AT&T sells stake in BPL

Looks like AT&T is getting ready to quit the Indian mobile phone market (their last remaining investment is in IDEA cellular), even as a record 1.9 million subscribers were added in November alone. Analysts suggest that Ma Bell has sold its stake (which it acquired at about $150 million) at a considerable discount.

The question is whether Ma Bell's decision had anything to do with the unified licence regime (wireless and fixed-line) announced by the government, a move that was predicted to start of a wave of much-needed consolidation in the Indian mobile phone industry.

Success has many fathers

So now every political pundit can find something nice to write about the BJP. Talking heads are spanning the length and breadth of television studios to reveal the reasons and the impact of the BJP victory. Suddenly, they are a young and dynamic lot, lots of fuss is being made about Pramod Mahajan's lap-top boys (as if he ran some complex election mathematical models on the dam thing to figure out strategies...) , Arun Jaitley's (ugh) strategic sense, Vajpayeeji's charisma. Without bothering to say why, political pundits now think the election victory is an endorsment of economic reform. None of these pundits caught which way the wind was blowing before the election results, so now they are playing catch up.

All very well, I suppose--to the victor go the spoils.

Moreover, one shouldn't judge pundits too harshly. Its genuinely difficult to figure out the Indian voter, and more importantly the first past the post system can make a few percentage difference in vote share seem like a land slide.

However, I shall stick by my party. The BJP, with few exceptions, in my view is a rotten lot.

And the fact is that all four Congress Chief Ministers were excellent Chief Ministers. All four were modern, clean, and efficient Chief Ministers. And their tenures have visibly--and not so visibly--improved the condition of people living in their states.

Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, for example, have both started to pull out from the BIMARU trap in their Digvijay's and Ghelot's tenure respectively.

Digvijay's de-centralization and land re-distribution program is to be genuinely applauded. Any Ghelot fought 4 years of drought vigorously. Food and work reached the farthest corners of the desert state--a point often missed by Delhi/Bombay types. Most emphatically the states will be worse off without them.

All pundits have, as usual, begun writing political obituaries for Sonia Gandhi. Let me just say that if she was good enough to pick and stick with Ghelot, Dixit and Digvijay, she is good enough to be my Prime Minister.

Branding India

A few weeks back, we were all rather excited about the Sekhar Kapur interview that Edward posted here. Being the 'realist' that I am, I had tried to throw some cold water on his theory. Now, Sandipan has an interesting article up in Outlook which questions some of my premises.

"What is a brand? In business school, they teach you that a brand is a "basket of attributes". Hindi films did not consciously try to do any branding for India. It just happened. The attributes are what the audience perceives. In the Asia-Pacific region, India—as communicated by Hindi films, as interpreted by the fannish legions—stands for beauty, joy, hope, and Asian pride. In Morocco, Egypt and large tracts of the Islamic world, it stands for rock-solid family values, the inviolability of contracts made for human relationships. In the West (in a small town in Georgia, US, a friend met good Southern Baptists who knew of Preity Zinta), it stands for unbounded passion, for a sovereign energy, about a freedom from the should.

Can these involuntary and contradictory brand appeals for India be harnessed together to build a velvet battering ram for the worldmind? Yes, of course. Don't ask me how. I am just a tourist. One request though. Can we stop defining ourselves by an LA suburb? Can we stop calling our film industry Bollywood? It'll be a start. "

In a powerful and balanced accompanying piece, Manu Jain examined what does India, the brand, represents and if it is possible to leverage it. Both the articles are very well written and worth reading in their entirety.

What will the defeat mean ?

What will the defeat of the Congress in the 3 states mean for India, I wonder.
Will it mean that all non-NDA parties come together?

Well I certainly hope so mostly because I am a partisan hack. I hate the BJP more than anything else in the world.

But also because I think the BJP is the wrong party to carry India's economic reform further. Their support base--urban, upper caste Hindus and increasingly "brahmanized" intermediate castes (like Uma Bharti) are the principal beneficiaries of the current economic system like free higher education, LPG subsidy, in the villages fertilizer subsidy, virtually free water and power , jobs in public sector undertakings, rent control etc.

Economic reform in essence means uprooting a lot of this structure. The BJP, like every other political party in the world, will be unable to go against its own supporters.

What it means is that the Congress must ally with the Communists, Mulayam, Laloo, Paswan and whatever else is left of the old United Front government if it wants to form a government next year. But how the hell will Manmohan Singh as finance minister convince the communists to support the government over PSU divestment, or labour reform? The BJP is unlikely to be magnanimous and lend their support as the opposition just as the Congress hasn't supported Arun Shorie over privatization.

I still think the Indian economy will grow fast enough. The impetus for economic change/ growth comes from deep within the fabric of the country. There is only that much that any government can do to stop this thing we've started.

However questions remain...