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Thursday, November 24, 2011

The Phantom Strikes


The Phantom strikes

It isn’t just the Rolls Royce that has made much of its quietness in motion. Much, as in its monikers of Phantom and Ghost and its famous David Ogilvy created advertisement.


The legendary headline to the 1958 print ad said: At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock. The Subhead line read: What makes Rolls-Royce the best car in the world? “There is really no magic about it – it is merely patient attention to detail,” says an eminent Rolls-Royce engineer.

Of course, the Lee Falk “Ghost who walks” inspired imagery in the Rolls Royce model names, the somewhat horse and carriage reminiscent rounded lines, and the advert that talked of tick-tocking clocks and miles per hour, all belong to a bygone era. One in which the “Roller”, under British ownership, exuded occasional, if nostalgic, whiffs of Empire, despite the dwindling number of its anachronistic takers.

Significantly, this iconic British marque built at Crewe in the Midlands, associated with royalty and the “toff” for so long it seems like forever; still makes aircraft engines on its own. The auto manufacturing however has been hived off to BMW, the German car maker from Bavaria, which also once made aircraft engines but now only has the blue and white propeller on its much admired logo.

But BMW too, while extensively reengineering and restyling the Roller into tank-like toughness and Teutonic performance, has daintily retained the ethereal model names and the je ne sais quoi Greek mythology classicism of the “Spirit of Ecstasy” hood badge, now retractable to elude souvenir hunters, vandals and the gritty cynicism of modern times.

With this combination of old world class and Butch new, improved, performance, the Phantom can outgun several serious sports cars, despite weighing in at over two tons without any armour plating. Likewise, the slightly smaller new Ghost for those who want to drive themselves.

Which brings me to the reclusive billionaire with built-in state-of-the-art stealth features undetectable on most radars, known as “The Phantom of Bombay House”.  I write of Mr. Shapoorji Pallonji Mistry and his long road journey to the takeover of the iconic Tata Group. He too oozes stateliness and good manners while being a proven quantity over decades at or near the top of Indian business and industry.  

Mr.S.P. Mistry has been closely associated with all the major construction emanating from the Tata Group for decades. He has been an inner circle intimate of JRD Tata and an avuncular and consistent presence for his successor Ratan, not to mention all the other Tata satraps. Mr. Mistry has quietly sat on the boards, or in the Chairman’s office, of several Tata companies at the same time, for decades together, in addition to having his own name plate formally and informally at the board table at Tata Sons for just as long. But despite his biggest single private shareholding at some 18.5% in the Tata Sons holding company, Pallon, as his friends call him, has been careful to eschew petty ambition while diligently minding the store.  

Even now, at around 80 years of age, in technical retirement certainly, the elder Mistry is still a major force at Bombay House, despite his innate humility, warmth, human touch and signature low-key style. But underneath this silk and velvet, is a clear cut and long term strategist that has at last executed a plan of action begun in 1930, when his father, the heir apparent Cyrus Mistry’s grandfather, acquired 12.5% of Tata Sons by buying out the then Tata lawyer’s holding.

In the 1930s it was a very different kind of Phantom and Ghost, that rolled around in the heat and dust of princely India, besides featuring anthromorphically in hit films like “The Yellow Rolls Royce”. But undeniably, the Rolls Royce motor car’s survival to date owes much to a nimble evolution from its walnut and burl dashboards and picnic hampers that has cast many of its contemporaries into the outer darkness of museums sighing with times past.

The naming of the 43 year old Cyrus Mistry to the top job at Tatas’ is significant for its signal of an astute and hard-nosed makeover not unlike the one made to the Roller by BMW, signalling both modernisation and continuity, and recognising, as Ratan has done throughout his tenure, coinciding with the beginning of India’s liberalisation, that competition, not protection, is here to stay.

The Tata Group, grown out of the pre-independence ethos, consolidated throughout the Socialist era and brought into its own since 1991, has a long way to go in its transformation into a global behemoth. And this particularly as the balance of power is beginning to shift to Asia in terms of China and India and also to the other BRICS countries. What is certain is that America and the West will have to share a lot of power and pelf in the future.

Cyrus Mistry will have the time, over 30 years per the terms of tenure at Tata, God willing, and given the determination and vision demonstrated by outgoing Chairman Ratan Tata, like JRD before him, he will take it to the heights of achievement and excellence befitting the refreshed TATA logo.   

 Cyrus Mistry has already taken the Shapoorji Pallonji Group, albeit in conjunction with his father and elder brother, into very impressive multi-billion dollar growth, branching out into a conglomerate on its own, embracing manufacturing, services and engineering, from its roots in A grade civil construction going back to his grandfather’s days.

The time has come to continue the kind of dynamism and courage that has marked the latter half of Ratan Tata’s tenure, when he came into his own after successfully subduing considerable internal challenges to his leadership. Cyrus Mistry is lucky to be inheriting this legacy of consolidation. All he has to do now is leverage the considerable strengths of the Tata Group in an era where India itself is destined to become a leading nation and economy.

There are great opportunities in areas that are yet to be thrown open to the private or collaborative joint sectors, particularly in the Defence Industry, but they are coming because of irresistible geopolitical pressures and threats that need urgent action. Such private-public-international collaboration, inclusive of both organic and inorganic growth, as demonstrated in the Corus and Jaguar/Landrover acquisitions, has the potential to catapult more and more companies in the Tata Group into the upper reaches of the Fortune 500.

All Mr. Mistry needs is a hunger and stomach for visionary growth and he has certainly demonstrated this characteristic already, if on a smaller canvas.

(1,100 words)
24th November 2011
Gautam Mukherjee

Published as Leader Edit on the Edit Page of The Pioneer as "With sleeves rolled up" on November 29th, 2011. Also online at www.dailypioneer.com

Sunday, November 13, 2011

Modi as in Deng




Modi as in Deng


Reform is China's second revolution.
Deng Xiaoping

In power terms, political correctness is a reasonably modern phenomenon. In history, the blood and gore of conquest was usually cast in terms of valour, vision and the capacity to rule. It was understood statecraft was not a province for wimps. But another demeanour, far less militaristic, that works nowadays, is that of the doer with a modicum of style.

Chief Minister Narendra Modi recently went to Beijing with a large entourage of Gujarat’s finest business leaders. He went in response to an ongoing Chinese initiative from the Central Committee of the CCP. Another possible Opposition prime ministerial candidate, Mr. Nitish Kumar of Bihar, has also recently been to Beijing on the same invitation format, as have several others, including Haryana’s Mr. Hooda.

Modi however is the only Indian CM who can boast of Chinese rates of growth. Gujarat has an overall figure of 12%, per annum, with even the usually moribund agricultural sector turning in a record-breaking 10% last year. The urban population of Gujarat, at 40% of the total, more closely resembles the demographic in China. Our near inviolate shibboleth is that “India lives in its villages”. That profundity was pronounced by the Mahatma, Gujarat’s greatest gift to the nation and the world, over a half century ago. Unsung as he undoubtedly is, Sardar Patel also from the womb of Gujarat, with a great deal more realpolitik to him if not the greatness, makes up a close second to MAK Gandhi.

Modi, also cast in decidedly heroic hue, is seen by the Chinese as an Indian Deng Xiaoping, himself long on the periphery of national power, but once installed centre stage, the one who took China on its spectacular trajectory to make it the fastest growing economy in the world.  Our NaMo, impressed as he is with Chinese achievements, is not content however, to slavishly ape Chinese growth methods.

He sees the business opportunity more as a Chinese one, and asked his hosts to desist from egging Pakistan on to make trouble for India, inclusive of the Chinese presence in POK. He also referred to the brandishing of Chinese maps that include large tracts of Indian territory such as Arunachal Pradesh and Akshai Chin on the Chinese side of the fence.

Modi does not think such essentially hostile attitudes are going to help Chinese companies get lucrative Indian contracts in infrastructure, telecom, and energy, amongst other things. Hardly the talk of a supplicant, and to give credit to his hosts, they took such pointed remarks on board without demur.

But even if China sees Modi as a possible future prime minister of India, they don’t have to fight through the thicket of rivals and detractors that NaMO has to tackle. Of course the matter that most stands in Modi’s way towards power at the centre, is the perception that he either caused, or colluded, with mob fury, during and in the aftermath of the Godhra riots that took some 3,500 lives. While technically and legally it may be very difficult to lay any such blame at his door, the damage has already been done.

The irony of this situation is that this country itself was born in the grip of communal violence, with perhaps a half million lives lost in the process. But it did next to no damage to the subsequent political careers of the principal beneficiaries, Mohammad Ali Jinnah and Jawaharlal Nehru.

Mr. Jinnah of course coughed his last soon after, but you could hardly blame his tuberculosis on his politics. The third beneficiary in glory, if not in pelf and power, was the beribboned Lord Mountbatten of Burma, but when he was finally blown up in a fishing skiff many years later, it was the IRA that did it, and not any part of the Hindu-Muslim diaspora.

In recent history, there was Mrs. Indira Gandhi’s invasion of the Golden Temple at Amritsar, that bizarre use of tanks through narrow lanes, and that of the regular army.

There were about a thousand casualties around the lanes, rooms, pools and terraces of the temple. The net effect was one of desecration and sacrilege. The martyrdom of Bhindranwale, when a judicially sanctioned noose would have been infinitely better was a corollary, and deeply wounded Sikh pride, a consequence. And then, there was the whispering from the shadows, echoing with the ghosts of Jallianwala Baug, located just a few alleyways away, in the same city.

Later came the Shakespearean aftermath, that of Mrs. Gandhi’s murder at her wicket gate, and the 4,800 Sikhs butchered in the Capital in swift retaliation. The
carnage organised, it is maintained to this day, by prominent members of the Congress Party, over four days of barbarity.

And yet it is Godhra, where the first provocation involved the deliberate burning alive of  scores of  Hindu pilgrims inside locked railway carriages, and Ayodhya, wherein nobody was killed during the demolition of Babar’s mosque; which are held out as prime examples of communal intolerance in this country.

Having the bountiful money tap of Government advertising is a good way to control the flow of news and analysis, even allegedly third-rate analysis, as certain judges with extra-curricular views have it. It is a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black, if one only casts a glance at the state of our judiciary and the functioning of our legal system. But casting stones at others is the sub-continental idea of free speech. Though we have never been much good at taking what we love to dish out.

Coming back to Mr. Modi and the great neo-liberal cant about his unsuitability for the top job because of his communal credentials, and coming, as he does, from that “communal party”, is so much talk that can harm our national progress.

The importance of NaMO is that  there is practically no one from any party with his development record. And as for his communalism, even if it is taken on face value, it cannot be seen to be any worse than that of any other politician, including Mr. Rajiv Gandhi, who justified the Sikh killings in Delhi circa 1984, in philosophical and arboreal similes. 

Deng the doppelganger was purged twice by Mao, but managed to upstage Mao’s designated successor Hua Guofeng. He then took control of the second generation reform that has catapulted China to its present prominence.

Modi has similar potential, albeit in a different political context and discourse, and this has not been lost on the Chinese. As for NaMo himself, he prepared for his visit carefully and made his presentation on Gujarat in correct Mandarin. 

 (1,105 words)

13th November 2011
Gautam Mukherjee     

Published as Leader Edit on the Edit Page of The Pioneer as "Modi could be India's Deng" on  15th November 2011. Also online at www.dailypioneer where it is also archived under Columnists.