Pranab Mukherjee's visit to RSS HQ explained

Jawed Naqvi in The Dawn

TWO lobbies were clearly worried by a photograph that was clicked during the swearing-in celebrations of the Karnataka anti-BJP coalition. It showed Congress leader Sonia Gandhi locked in a rare embrace with Dalit leader Mayawati. The picture had other leaders who were opposed to the Modi-led BJP government basking in the glory of the Karnataka victory, but the hugging of the two women was a defining moment. Insidious advisers to the Congress leadership had stalled their coming together in the past.

Among the understated reasons was the stark reality that some of the Gandhi family’s upper-caste advisers also happened to be conduits for the mercantile lobbies based in Mumbai. The photograph threatened both, the tycoons and their caste protégés adorning the upper houses of legislatures, where those who cannot win the Lok Sabha or assembly polls are given a cosy perch, not just in Congress.

There is a brouhaha about former president and former Congress minister Pranab Mukherjee’s visit to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh headquarters. It’s surprising why no one has linked the visit with the Karnataka photo. Mukherjee is an educated Brahmin, flaunting the requisite links with Mumbai businesses, which could be a temptation for the RSS leadership to sound him out.

It is possible of course that the nudge for the meeting came from the mercantile club in Mumbai. It has acquired the habit of late of playing kingmakers. Remember how hard they had lobbied with the RSS to make Narendra Modi the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate? 

They finance other parties too, not the least the Congress party. But there is a silent caveat here. The Congress that forms the government or heads a coalition should not offer the prime minister’s job to a Gandhi, and we have had two such non-Gandhi Congress prime ministers to press the point.

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There is a history to this reasoning and the Gandhi family has been pitchforked as the villains, or the heroes, depending on where you are vis-à-vis crony capitalism. Jawaharlal Nehru had no love lost for the mercantile leaders whom Gandhiji otherwise saw as the trustees of a free India. Nehru put their biggest icon in jail for fraud. (R.K. Dalmia’s close friendship with Mohammad Ali Jinnah may have been an added allergen.)

Then came Indira Gandhi. She nationalised the cabal’s ‘usurious’ banks and also locked up several of them under the draconian Conservation of Foreign Exchange and Prevention of Smuggling Activities Act, the law she passed just before the 1975-77 emergency.

Mr Mukherjee recently chronicled his political innings from 1980 onwards. That marked the post-emergency return for Indira Gandhi who was looking vulnerable after her traditional left supporters deserted her over the emergency. Mr Mukherjee’s proximity to the Mumbai tycoons is well documented in books that predictably did not make it to bookshops. He became a darling of the media as her finance minister, the same media that is celebrating his visit to the RSS headquarters although he said perfectly liberal, pro-constitution things there. When Mrs Gandhi was killed, Mr Mukherjee reportedly saw himself as her natural successor, a thought resented by her family friends.

Rajiv Gandhi arrived to throw the ‘moneybags off the backs of the Congress workers’. He sent Mukherjee into political oblivion. The tycoons, however, swung into action. Every inch of media space they owned was harnessed to tarnish the young prime minister with financial scams. His death brought the cabal and Mukherjee back into the heart of Indian politics, both firmly embraced by Narasimha Rao.

One more twist followed. When Rao lost the elections in 1996, he handed over the Congress presidency to Sitaram Kesri, a canny grass-roots Congressman. The change was accepted by the Gandhis who saw in Kesri a better chance of getting to the bottom of Rajiv’s murder mystery than Rao had delivered. Also Kesri shored up two prime ministers with the help of communists.

I remember asking him at a news conference why he had taken the unusual step to ally with Dalit leader Mayawati in 1998. Did he see her as an asset as a woman leader, or was she a potential Dalit ally? Kesri exploded with joy. Both, he yelled. We don’t know which of the Congress rivals locked him up in the bathroom subsequently and handed the leadership to a still reluctant Sonia Gandhi, who had evidently not yet recovered from the shock of her husband’s assassination. Mukherjee was part of the group, or perhaps its leader, that went after Kesri in what can only be described as a palace coup. Kesri saw himself as a Gandhi loyalist and didn’t know what hit him. He died from the shock.

It is said that the Mumbai club has applied a financial squeeze on the Congress party for flirting with state leaders they do not control. This could be a blessing in disguise for the party. It could bring the Gandhis close to crucial leaders like Mayawati, Arvind Kejriwal, Lalu Yadav and Mamata Banerjee who have to fend for themselves financially.

If, like Kejriwal, Rahul Gandhi goes for crowd funding instead of leaning on crony tycoons for support, he might become a richer, cleaner leader. But before that, he must do with the current potential ‘Congress Syndicate’ what Emperor Akbar did with his regent Bairam Khan or Nehru did with his detractors clothed as advisers. They could be sent to work with the masses under a new Kamraj Plan to borrow from the Congress history.

Above all, it was Mayawati’s sacrifice and not ambition that has reaped rewards for a rejuvenated opposition. Rather than aim to become prime minister, Rahul Gandhi would do well to watch out for deserters, no matter how educated they are, while embracing the game-changing picture from Karnataka.

Londongrad oligarchs are being forced back to Russia’s embrace

Max Seddon in The Financial Times

As the west’s relations with Moscow plumb ever lower depths, the UK is abuzz with calls to do something about its oligarch problem. “We are going after the money,” Boris Johnson, foreign secretary, vowed after former double agent Sergei Skripal was poisoned. 

A group of MPs recently singled out law firm Linklaters for its work on the London float of En+, owned by sanctioned oligarch Oleg Deripaska, and called for a crackdown on “corrupt” Kremlin-connected tycoons. 

But the ones in real trouble may be the oligarchs themselves. They were once ideal go-betweens between Russia and the west. The real life models for the mafia money launderer in espionage novelist John le Carré’s Our Kind of Traitor saw no contradiction in sending their children to Eton. UK politicians had no qualms about staying on their yachts or serving in their boardrooms. 

Now, feeling equally at home in London’s Soho and Moscow’s Soho Rooms — the nightclub so exclusive that, according to legend, Roman Abramovich once did not pass “face control” — is a liability. Mr Abramovich, who epitomised “Londongrad” bling when he bought Chelsea football club and a house on a street known as “ Billionaire’s Row”, struggled to get a UK visa. Suddenly, oligarchs are too Russian for a west eager to clean up its act and too western for a Russia hunting for “enemies of the people”. Or, as the Russian saying goes: if you sit on two chairs, something vulgar will happen to you through the crack in the middle. 

“Even if you’re not sanctioned yourself, it still affects you,” a close friend of one of Russia’s richest oligarchs told me this week. “You go to a bank and the compliance department doesn’t want anything to do with anything Russian.” 

Today, oligarchs are like hipsters with even worse dress sense: nobody will admit to being one, even if you know them when you see them. 

Part of the problem is the nature of oligarchy, which has changed dramatically since Vladimir Putin took power 18 years ago. The classical definition is someone who acquired vast wealth, often through dubious political connections, by privatising state assets on the cheap, thus giving them huge power over the penniless political class. 

In the 1990s, it was widely held that the real power in Russia lay not with Boris Yeltsin, but the oligarchs backing him. The late Boris Berezovsky liked to give the impression he ran the country during Yeltsin’s frequent absences due to heart problems and that he had handpicked Mr Putin as the next leader. 

Mr Putin shifted the power dynamic in his first few years in office. Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky, who challenged him through their TV channels, were forced to flee. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who dared to take him on politically, was jailed for a decade. 

That turned most of the other oligarchs into supplicants working under an unwritten rule: they were allowed to keep their wealth in exchange for staying out of politics. 

The new set of prime movers were figures from Mr Putin’s childhood. They amassed huge fortunes after he became president — often through winning lucrative contracts from state companies such as Gazprom. After Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, the US sanctioned these individuals first in the hope they would convince Mr Putin to change course. 

Instead, they circled the wagons around him. Yuri Kovalchuk, a billionaire banker who once owned a dacha outside St Petersburg next to Mr Putin’s, made a bizarre TV appearance in which he said that Russia had a “nationally oriented elite” that knew “what side of the barricades it was on”. 

He went on: “I’m not against having a flat abroad or a villa on the Cote d’Azur, be my guest. But the question is: where’s your home?” 

The more recent US sanctions have cast a wider net that has perplexed its potential targets. “Before, they were going after people who really made money with the regime. Now we don’t get what it is for. If you think we can go to Putin and tell him what to do, you don’t understand Russia,” one oligarch told me this week. If anything, he continued, the western attack on oligarchs benefits the Kremlin. First, moves against Russian capital push them to repatriate cash stashed abroad in western companies — a goal Putin has struggled to achieve for years. Second, many in the elite increasingly see little reason to leave key businesses in private hands, especially if they require state support. 

And now that several sanctioned oligarchs cannot pay off dollar loans to the state banks to whom they pledged major assets as collateral, they may not be tycoons for much longer. 

“Putin loves this,” the oligarch said. “The regime is winning. The people like it because nobody likes oligarchs, and the state consolidates.” 

The pressure the tycoons face at home and abroad has put the entire UK oligarch service industry at risk. I recently had dinner with my first Russian teacher, who now runs a consultancy helping oligarchs and assorted pretenders get their children into exclusive schools. When I mentioned that I had heard one businessman with a prominent UK presence was facing trouble after the state nationalised a company he part-owned, the teacher nearly spat out his food. “You’re joking!” he said. “He’s one of my best clients!”