Understandably, she did not care to respond. Much later, under two former united front prime ministers — HD Deve Gowda and Inder Kumar Gujral — civil aviation minister Chand Mahal Ibrahim got the Tata-Singapore Airlines project scuttled. Ibrahim had publicly declared: "Only over my dead body will this proposal be cleared.” While the project was shelved, no one hauled or called Deve Gowda to make a statement in Parliament or outside. The coal mines privatisation programme, bringing fortune to many politically connected business houses, failed to nab former prime minister Manmohan Singh, who also headed the coal ministry at the time of privatisation.

Linking Modi with Adanis’ assets, highly inflated share prices, debt manipulation and the group’s Mauritius connection are simply ridiculous. Mauritius had long been the biggest source of foreign investment flows into India. It was also known as a key route to manipulate foreign fund inflows by Indian businessmen. In 2020-21, the US replaced Mauritius as the second largest source of foreign investment into India with inflows of $13.82 billion in foreign direct investment (FDI). Singapore remained the top FDI source into the country for the third consecutive fiscal year at $17.41 billion. Two British news dailies lately alleged that ‘Modi-linked Adani family secretly invested in own shares’ citing new documents obtained by the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP).

The documents reveal the details of an undisclosed and complex offshore operation in Mauritius – seemingly controlled by Adani associates – which was allegedly used to support the share prices of its group companies from 2013 to 2018. How does such Adani share price manipulation link the India government or even Modi, personally? Artificially inflated share prices do help a promoter borrow more funds from lenders by pledging those shares than they really deserve. It is the job of lenders to make proper valuation of stock mortgages. The debt-heavy Adanis borrowed from everywhere, not the nationalised banks alone.

In fact, most big businessmen had strong connections with every Indian prime minister and his or her government although no Indian prime minister responded to such suggestions. A business-government link is only natural in any country under control-freak government. Economic policy decisions of the government, including those covering state sector privatisation, imports and exports, inward and outward investments and technology transfers, have always impacted business houses. The Adani group’s meteoric rise during the rule of the current government could rightly raise eyebrows of business analysts and the media across the world, but this is not uncommon in India. The Ambanis are among the biggest beneficiaries of select government policies, right from the days of Indira Gandhi to the present.

Thanks to such policy support, India’s largest private sector enterprise, Reliance Industries (RIL), has evolved from being a small textiles and polyester company to an integrated player across oil exploration, refining and sale, petrochemicals, retails and telecommunications. Today, Reliance products and services portfolio touches almost all sections of people, across economic and social spectrums. The Vajpayee government was more generous to the Ambanis and Vedanta-Sterlite’s Anil Agarwal, handing over cheaply the country’s largest state-owned petrochemical company and an aluminium company to the two business houses, respectively, than probably the Modi government toward Gautam Adani.

Isn’t the government’s latest policy decision to stop import of laptops, desktop computers and tablets specially helpful to the Ambanis’ JioBook? Could the prime minister have a hand in it? The import could have been restricted much earlier if the purpose were simply to encourage domestic manufacturing. Why now? The Directorate General of Foreign Trade imposed the specific import restriction as soon as the country’s biggest business house was ready with the JioBook. The government action is expected to drive up the cost of electronics and computers in India. This change affects businesses who sell laptops after importing them from outside, including Apple, Lenovo, Asus, Acer, Samsung, and HP. Many people on social media say that the latest government action is designed to benefit Reliance, which just introduced JioBook. Why is the political opposition silent on the issue while campaigning to establish an Adani-Modi link?

How did a handful of local pharmaceuticals manufacturers manage to have the government on their side right from the days of Indira Gandhi as the prime minister to drive away multinational giants in the 1970s and 1980s from controlling the country’s growing drug formulations market? Today, India is one of the world’s top drug manufacturers and exporters. How would the political opposition like to explain the government-pharmaceutical industry link in domestic drug price fixing? Directly or indirectly, the government —central and state — have selectively favoured or brandished businessmen in India. A seemingly unusual decision by West Bengal’s former Left Front government under the late Marxist chief minister Jyoti Basu to transfer the electricity distribution licence of Calcutta Electric Supply Corporation (CESC) in favour of his private businessman ‘friend’ Rama Prasad Goenka witnessed the massive rise of the RPG group over the years.

The business-government link in India is as old as the country’s independence. In the 1950s, the Jawaharlal Nehru-led government blocked the growth and expansion of all established Indian business groups, having assets in excess of Rs. 20 crore, under the Monopolies Act . Emergence of innovative private investors since the days of Indira Gandhi, led by the late Dhirubhai Ambani, gradually changed the country’s entire business-government relationship environment. The country noticed a meteoric rise of many Indian and NRI business families such as those led by Dhirubhai Ambani, Bhai Mohan Singh, Rahul Bajaj, Vittal and Vijay Mallya, Dilip Shanghvi, Pawan Munjal, Kushal Pal Singh, Anil Agarwal, the Hinduja brothers, Grandhi Mallikarjuna Rao and Sunil Mittal among others.

The ruling BJP’s political opposition would do well to find some strong substantial issues to corner the Modi government before the scheduled 2024 Lok Sabha election instead of hanging on to Modi’s alleged Adani connection. Corruption could be a weak election issue to take on the Modi government, which is out to expose massive financial malpractices among opposition leaders. This could be especially so in the light of the presence of so many questionable leaders, including big time judicial convicts, at the helm of the opposition combine, I.N.D.I.A. Maybe, the anti-Modi opposition forum could try to pin the government down on specific governance issues if it can find some. (IPA Service)