Great wealth, often built on grievous inequity, needs media scrutiny
SADANAND MENON
| So now, Satyam has turned out to be Jhutham. Many who, till recently, rested their heads on feather pillows in the noble pursuit of adding magic zeroes to their balance-sheets suddenly find the rougher material of jail floors scraping their ears. What has been most touching has been the incredulity of the media at the confessions of the chairman of Satyam Computer Services. Can a karorepati actually manipulate and falsify accounts? Aren't these the good guys, propelling India to a horizon of perpetual sunshine? The January 8 editorial in The Hindu said it all. "It passes one's understanding," it lamented, "how malfeasance of such a magnitude could escape the eyes of the auditors...that such a huge hole in the finances did not show up somewhere and could not be spotted by the numerous investment analysts. The Satyam fiasco casts a shadow over the nature of corporate governance in India." Well, it passes my understanding how not the financial analysts but the media sat on its haunches and lapped up the story of fairy tales of success in the corporate world without any investigation into corporate practice in India. In particular, the pink press, which is supposed to be reporting from the financial ringside, seemed to have little clue that even as it was salivating at and being complicit in the successes of the wealth-makers, it was but a sniffing distance away from a tsunami-size fraud. If security agencies were caught with their pants down during the Mumbai attacks, here it was the financial papers that had their fundamentals exposed. The sight is not pretty. There is nothing from the pink paparrazzi in recent memory that so much as hints at the impending storm. Perhaps a Rs 7,000-crore scam is just small change for financial journalists who have consistently refused to see any connection between the little zeppelins of affluence floating above the large continents of privation and misery. Our media can certainly be accused of having betrayed the trust of ordinary people and colluded in this project of marketing a flawed dream. The intrepid P. Sainath has consistently done the job of tracking the new community of India's dollar billionaires and reporting to us on the latest inflation in their wealth. Their number has grown steadily, even as figures on poverty and starvation too refuse to decline. At last count, the combined wealth of the two Ambani brothers, for example, had crossed the hundred-billion-dollar mark. How come no financial journalist here investigates the source of such wealth? How come we take it for granted and docket the generation of such wealth with enterprise and the virtue of capitalist individualism? How come in these matters we fight shy of ideas of transparency and accountability? Take the Ambani wealth. We all wish them well. However, should not at least a minuscule section of the media be giving us some basic details? Like how could they achieve this in all of about 35 years? Wherein lay their financial genius? They made their wealth over the carcass of the dying handloom and powerloom industry, which bowed out under assault from polyester fiber. Aided, no doubt, by official changes in textile policy; but abetted, no doubt, by some push from the Ambani enterprise. How did this affect the cotton mills? How many workers and cotton capitalists did it wipe out? How it converted cities like Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Baroda, Surat, Chennai, Nasik and Salem into ghost towns with smoke-rimmed chimney stacks and new social tensions brought about by a defeated industrial working class? And how the land occupied by those dead mills house the new entertainment districts of those cities? Does one have to be a Marxist to ask these questions? Is a governmental bailout plan for the rich and the greedy a "socialist" idea? Is socialism or Communism merely about state intervention? This is bizarre.There is some homework due here for the pink press. I am reminded of Hirose Takashi, a social scientist and anti-nuclear activist, who around 1990 read in a Japanese paper that Britain had the largest number of the world's wealthy. He was curious as to how a group of islands tinier than Japan could achieve this. He got a grant, sat in the British Library and checked on the wealth of 200 of the richest Britons. He told me later that in the case of 182 of these families, he discovered they used to be poorer than church mice until a father, uncle or brother sailed to serve in India some hundred years before and how that became the source of their wealth. There are several such stories of contemporary cash-surges waiting to be told in the Indian media, which needs to inform us not just about the wealth of the nations but also about the stealth of the nations. The financial press needs to do a little more than blowing pink-tinted soap suds. |
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