Licence Permit Raj in Armani: Regulators, Raids, and Rhetoric

 


Some time ago, the residence of the Hero Group’s Munjal family was raided. The next morning, newspapers screamed that assets worth twenty-five crores had been confiscated. What assets? No one bothered to say. The press release was a haiku; the social-media choir turned it into an opera. The bhakts on social media cheered as if the government had unearthed a treasure chest in Gurgaon. To anyone with functioning spectacles, however, this was theatre, not triumph. Twenty-five crores in a billionaire’s home is what a village headman might call “a tidy sum”; for the Munjals, it is pocket change. To hail such a raid as a grand haul is like boasting of catching a whale when all you’ve netted is a sardine.

This memory returns because of a recent article in Business Standard with the pompous title: Time to Stop Abusing India Inc. Its author, R. Jagannathan, sermonises at length—wagging his finger mainly at opposition politicians who allegedly malign Indian business houses, while sparing a few barbs for intellectuals such as Pratap Bhanu Mehta. According to him, the opposition chants “crony capitalism” every time Adani or Ambani sneezes, while scholars dismiss Indian capitalism as mere arbitrage. These, he says, are the real abusers of India Inc. Stirring stuff—except that it overlooks the larger, uglier picture: the government’s own abuse of businesses through raids, leaks, and media trials that lead nowhere. The message to honest businessmen is simple: live nervously.

If the Munjal raid wasn’t abuse, what is? If ransacking the BBC’s offices wasn’t intimidation, what is? According to Newslaundry, fewer than five per cent of ED and CBI cases ever result in conviction. The rest are pure theatre—stage-managed dramas to harass critics and manufacture headlines. Yet Jagannathan raises no objection to this. Instead, he scolds the opposition for daring to ask why some billionaires rise meteorically while others are raided into silence.

More troubling still is the lazy economics in Jagannathan’s argument. To dismiss the IT services revolution as mere “labour arbitrage” is to insult millions who built global-scale enterprises. Infosys, TCS, Wipro—these are not just wage-differentials; they are systems, processes, training grounds, governance experiments, and exports rolled into one. To reduce them to “cheap labour” is to reduce a cathedral to a pile of bricks. Meanwhile, the conglomerate that expands through favours and proximity to power, think cement, is suddenly praised as “nation-building.” That double standard is not analysis; it is spin.

And here let us not be coy. The old “licence-permit raj”—that monstrous octopus of red tape—has not been abolished so much as repackaged. Today it carries a sleeker name: “regulators.” Same chokehold, sharper suit. Renaming is the gospel of our times: call the old licence raj “reform,” dress it in Armani, and hope no one notices. But if regulators act like club bouncers—admitting favourites and tossing out rivals—you have the same old raj, only with better tailoring.

There is also another, more performative cruelty: the project of belittling the recent past. The political habit of belittling predecessors has become an indoor sport. Our leader, at home and abroad, keeps insisting that before his era India was a land of scams and shame, that nothing much happened for decades, that Indians were somehow embarrassed to be Indian. At foreign podiums—in Seoul, Toronto, Shanghai—this declamatory history-washing may play well to crowds. But on the world stage it looks small: instead of dignifying the nation’s messy, complex past, it reduces it to a punchline to glorify the present. If you lecture opponents at home for “abusing” business, do not turn around and abuse your own country’s history abroad. That is not leadership; it is petty showmanship.

So when Jagannathan pleads that politicians and intellectuals stop abusing Indian business, the hypocrisy is glaring. What corrodes trust in India Inc. is not Rahul Gandhi’s speeches or Pratap Bhanu Mehta’s essays. It is the state’s selective raids, its regulators masquerading as gatekeepers, and its leader who cannot speak without diminishing his predecessors.

Jagannathan’s column reads like a man shocked that someone coughed in church while the priest quietly siphons the collection plate. If you want India Inc. to flourish, stop the theatre. Fix the institutions. Call the licence-permit raj by its name, stop dressing it up as “regulators,” and stop blaming the passerby when your own house is on fire. In plain words: fewer sermons, more sweat. Otherwise, all this talk of “trust” will remain what it is now—a slogan on banners while the market holds its breath.

 

https://www.business-standard.com/opinion/columns/time-to-stop-abusing-indian-business-houses-trust-will-help-them-build-125090201478_1.html

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