It is an oft-noted fact that the Adani Group’s growth has been meteoric and in areas that the government of India under Prime Minister Modi has prioritised for development. (Express photo by Amit Chakravarty)
The ‘national champion’ vs ‘foreign entity’ narrative has a long history
Written by Meghna Chaudhuri
Updated: February 4, 2023 15:29 IST
When the CFO of Adani Group likened Indians offloading its stock to Indian soldiers opening fire on their fellow countrymen under the orders of the British officer, General Reginald Dyer, at Jallianwala Bagh in 1919, he wasn’t merely displaying a penchant for hyperbole. It was, in fact, an expression of the conjuncture at which the Indian nation-state finds itself. But let us stay a moment with the language and symbols deployed by the Adani Group.
The Group’s CFO, Jugeshinder Singh, appeared with the national flag prominently displayed behind him in a video statement on January 25, a day after the Hindenburg report came out. The statement highlighted the conglomerate’s status as “India’s leader in infrastructure and job creation”, entwining its own reputation with that of India’s equity markets and larger promise of economic growth. As share value plummeted, the Group noted the “unwanted anguish for Indian citizens” caused by Hindenburg, which they marked out as a “foreign entity” out to “sabotage” its follow-on public offer (FPO). To name an investor in Adani — even one with a short position — a foreign entity, invoking national boundaries and “maliciously mischievous” intentions, insinuates that they originate in a foreign national, geopolitical agenda.
But capital recognises no borders. Indeed, that is the very condition of the global market integration which makes Adani’s $2.5 billion FPO — India’s largest secondary shares sale — possible, anchored by international institutional investors. The 413-page response that Adani ultimately produced on January 29 weighs argumentative heft rather more literally than the scrutiny of the international investment community would prefer. The response accuses Hindenburg of “a calculated attack on India, the independence, integrity and quality of Indian institutions, and the growth story and ambition of India.” As shares continued to tumble, Adani withdrew the landmark sale given the volatility in the market.
Embattled corporations invoking nationalism, or national sentiment, is not unheard of. The Sahara India Pariwar, a conglomerate headquartered in Lucknow, ran full-page advertisements in March 2013 depicting Mother India on a lion-drawn chariot along with the slogan “Enough is Enough,” challenging various Indian market regulators to a live television debate. Dogged by scandals and accusations of scams, Sahara’s founder and managing director, Subrata Roy invented a whole new national appreciation day, “Bharat Bhawna Diwas” to be marked on May 6, 2013, at 10 am by lakhs of Sahara employees singing the national anthem, in a long-armed bid to defend the intentions of his company.
In 2015, when the Financial Times began its investigation into the German fintech company Wirecard, it was cast as being in cahoots with “foreign” short sellers by the company and large sections of the German business press. Wirecard grew exponentially in the last two decades, overtaking Deutsche Bank in market value in 2016. Now insolvent, all that remains of it is evidence of the worst case of fraud in Germany’s post-war history. Longtime observers believe that Wirecard’s status as a potential “tech champion” and Germany’s riposte to the dominance of Silicon Valley likely blindsided the German parliament and regulatory authorities, even as critical reports on its suspect activities grew.
However, how the nation and its wellbeing are being mobilised by the Adani Group in response to its spiralling stock value is distinct from these other examples in that its statements conflate the substance of Adani holdings with the wealth of the nation and any questioning of these as an attack on the future of India itself. There have always been companies which have been identified closely with their nations. In India, the most obvious candidate for the 20th century is the Tatas. Globally, the period from the 1930s onwards saw the advent of dirigism (state control over the economy) and the rise of national champions — large companies protected and supported by the state, particularly in quasi-monopolistic industries like energy.
The question of why India didn’t quite achieve its planned take-off into high industrialisation in the 1970s haunts inquiries into what India’s economic role on the global stage is now. But the pre-liberalisation period was marked by high tariffs and barriers to foreign investment, rather than a strong state-led support framework that characterises the emergence of the “Asian tigers” and companies such as Hyundai and LG as global behemoths. The East Asian experience of South Korea or Taiwan was one of building dominance in small electronics and light manufacturing. Adani, with its focus on energy and infrastructure, is not that, and its rise has been coterminous with India’s position primarily as an exporter of soft skills and exploitatively cheap labour.
It is an oft-noted fact that the Adani Group’s growth has been meteoric and in areas that the government of India under Prime Minister Modi has prioritised for development. The broad characterisation of “crony capitalism” is often used to capture how Adani’s and the state’s interests have served each other since 2014. Since 2020, the rise in the value of Adani companies has outshone the biggest US tech firms even as questions have been asked about whether this growth is anchored in productive investments that promise future value or is a chimaera of debt-leveraging and acquisitions that span port and airport operations, coal production, energy distribution and media. But is “crony capitalism” enough to explain what is specific to this moment in India’s relationship to private capital?
Drawing on different elements from this growth story and of the Gujarati business clique headed by Adani and Ambani, scholars and analysts have struggled between comparisons to the robber barons of the American Gilded Age, with Adani styled as an Indian Rockefeller, to the East Asian story and the concentration of capital by Russian oligarchs. This impulse to pin down a model of comparison for Indian development itself expresses the historical particularity of this moment.
The comparisons are ultimately limited by the fact that each of those models emerged from very historically particular strategies of capital accumulation — from the origins of the US empire to the reaction to shock therapy in the former Soviet Union. Capital may not recognise borders, but geopolitics operates through both borders and capital. The Adani Group’s focus on large-scale infrastructure on a global scale is in this sense tied to the Indian government’s ambitions in a world where the tectonics of geopolitical economic power are shifting along the lines of supply chains and the infrastructures that will maintain them. Even as the state has receded from its obligations towards social welfare and private entities like Adani have found the ground cleared for providing services for profit, a rivalry with China has dominated the rhetoric of the government. Adani’s strategic acquisitions, such as the port of Haifa in Israel to the Carmichael Mine in Australia, speak to the government’s desire to find ways to territorialise its bid for global leverage within the changing dynamics of globalisation. Commitments to global solidarity amongst newly decolonised nations between the 1930s and 1960s notwithstanding, every formerly colonised entrant into the international order grasped that the nation-state was the necessary unit of capital accumulation through which to carve out a seat at the table. What we are seeing now is the displacement of responsibility onto each citizen not only for their own welfare, but also for the global market value of a new kind of national champion — one for whom the “national” is but a hollow echo of new global pretensions.
The writer is Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Boston College
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