YATAN SAMANTA, a 58-year-old man, is following a procession around Sukhchar, a neighbourhood of single and double-storied plain brick houses in Khardah, a suburb 23 kilometres north of Kolkata. The suburb straddles the Barrackpore Trunk (‘B.T.’) Road that connects Kolkata to Barrackpore, an ancient settlement mentioned in Mughal texts, that later housed a large British garrison, and then grew into an industrial town.
Till the late 1980s, Samanta worked at one of the numerous factories that dotted Khardah. As most of them shut down, he began running a tiny neighbourhood shop that sold everyday items such as soap and cigarettes. He closed that down five years ago and now survives on odd jobs such as sub-contracting building materials. Besides, there is his son Milan’s salary of
Rs 12,000 per month from Electrosteel Castings, the only big firm remaining in the region other than wagon maker Texmaco, owned by the K.K. Birla group.
Samanta is angry with the Communist Party of India (Marxist)-led Left Front government and his local member of the legislative assembly: West Bengal’s finance minister Asim Dasgupta. The fact that most of Khardah’s factories closed during the Left Front’s three decades-plus rule isn’t the only thing that gets him all wound up. “I don’t want favours. But if I go to a local municipal councillor to get a document signed, I cannot be asked which party I vote for,” he says in Bengali.
Does he know the man at the head of the procession, whose extended entourage he has unwittingly become part of? “Sort of,” he tells me awkwardly. “Isn’t he Trinamool Congress’s candidate for Khardah, pitted against Dasgupta?”
Unknown to Samanta, the gaunt, 63-year-old in professorial spectacles and a ready smile is no ordinary candidate. He’s Amit Mitra, secretary general of the Delhi-headquartered Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (Ficci), India’s oldest corporate lobby. Though a rookie politician (this is the first election he is contesting), Mitra is a heavy hitter from India Inc., more at home with CEOs and ministers than the humble folk whose votes he is seeking. As the HSBC Group’s India head Naina Lal Kidwai says: “You cannot be in the world of business and not know who Amit Mitra is.”
He is no ordinary lobbyist. He is a virtuoso where others are mere wannabes, often more an evangelist than an everyday persuader. Last October the Supreme Court passed an order directing the environment ministry to ban gutkha companies from using multi-layered packing, which is plastic packaging with an aluminium layer on top. The ministry took a more stringent view and proposed to ban all use of multi-layered packing. This meant swathes of corporate India—from shampoo manufacturers to crisp makers—would have to refashion their distribution. Mitra got into the act, lobbied environment minister Jairam Ramesh and ensured that the ministry restricted its re-packaging norms only to gutkha players. “I saw him work the phones at midnight with Ramesh. This is the kind of focus he brings to his work for the private sector,” says Rajiv Kumar, director general, Ficci.
Ficci, once seen as playing second fiddle to rival Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), has emerged as one of India’s eminent industry bodies under him. One indication of its increased span of influence is its budget, which has grown from Rs 3 crore in 1994 (the year Mitra became secretary general) to Rs 110 crore in 2010, comparable to CII’s.
Mitra is also ideologically more right of centre than left. Rungta Group director Ajay K. Rungta, who brought him to Ficci, says he was introduced to him by someone from the International Chamber of Commerce, after Mitra had written a piece on liberalisation. “At that time, we were getting a lot of funding from USAID (United States Agency for International Development) to talk about liberalisation. When I received the article, which we were supposed to read out at industry conferences to educate industrialists, what struck me was its clarity and focus,” says Rungta, who was Ficci’s president from 1994 to 1996.
Its current president, Rajan Bharti Mittal (also vice chairman Bharti Enterprises), says Mitra is more on “Jagdish Bhagwati’s side than Amartya Sen’s. He believes that
growth velocity in India is the only way for prosperity to percolate downward.”
Yet he has opted to ally with Trinamool Congress’s head Mamata Banerjee, who famously turfed Tata Motors’ Nano project out of West Bengal, has routinely opposed disinvestment, and is generally perceived to be somewhat anti-industry. Indeed, he is Trinamool’s finance minister-in-waiting. If Mitra wins, he’ll have his biggest lobbying challenge ever. Not only will he have to convince his party to follow a more market-friendly line, but also persuade sceptical businessmen to invest in the state.
He has begun spinning the message. His quick take on the Nano fiasco: “The Trinamool wasn’t against the project, but rather the compensation given to farmers on whose land the factory was built.”
IT'S MID-MORNING, AND MITRA is addressing a small crowd gathered outside Texmaco’s gate. Though he’s exchanged his trademark dark suit and tie (often red) for a white dhoti and kurta, the uniform of Bengali politicians, playing the part still doesn’t come easy. For one, he’s not terribly fluent in Bengali and speaks it with the unease of someone who doesn’t use it every day, let alone think in it. On civic issues, he speaks in Bengali, but lapses frequently into English each time he discusses complex matters such as development or industrialisation.
Mitra is being chaperoned by Saugata Roy, a Trinamool leader and also Union minister of state for urban development in the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government. The two have known each other since the late ’60s, when they were students at Kolkata’s Presidency College—Roy read physics, and Mitra, economics.
Trinamool’s supporters are the new proletariat—labourers, weavers, small-time shopkeepers, and the like. They are products of a class system created by the Left where those outside the party languished. Mitra is better recognised by his opponents, the Left voters (including teachers, government officers) sitting around Kajal Bhattacharya, the local CPI(M) leader, at the party office. They seem to know he works for some industry lobby in New Delhi. The best a Trinamool supporter manages is to identify Mitra as a Ficci person, though he doesn’t know what Ficci is.
Mitra wasn’t the Trinamool’s first choice for Khardah, a constituency of 1.59 lakh. Kajal Sinha, a local leader was. Banerjee, however, changed her mind and picked Mitra instead. She was impressed with the work he did for the Indian Railways. “Amit has been working with her for the last two years. He introduced a public-private partnership model for the Indian Railways. She developed an affinity for Amit and appreciated his qualities,” says Roy. Mitra’s Ph.D. in economics from Duke University also helps counter CPI(M)’s Dasgupta, who holds a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. West Bengal is one of those places where such symbolism matters. In Kolkata, filmstars, directors, authors, poets, and artists often march as a troop of ‘intellectuals’ protesting an issue.
Mitra’s move to politics didn’t surprise his wife, Meera Mitra, or his close friends. “He (Mitra) is Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose’s grand-nephew, and my father-in-law Haridas Mitra was the deputy speaker in the West Bengal Assembly,” says his wife. The former chairman of investment bank Lazard, Udayan Bose, who was with Mitra in college, says they were all a part of the Presidency College Students’ Organisation. But it surprised some of his business associates. “I haven’t thought of him at any place other than Ficci, so yes, I was surprised. I was equally surprised to know of his political lineage, that he is related to Subhas Chandra Bose,” says HSBC’s Kidwai.
OVER A MEAL OF RICE, DEAL, AND FISH (the curried variety, Mitra’s favourite), he explains his economic agenda to me. “In 1991, what did Manmohan Singh do? He just withdrew a paper called licence. That does not require structural change. It is a matter of political will.”
Rungta says Mitra was one of Singh’s favourite students at the Delhi School of Economics. The student now wants to emulate the master and create an environment where business can flourish. “From the research we have done, we see that small businesses are subject to the most intense ‘inspectorate’ system. In 2002, a few Left-leaning Bengali economists including Amartya Sen wrote an article where they admitted that the largest number of inspectorate systems, rules, and regulations for small businesses are in West Bengal,” explains Mitra.
He believes harassment by inspectors (an extreme form of bureaucratic interference) can be reduced if there’s political will. “You do not need to meet the inspector at all. In Andhra Pradesh, land records are kept electronically. If you want to sell land, you don’t need to meet anyone, the whole thing is electronic. We can use those principles here.”
The next day, he talks about his ideas of changing the state’s work culture. Agitation (frequent strikes, bandhs, gheraos, and the like) by workers against company managements were once an instrument of state policy. While its intensity has diminished, this history has nearly destroyed West Bengal’s work ethic. Mitra wants to create a “work culture cell” that will change how people view industrial activity. He doesn’t elaborate. Roy adds that Banerjee is hot on the idea. While the economic manifesto (co-written by Mitra) makes no mention of the cell, a single line on labour on page 39 of the English version merely hints at what they may be thinking. It says: “Foster collaborative environment in labour management relations with a human face.”
The harder task will be to fix the state’s finances. Numbers collated by Credit Analysis and Research, a Mumbai-based ratings agency, show that West Bengal has a revenue deficit of Rs 16,820 crore on revenue receipts of Rs 47,680 crore in 2010. In comparison, Maharashtra has a surplus of Rs 12,700 crore on receipts of Rs 88,490 crore and Gujarat, a Rs 4,356 crore surplus on Rs 43,449 crore. Moreover, as Mitra points out, a major part of West Bengal’s revenues consist of panchayat deposits (money that, strictly speaking, can’t be used for development) and most of its expenditure is non-plan (wages, pensions, etc.). That leaves little to invest in infrastructure.
The way out is to attract investment to the state. “We need to rebuild investor confidence in West Bengal,” says Mitra. “Fixing the labour and work culture issue will go a long way towards that.” In all his discussions, he keeps coming back to the need to rebuild investor confidence as his most important objective.
So, if he wins, will his friends oblige? They’d rather wait and watch. Harsh Pati Singhania, a senior industrialist and Ficci president in 2009, who has known Mitra for years, says even the Left made the right noises in the past few years, but ultimately there was little to show for it. “It is not just about an individual being there. There are many issues to tackle for business. How conducive is the business climate? What is the overall attitude of the government?” says Singhania.
Mitra talks about creating industrial clusters in the state, an idea that at once raises expectations and underscores how politically difficult things maybe. “There is
the issue of labour,” says Mittal. “He would need
to build or facilitate some industry clusters where the labour laws will have to be different. Maybe on a contract basis, for example.”
The question they leave unasked: Will Mitra be able to influence Banerjee sufficiently? Ask him, and he repeats the party line of what a visionary leader she has been and how she will usher in change.
Mitra has one thing going for him though: Banerjee’s need for him, now that she wants to present a business- friendly face, is perhaps greater than his need for her. He is her party’s liberal face to the world, somebody who can play rainmaker. Moreover, as a senior industrialist says, if Mitra can’t, nobody can. “Remember, he’s managed to get his way with 15 Ficci presidents.” Adds U.D. Choubey, the former chairman of Gas Authority of India (GAIL): “He has a good intelligence quotient, but better emotional quotient. When he meets someone, he immediately understands that person and steps into his shoes. And, within a few minutes, that person becomes Mitra’s fan.” Mitra served on GAIL’s board for eight years.
IT'S NEARING EVENING. Two college students, Soubhik and Subhojit, are lounging around near Khardah’s main market. They don’t like processions, or politics, and vote because they are expected to. I ask them if they feel Mitra will be able to fulfil his poll promises. Both say that most politicians cannot be trusted. Then they stop to add: “We do not have anything. But we still have hope.”
It’s all up to the skills of the lobbyist now.
