• Rahul Gandhi, M.P.

India was silenced by the East India Company. It was silenced not by its business prowess, but by its chokehold. The Company choked India by partnering with, bribing, and threatening our more pliant maharajas and nawabs. It controlled our banking, bureaucratic, and information networks. We didn’t lose our freedom to another nation; we lost it to a monopolistic corporation that ran a coercive apparatus.

The Company controlled the terms of trade and obliterated competition. It dictated who sold what and to whom. It wiped out our textile industry and manufacturing system. I do not know of any product innovation or market development the Company performed. What I do know is that it secured a monopoly for the cultivation of opium in one region and developed a captive market of opium addicts in another. Yet, while the Company plundered India, it behaved as a model corporate citizen in the UK. Its foreign shareholders loved it.

The original East India Company wound up over 150 years ago, but the raw fear it then generated is back. A new breed of monopolists has taken its place. They have amassed colossal wealth, even as India has become far more unequal and unfair for everybody else. Our institutions no longer belong to our people, they do the bidding of monopolists. Lakhs of businesses have been decimated and India is unable to generate jobs for her youth. ‘Bharat Mata’ is mother to all her children. The monopolisation of her resources and power, this blatant denial of the many for the sake of a chosen few, has wounded her.

I know that hundreds of India’s brilliant and dynamic business leaders are scared of the monopolists. Are you one of them? Scared to talk on the phone? Scared of the monopolists colluding with the state to enter your sector and crush you? Scared of I-T, CBI or ED raids forcing you to sell your business to them? Scared of them starving you of capital when you need it the most? Scared of them changing the rules of the game midway to ambush you?

You know that describing these oligarchic groups as businesses is misleading. When you compete with them, you are not competing with a company, you are fighting the machinery of the Indian state. Their core competence is not products, consumers or ideas, it is their ability to control India’s governing institutions and regulators — and, in surveillance. Unlike you, these groups decide what Indians read and watch, they influence how Indians think and what they speak. Today, market forces do not determine success, power relations do.

There is fear in your hearts. But there is also hope.

In contrast to the “match-fixing” monopoly groups, there is a larger number of amazing “play-fair” Indian businesses, from micro-enterprises to large corporations, but you are silent. You persevere in an oppressive system. Consider Peyush Bansal, a first-generation entrepreneur with no political contacts, who started a business when he was just 22. He went on to co-found Lenskart in 2010, which reshaped the eyewear sector. Today, Lenskart provides employment to thousands across India. Then take Faqir Chand Kohli who, as a manager, built Tata Consultancy in the 1970s. It was a triumph of ambition over fear, the guts to take on giants like IBM and Accenture in their backyard. TCS and other pioneers transformed global IT services from a boutique process to an industrial process. I have never personally known Bansal or the late FC Kohli. It could well be that their political preferences diverge/diverged from mine. So what? It seems that companies like Tynor, InMobi, Manyavar, Zomato, Fractal Analytics, Araku Coffee, Tredence, Amagi, iD Fresh Food, PhonePe, Moglix, Sula Vineyards, Juspay, Zerodha, Veritas, Oxyzo, Avendus, from the younger lot, and L&T, Haldiram, Aravind Eye Hospital, Indigo, Asian Paints, HDFC group, Bajaj Auto and Bajaj Finance, Cipla, Mahindra Auto, Titan, from the older lot — most I hardly know personally — are a tiny sample of homegrown companies that have innovated and chosen to play by the rules. I am sure I have left out hundreds of names which fit the bill even better, but you understand my point. My politics has always been about protecting the weak and voiceless. I draw my inspiration from Gandhiji’s words about defending the last voiceless person in the “line”. This conviction made me support MGNREGA, the Right to Food and the Land Acquisition Bill. I stood with the Adivasis in the famous confrontation of Niyamgiri. I backed our farmers in their struggle against the three black farm laws. I listened to the pain of the people of Manipur.

But I realized that I had missed the full depth of Gandhiji’s words. I failed to pick up that “line” is a metaphor — that, in fact, there are many different “lines” in society. In the “line” you stand in, that of business, it is you who are the exploited, the disadvantaged. And so, my politics will aim to provide you with what you have been denied — fairness and freedom to operate.

The government cannot be allowed to support one business at the expense of all others, much less support benami equations in the business system. Government agencies are not weapons to be used to attack and intimidate businesses. That said, I do not believe that fear should be transferred from you to these big monopolists. They are not evil individuals, but simply the outcome of the deficiencies of our societal and political environment. They should get space, and so should you.

This country is for all of us. Our banks should overcome their fascination for the top 100 well-connected borrowers with their attendant NPAs and be made to discover the profit pools in lending and supporting the play-fair businesses. Finally, we must not underestimate the power of social pressure and resistance in moulding political behaviour. There is no need for messiahs. You are the change that will generate wealth and employment for all.

I believe a new deal for progressive Indian business is an idea whose time has come.

(The writer is Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha) Courtesy: The Indian Express