Some things to Reconsider

R. Jagannathan in his article titled “Wooing billionaires & HNIs” published in Business Standard recently wrote that India needs “patient capital” or a booming plea for Indians and Indian Diaspora to invest in India. He asked, why do our wealthy continue to pack their Louis Vuitton luggage and say tata-bye-bye to Mother India? The answer isn’t rocket science. All it takes is a little honesty, a little introspection, and a little less finger-pointing. Take the case of Salman Khan. Eternal bachelor, permanent controversy machine. In January 2014, just before elections, there he was — flying kites with Narendra Modi in Ahmedabad. Salman smiled, called Modi a “good man,” but stopped short of endorsement. Clever man. At that time, his hit-and-run case was hanging like a noose. In 2015, BJP in power, a sessions court gave him five years in jail. By the end of that year, Bombay High Court acquitted him. Coincidence? God’s grace? Call it what you will. But Salman never converted into a...

  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 spa...

 https://www.business-standard.com/opinion/columns/india-s-diplomacy-needs-to-move-from-demonstrative-style-to-hard-substance-125080501933_1.html Let’s begin with the obvious. R Jagannathan’s piece titled “India needs to up its diplomatic game” published in Business Standard dated Aug 6,2025 starts with the right note but soon meanders into a muddled defence of the very failures it gestures toward. The title implies urgency, even introspection. But the essay itself does little more than catalogue geopolitical anxieties while clinging to the same photo-op-driven framework that has defined Indian foreign policy for over a decade. To his credit, Jagannathan does briefly acknowledge the hollowness of Narendra Modi’s personal rapport-based diplomacy, stating that “personal rapport with global leaders is not a solid enough basis for conducting the kind of hard-nosed diplomacy that can deliver net gains for the country.” He nods at the performative spectacles of “Howdy Modi,” “Namaste...