitting back and highlighting his predecessor’s arbitrary decision-making and skulduggery, the true face of this Machiavellian practitioner of corporate politics is about to be exposed to the public.
Colonial value premises
An entirely wrong set of regressives with skewed prejudices seem to have captured the entertainment industry in contemporary India. Despite the country having attained independence from white colonial rule over six decades ago, these anti-social elements continue to be enamoured with Western norms and value premises.
How else can one interpret the spate of rude comments about her skin tone directed at actress Tannishtha Chatterjee — who if this benighted nation was invested with some pride in its ethnicity would be classified as a beauty — on a programme of the popular television channel Colors titled Comedy Nights? During this hour-long programme in which comedians are ribbed or “roasted”, i.e, teased, put down in a light-hearted manner, the sole focus of the show hosts was the ethnic skin tone of Chatterjee.
Curiously, the roasting of this talented star of the widely acclaimed movie Parched was orchestrated by one Varun Krushna and television actress Mona Singh who with their sandy Middle East complexions suffer grievously in comparison with Chatterjee in the looks department. In particular, the latter with her nauseating milk-bottle legs which were reportedly greatly appreciated in a television serial of yesteryear, is widely acclaimed as a model of pulchritude by the Bollywood fraternity. Under the influence of Bollywood trash and a barrage of Fair & Lovely ( a skin lightening cream marketed by Great White Satan Hindustan Lever) advertising, judgement has indeed fled to brutish beasts and people have lost their reason.
Gangs of Uttar Pradesh
Slowly but surely, India’s democracy is sliding off the rails. A clear indicator of this phenomenon is the sordid drama unfolding in Uttar Pradesh, the country’s most populous (215 million) state. Shockingly, a gang — to call it a political party is an overstatement — which bills itself the Samajwadi Party (SP) was swept to power in the state legislative assembly with a clear majority in 2012 because former chief minister Mayawati, a self-styled leader of another gang claiming to represent the interests of the socio-economically backward Dalit communities, squandered the state’s resources by building huge parks featuring elephants, the electoral symbol of the Bahujan Samaj Party. Now with the next round of state legislature elections due early next year, the SP gangsters — father, son, uncles and cousins — who had fooled the electorate with promises of socialism and progress — are at war with each other disputing who will lead the gang to power in 2017.
While learned analyses and numerous treatises have lauded India’s unique democracy, little if any, light has been shed on how and why political power is being seized by family and dynastic gangs. The explanation — a rich field for exploration by scholars — is rooted in the steady secession of the educated middle class which led India’s freedom struggle, from politics and the calculated neglect of public education by the new breed of gangster-politicians.
Foolishly, post-independence India’s middle class struck a faustian bargain with the new political class under which it would be allowed to succeed in business, industry, trade and the professions, in exchange for conceding the political space to gangster-politicians. Of course, this bargain couldn’t endure because the combination of gangster rule and substandard, nominal education has infected business, industry and the professions plunging standards and outcomes to the depths — bankrupt banks, choked judicial system, rising inequality and climbing criminality. An apocalypse looms ahead.