Time to Stop Abusing India Inc

Unhinged attacks on Indian business houses and their so-called trader mentality are unjustified

- R JAGANNATHAN

India Inc has many failings, but one thing it does not deserve is constant abuse and delegitimization by political parties or public intellectuals. When major politicians start attacking it — Rahul Gandhi now and Arvind Kejriwal earlier — it does not help India's cause, even assuming India Inc has made mistakes. To endlessly rant about Adani and Ambani, and then expect the same business houses to invest and take the India story global, is sheer foolishness. It is one thing to prevent monopolies, quite another to assume that India does not need giant conglomerates of its own.

Unhinged domestic criticism of big business houses will tempt foreign powers to do the same thing to undercut Indian interests. It is not a coincidence that the United States Securities and Exchange Commission and Hindenburg Research targeted Gautam Adani over actions that affected no American citizen's rights. Nor is the recent rant by US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, alleging that India (read: Reliance) is profiteering from cheap Russian oil by refining it and exporting to the West.

White House trade advisor Peter Navarro went further, accusing India of being Russia's "laundromat" — and worse.

If anyone has profiteered from the Ukraine war, it is America's military-industrial complex, which has been counting its shekels all the way to the bank as both Ukraine and Europe buy more defense equipment from it. If any economy is the world's true "laundromat," it is America's. There is no drug cartel or illegal business anywhere in the world that does not use the US dollar to launder money. A paper by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis estimated in 2022 that over $1.1 trillion in US cash — two-thirds of it in $100 bills — is held by non-central banks abroad. Crypto may be changing that, but with Donald Trump now in the crypto game, this laundromat will start working even better.