Business leaders concerned about sense of drift in government.
Even as the Supreme Court is set to consider on Monday the petition filed by industrialist Ratan Tata on right to privacy and the halt to publication of tapped telephone conversations — and the government’s response to it — the contents of more tapes were leaked over the weekend in weekly newsmagazine Outlook.
Timed with the new leak, Union Home Secretary G K Pillai issued an unusual statement to the press claiming rumours that his remarks of last week, relating to the leaked tapes of telephone conversation between lobbyist Niira Radia and various interlocutors were the ‘tip of an iceberg’, were made “at the behest of the Union home minister, is totally unfounded and false”.
The home secretary’s clarification drew attention to the flood of rumours swirling around New Delhi’s power corridors, with conspiracy theories attributing the leak of officially conducted telephone tapping to a power struggle within the ruling coalition.
Adding his voice to a chorus of concern about the political impasse in Parliament, the damaging impact of media leaks and revelations about a cosy relationship between business, politics and media, HDFC Chairman Deepak Parekh said in an interview to a TV news channel: “Everything that was going so well until a few months back” has suddenly snapped.
Against the background of more leaked tapes and a growing restiveness among Indian business leaders regarding the current political impasse and the atmosphere of uncertainty, Congress President Sonia Gandhi will address the Congress parliamentary party on Monday morning.
The new tapes, available on the Outlook website, offered more evidence of a cosy and cooperative relationship between Radia and journalist Vir Sanghvi, and reinforced the view created by the leaked tapes that business interests actively lobbied in favour of DMK MP Andimuthu Raja retaining the telecom portfolio in the Union council of ministers in May 2009.
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In conversations that indicate Sanghvi, former editorial director of Hindustan Times, had in fact tailored his Sunday column to further Radia’s agenda, contrary to his claims that he was merely “stringing her along” to get more information from “a source”, Sanghvi is heard saying: “I’ve dressed it up as a piece about how (the) public will not stand for resources being cornered, how we’re creating a new list of oligarchs.”
In return Radia thanks him, saying, “Very nice, lovely, thank you, Vir.” In a subsequent conversation with a colleague, Radia is heard saying, “He (Sanghvi) has a series of interviews lined up and he has agreed to ask the questions we asked him to ask. The first one is with Mukesh (Ambani) and Ratan (Tata).”
Reflecting the growing concern among business leaders with the sense of drift in government, Parekh said on NDTV’s Walk the Talk programme: “Why does a company do well? If each manager or each departmental head is pulling in different directions, you will not have a good company, or a good result. The big boys in the government are pulling in different directions and not working as a team. The Prime Minister has to get that organised.”