The Latest: Top stories of the day
1. Protests force Finance Minister Arun Jaitley to withdraw the controversial EPF tax.
2. Art of Living event: Has ecological impact been assessed, asks the National Green Tribunal.
3. Pakistan has asked for the India-Pakistan World T20 match to be shifted out of Dharamshala, citing conflicting signals from India.
4. Bharatiya Janata Party IT cell official Sanjay Rathod tweets: Kill JNU students, professors; later deletes it.
5. Sponsors rush to drop tennis player Maria Sharapova after she failed a test for performance enhancing drugs.
The Big Story: The king of acche din
What’s in a name? Well, if you’re an ostentatious industrialist in India with the right political connections, a lot. Banks had lent money to Vijay Mallya’s Kingfisher group simply on the basis of high valuations of the Kingfisher Airlines brand.
Of course, this was a terrible decision. Kingfisher Airlines is now defunct and it’s safe to say the brand isn’t worth much. Yet, banks, including government-owned State Bank of India, lent a whopping Rs 7,000 crore to Mallya’s group.
How did such a poor valuation get past the admittedly smart people who run banks? Much evidence points to complicity between promoters of the company and bank employees. The Industrial Development Bank of India, a state-owned entity, lent Kingfisher money even though its own board members warned against it. The bank now had bad debts of Rs 700 crore.
Even as banks now labour under the effect of these bad loans, Vijay Mallya himself has managed to remain mostly unfazed. In February, he even bought a cricket team in the Caribbean Premier League. Speculation is now rife whether Mallya has left the country even as banks – with convenient delays – move to stop him from exiting.
Mallya is just one amongst many. An Indian Express investigation uncovered a Rs 11.4 lakh crore state bank write-off scandal. That’s Rs 11,40,00,00,00,000.
Yet, oddly, India’s public discourse it seems is more outraged about a student getting his Phd stipend of Rs 3,000.
In 1991, India made a break with crony socialism to ostensibly embrace the so-called free market. That it seems has remained a pipe dream. Instead we have crony capitalists, where a more than free market exists for the wealthy even as India’s crushingly poor have to foot the bill.
The Big Scroll
Since the government seems to be quite powerless against Mallya, Indians have taken to at least poking fun at him. And while Mallya might be the poster boy, the loan problem is much bigger than him.
Politicking and policying
1. Don’t want to lose my job by speaking on the beef ban: Chief Economic Advisor Arvind Subramanian.
2. In the Kashmir Valley, the funerals for militants have of late been seeing larger crowds.
3. There was an attempt to “fix” Narendra Modi in the Ishrat Jahan case, claims Finance Minister Arun Jaitley.
4. West Bengal Assembly elections: the Congress announced a list of 75 seats for the upcoming Assembly polls, steering clear of seats chosen by the Left.
5. Assam Assembly elections: Assom Gana Parishad workers angry with the party’s alliance with the Bharatiya Janata Party ransacked the AGP’s office in Guwahati.
Punditry
1. In the Business Standard, Anjuli Bharaghav explains that to stop rampant cheating, states need to fix the quality of their educational institutions
2. The Ishrat Jahan case has been politicised too much, says RK Raghavan in the Hindu.
3. In the Telegraph, KP Nayar says that a rude shock awaits many Indians if Trump comes to power
Don’t Miss
Kanhaiya has got bail but the state has more to gain from keeping his two classmates behind bars, says Ajaz Ashraf.
This is because Bhattacharya and Khalid do not belong to the student wing of mainstream political parties, whether the Communist Party of India or the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) or the Congress. They are what you can call political orphans.
Theoretically, they do not have the protection of Left national leaders – as, say, JNUSU president Kanhaiya Kumar has – and who together still command enough heft to insulate a person belonging to their formation from the blowback of the Modi government. They can organise expert and expensive legal help and nationwide publicity.
Bhattacharya and Khalid do not have such comfort. Their fate is crucially linked to the support they receive from JNU students and teachers, as also to their ability to ensure they remain lodged in collective memory.
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