OpEd: When business meets politics

By Kajol Singh

CPI(M) general secretary Prakash Karat had an interesting visitor the other day. Mukesh Ambani. India's top corporate honcho dropped by the CPI(M)'s New Delhi headquarters on his way to Washington for a meeting with US President Barack

Obama. No-one was more surprised than Karat when the request for an appointment came. It seems Ambani wanted to suss out the Left's view of the new US administration before the discussions with Obama. Ambani and Karat spent 40 minutes exchanging notes on the international economic, political and strategic order.

The industrial leader was particularly keen on knowing the Left's opinion of Obama and its expectations of America's first black president. It must have come as a pleasant surprise to Ambani that Karat was pretty open-minded and positive about Obama, even as he put in caveats about the new president's ability to make a paradigm shift in US policies. The CPI(M) leader conceded that Obama may have some impact at an individual level and saw the US decision to pull out of Iraq as a positive step.

Ambani flew to Washington with plenty of food for thought and a 360 degree take for Obama on Indo-US relations under the next dispensation, whether it's Left, Right or Centre.

The Ambani-Karat meeting naturally created a flutter. Was it a pointer to the direction in which the political winds are blowing? The last and only other time the two met was when the Left was the power behind the UPA throne. After the Marxists withdrew support to the Manmohan Singh government, they fell off the map as far as most opinion leaders were concerned. But with elections approaching and Karat doggedly stitching together a non-BJP, non-Congress front, those same opinion makers want to keep their options open. Much is being read into the fact that Ambani chose to also carry a Left view with him to Washington, besides the Congress and BJP perspectives with which he was already familiar.

The one circle in which the Ambani-Karat pow wow caused anxiety was the Samajwadi Party. It becomes such a high stakes game when corporate interests intertwine with politics. Amar Singh, who describes himself as Anil Ambani's brother, telephoned Karat to seek a meeting, despite having been snubbed once already by the CPI(M) leader. Karat was quite curt. Your behaviour is too whimsical, he is reported to have told Amar Singh.

Make up your mind whether you are with the Congress or against it. The SP leader apparently confided that relations were at breaking point. Well, hold a press conference and announce it, Karat is believed to have shot back. Then we can consider meeting. They say Amar Singh is a worried man, uncertain and unsure about the significance of Mukesh Ambani's unexpected decision to seek out Karat. Was it really connected to his Washington trip? Or was he carrying a message from the Congress to the Left for a post-poll understanding? The SP's worst nightmare is to be out in the cold again like it was in 2004 when the Congress imperiously rejected its offer of support. Ah! The vagaries of an Indian summer election!

TAILPIECE
Amar Singh is not the only confused politician who blows hot one day and cold the next. The Congress is doing the same with Mamata Banerjee in West Bengal. After dashing Banerjee's hopes for a Congress-Trinamool electoral pact by putting Left-friendly Pranab Mukherjee in charge of the party's Bengal unit, Sonia Gandhi has dispatched Mukherjee and Mohsina Kidwai to Kolkata for another round of alliance talks.

But Banerjee seems to have taken lessons in the art of negotiating from her new friend Amar Singh. She's told the Congress to stick to north Bengal and leave south Bengal to her. The problem is that there are only six (of Bengal's 42) Lok Sabha seats in the north. Not much joy there for the Congress.