This is supposed to be an age of specialisation, when a potter is a potter and a carpenter is a carpenter. So you would expect a businessman to be a businessman and a politician remain a politician, and the twain shall never meet. But increasingly things — and professions — are getting mixed up and people wear more than one hat.
Is a certain young tycoon from Mumbai, in politics or business? He is, of course, a businessman, and heads, along with his brother, the biggest corporation in India, with a turnover of nearly Rs 1,00,000 crore a year. But he is also a Member of Parliament, which makes him a certified politician like Manmohan Singh. For, after all, if an MP is not a politician who is?
Someone has estimated that between a quarter and a third of MPs are businessmen in their own right. Almost all our MPs are millionaires and a quite a few of them crorepatis. Can anyone be a crorepati without doing some business on the side? And if their main income is derived from business, can they really be called politicians?
Politics has now become a sideline, a profitable sideline that helps you in business, directly or otherwise. As an MP, you have direct access to ministers, even Prime Minister, and can call babus on your mobile at odd hours. You cannot do that if you are merely a businessman, when you are always waiting for their calls.
This is not so only in India. The Bush family in the US is adept at mixing business with politics. George W. Bush was a businessman before he took to politics and wound up in the White House.
His father, also a president, went back to business from the White House. And not any kind of business. He represents Osama Bin Laden's family in the US and earns millions.
In Singapore, you don't know where politics begins and business ends. Take the Lee Kuan Yew family, which has dominated Singapore for years. The family has a finger in every pie, from running Singapore to running its corporations. Lee Kuan Yew's son has just taken over as the next Prime Minister and will run the tiny state for the next 25-30 years. But that is not all. Lee Hsien Loong's wife, that is Lee Kuan Yew's daughter-in-law is the CEO of Singapore's state investment agency, which owns and runs half of Singapore, including its telephones and computers.
We do things differently in India. Our politicians' relations do not actually control or run state undertakings as in Singapore, but are happy with the small kickbacks they receive from time to time. These kickbacks add up to million of dollars in foreign numbered accounts, but they are peanuts compared to what happens in other countries.
Old business tycoons like Ghanashyam Das Birla or J.R.D. Tata never became politicians. They could have got themselves elected to the Rajya Sabha or even Lok Sabha but somehow they believed they did not belong there.
GD had been elected to the Central Assembly during the British days, but that was all. Although he was close to politicians throughout his business career, he was never one of them.
But things are different now. A man like Amar Singh, who says he makes three to four crore a year from his businesses is not only an MP but also an office-holder of his party. But he never describes himself as businessman, always a politician. Is that the reason why he doesn't get invited to certain parties and has to crash them?
This article was originally published on October 12, 2004.
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