 "Congress Vice-President Rahul Gandhi leaves after addressing the media on Bihar poll results, at the party headquarters in New Delhi")
Congress Vice-President Rahul Gandhi is on an image makeover to project a pro-corporate face. Conscious of the fact that his recurrent "suit boot ki sarkaar" jibes attacking Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his corporate friends were being "misconstrued", Gandhi has been interacting of late with industry and business leaders.
This past week he met foreign institutional investors from the UK, the US, Canada, Singapore and Hong Kong. They discussed the economic situation in the country while expressing concern over the atmosphere of "intolerance". Gandhi emphasised how there could be no growth without social harmony and that the Congress was committed to growth and economic redistribution.
That Gandhi's attempts to be business friendly are not a one-off thing can be gauged from the several interactions that he has had with entrepreneurs. A fortnight ago he met functionaries of the PHD Chamber of Commerce in the capital. In October, he interacted with start-up founders over tea in Bengaluru. The entrepreneurs had been selected on basis of their innovation and their employment generation potential.
He met a delegation of FICCI past presidents and the present president Jyotsna Suri in September. Prior to his Bengaluru interaction, he had had an intensive meeting in Delhi with the big players in e-commerce, Snapdeal, Ola, Nswipe, Practo, Micromax, Billdesk and Zipdial among others.
Refuting the charge that he had donned a farmer-friendly image and was averse to corporates, Gandhi has often stated how he himself has worked in a management consultancy firm in the UK and he knows the importance of business to economic growth. "I am averse to the crony capitalism of Modiji, not to corporates per se," he has often been quoted as saying.
Thursday's interaction, which @officeofRG tweeted a day later, "Had a fruitful discussion with top foreign institutional investors yesterday on state of the economy & its priorities."
Goldman Sachs brought together the 19 select CEOs and CFOs from firms, including Kingsway Capital, Jupiter Asset Management from the UK, MSD Capital and Harbour Fund-CI Investment from the US, as well as Canada Pension Plan, Nomura and Abu Dhabi Investment.
