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India’s imperious policy-makers, who Lord over the economy via directives and fiats, were humbled by the markets this week:
I: Ladies and gentlemen, I understand you’ve met top officials since the morning, who’ve stuffed your head with all the wonderful things this government has done for our economy. But I am afraid I have another story to tell.
The Economist has described Prime Minister Modi as a “tinkerer”. I marginally disagree. I prefer to call his government a bunch of voluble, aggressive incremental-ists who started with the “original sin” of swapping their “petrol bounty” for a tax-and-spend binge.
Narendra Modi was Napoleon’s proverbial “lucky general”, the first to enjoy a single-party majority after India freed its economy in 1991. His fortune was compounded when Brent crude collapsed from $108 per barrel in 2014 to $30 per barrel in 2016. His government got a windfall gain of nearly $100 billion over three years. Just imagine if it had gifted this largesse to consumers by cutting fuel prices at the pump? What a tax stimulus it would have been for private demand and corporate investment.
(*) TARP was the “Troubled Asset Relief Programme” launched by President George Bush and Federal Reserve Chief Ben Bernanke to handle the sub-prime crisis in America in 2008
Instead, Modi doubled, even trebled, the taxes on oil to soak up the bonanza; and made the problem worse by spending it on grand welfare programmes that are notoriously inefficient and leaky. To illustrate just one stark example: 200,000 tonnes of grain was illegally diverted using dummy Aadhaar/biometric identities in one district of Uttar Pradesh!
Today, this “original sin” has trapped Modi in a pincer. As the dollar strengthened, and Brent crude leapt back to $80 per barrel, the Emperor is without his clothes.
So, ladies and gentlemen, the chickens spawned by Modi’s “original petrol sin” are truly coming home to roost.
This excited a chorus from my audience:
Fine, we agree that he messed up India’s oil economy. But one swallow does not make a summer. How can you call him a statist on just one bad call?
I: Okay then, here’s another egregious instance of oppressing minority shareholders and capturing the regulator. Early this year, the Modi government was woefully short of its disinvestment target. It needed emergency cash. So, it thought up this awful fix for its failure. The public sector oil exploration behemoth, ONGC, was coerced to pay nearly $6 billion to buy the government’s shares in HPCL. The oil minister defended this subterfuge to claim that such a “vertical merger” made business sense. But hey, it wasn’t a vertical merger – if that had been done, ONGC would have saved $6 billion, aligning with the interests of millions of shareholders.
Instead, the government had virtually oppressed the rights of minority shareholders by unilaterally picking up cash from ONGC’s balance sheet to fill its own coffers. Worse, it did not stop here. Under the law, ONGC was required to make an open offer for 26 percent additional shares, providing an exit to HPCL’s shareholders who wanted out of this transaction.
It was naked regulatory capture by the Government of India. The sheer arrogance of “big government” was on display.
Now the foreign investors fell silent. My words were sinking in. Yet a few voices piped up:
Alright, those are two bad instances. This government has really done much better on several other scores. How can you ignore that?
I was waiting for this cue. I latched on to it with undisguised glee.
I: Ah ha, you want more evidence, right? About how Modi swears by the heavy hand of government control instead of the invisible hand of the market? I hope you do not enjoy the sorry spectacle about to unfold before you.
After that, I let fly, rat-a-tat-a-tat:
Clearly my audience had had enough. Most began to get up and leave the hall. Somewhere, a gong rang to announce the cocktail hour. It was time to hit the bar and drown one’s disappointment.
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Published: 22 Sep 2018,07:59 PM IST