Why India Inc won’t put up a fight

Valid though the argument may be, will corporate India put up a fight?

If one goes by history, then the chances are dim. There is a 1991 volume brought out by one of the beleagured IIMs (Ahmedabad, in this case) called Business and Politics in India, containing essays by well known business writers, that describes how, way back, even before the bowing and the scraping under the post Independence licence raj, Indian entrepreneurs preferred to play safe. Though individual industrialists such as Ganshyam Das Birla, Kasturbhai Lalbhai and Jamnalal Bajaj were close to Gandhi and contributed to the Congress, the writers argue that confrontation with the authorities was strictly avoided.

This was most evident during the civil disobedience movement of the 1930s. Birla urged Gandhi to attend the first Round Table conference but Gandhi chose to march to Dandi instead. Other commercial interests such as merchants and traders were enthusiastic with their support but the industrial leaders’ response to civil disobedience according to business historian Dwijendra Tripathi, conformed to the set pattern of their behavior: ‘‘During quieter times they would shout support for the Congress position on major issues without burning their bridges with the authorities, but when the battle lines were clearly drawn, a more discreet behaviour was called for.’’

Leading industrialist Purshotamdas Thakurdas in a letter to a colleague at the time expressed concern about the ‘‘extremely dangerous lesson’’ the Civil Disobedience movement would teach the people. And in 1942 during the Quit India movement, textile magnate Kasturbhai Lalbhai reached a quiet agreement with the local trade union leader to let the workers slip away to their villages to avoid open unrest. Gita Piramal, assessing the response of the Bombay business community as a group to the freedom struggle in general, found it ‘‘weak’’. In fact industrialists were drawn to Bombay, she claims, as it was a haven of law and order and saw the British as symbols of ‘‘justice and peace’’.

Clearly, the corporate class has no tradition of combativeness against those in power. Just before the Quit India movement of 1942 in fact, a group of industrialists including Birla and J.R.D. Tata wrote to the viceroy assuring him of their opposition to a politics of open conflict: ‘‘We are all businessmen and therefore we need hardly point out that our interest lies in peace, harmony, goodwill and order throughout the country.’’ And yet, even when the same harmony and order is threatened, as it was in Gujarat recently, few were willing to stick their neck out and express outrage or even condemnation.

Can corporate India change? Given its enormous influence and privileged position, there is no reason for it not to try. The problem however is that, with the expansion of the business community and the growing corporatisation of every aspect of life, the values and insecurities of this class have percolated to a wider section of the population. It is perhaps because of this that public anger does not translate into cohesive action any more. Bofors unseated a government. The stamp paper scam has the same effects as a long-running TV soap. The death of a South Indian youth became a potent symbol of misrule during the Emergency. The murder of Satyendra Dubey, despite the proliferation of media that makes such events impossible to cover up, does not seem likely to jolt today’s comfortable youth into creating anything like, say, the seventies JP movement.

Confrontation, the politics of protest are fading away. And growing materialism and competitiveness (the cornerstone of the corporate culture) will make it even more difficult for people to unite for mass action. The wimp factor is a catching one.