Sunanda K Datta-Ray: Buddha's Salim coup

WHERE MONEY TALKS

If the Salim Group proposal takes off, it will be India's biggest foreign project

The real gain from a connection with Indonesia's Salim Group, whose promise to invest heavily in West Bengal might possibly help Manmohan Singh push through much-needed economic reforms in the teeth of Left Front opposition, would be a lesson in assimilation, versatility and work culture.

For Salim is a fascinating ethnic phenomenon. With assets worth 32.5 trillion rupiahs in 1995 and more than a finger "" a fist perhaps "" in the cement, food, property, automotive, finance, steel and agribusiness industries, it is Indonesia's largest conglomerate.

But that isn't what makes it unique. The founder-owner, Sudono Salim, was born Liem Sioe Liong in China's Fujian province in 1916, and fled to the then Dutch East Indies when civil war ravaged China in 1936.

Such Chinese maintained their position in independent Indonesia through the quaintly named Ali Baba alliances. Ali referred to an indigenous Muslim who held the licence while Baba was the Chinese who had the capital and brains.

Now, these tycoons are called cukong, originally spelt tjukong, which means "master" in Hokkien. The word has come to stand for a Chinese businessman who collaborates with a member of the Indonesian ruling elite, usually "" at least during General Suharto's long dictatorship "" an influential brasshat.

The power of cukongs was a scandal of the Suharto era when even the highest in the land was in their pay, and the president's wife, of whose royal descent he was so proud, was known as "Madam Ten Per Cent".

The Liem family and the Suhartos have been friendly since the 1950s, but that has not prevented the Salim Group from continuing to flourish after Suharto's overthrow.

Obviously, the prime minister hopes that Salim's stake in West Bengal will influence Left Front MPs. Hence, echoing Bal Gangadhar Tilak's famous "What Bengal thinks today India thinks tomorrow", he declared "What is good for Bengal is good for India."

But different factors operate at the two levels. Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee "" the Laughing Buddha in the wake of the coup he pulled off in Jakarta "" must revive Bengal's past glory, transform its bleak present and protect the future. I suspect a psychiatrist might also find among his motives the urge to do better than the anglicised Jyoti Basu who held the reins of government for 23 years.

With his clipped English and brisk manner, Basu is personally so impressive that someone called him the best prime minister India never had. But his record in office was disastrous.

Many grand projects started by Bidhan Chandra Roy, West Bengal's most effective chief minister, were allowed to crumble. Unlike the cukongs, the Marwari businessmen whom Basu favoured set up few industries. Their forte was housing, and, of course, they supported the CPI(M).

The 61-year-old Bhattacharjee, whose tousled white hair and crumpled dhoti and kurta make him look like a college professor, has none of his predecessor's social pretensions.

The quintessential bhadralok intellectual, as much at home discussing Marxist dialectics as the works of Garcia Marquez, he would probably be terribly ill at ease among the whisky-swilling elite at a Bengal Club cocktail party. But he is realistic enough to acknowledge that West Bengal must now attend to industrialisation.

Time and again I have come across young men from peasant families that prospered through land reform and the Food for Work programme but had outgrown their village past. Some had completed high school, others gone to college.

All were looking for white-collar jobs, anxious to make the jump from chasha (peasant) to bhadralok. But with no jobs to go to, a whole new generation of bright young men was in danger of turning into drifters at best and criminals at worst.

The Salim Group, which has already invested $50 million in a motorcycle factory in West Bengal, might be their saving. It has promised to set up a 2,500-acre replica of the Batam Industrial Park (on an Indonesian-owned island but managed by Singapore) to include a knowledge city, industrial estate and special economic zone.

As a practical concession to communist ideology and Bengali nationalism "" the two are often indistinguishable "" Salim will resettle and find jobs for people the park displaces.

In addition, it will build a township in Howrah, across the Hooghly river, two bridges, a state of the art hospital, an 85-km four-lane expressway and a coke processing plant. If the proposal takes off, it will be India's biggest foreign project.

Bhattacharjee also expects other cukong conglomerates like Lippo (Li Wenzhang renamed Mochtar Riady) and Ciputra (William Suryajaya, previously Tjia Kian Liong) with whom he talked in Jakarta to follow Salim's initiative.

It would be tremendous if Bengalis as well as Calcutta Marwaris profit from the example of these diaspora Chinese who changed their names, embraced Islam, enriched themselves and Indonesia but remain Chinese.

Liem, in particular, invested heavily in mainland China, Hong Kong and Singapore, as well as in the Netherlands and the US. A peasant's second son who ran a village noodle shop, he became the owner of a multinational corporation and a power in Indonesian life. His spectacular rise holds a lesson for all Asians.