You can fool some people all the time, all people some of the time, but not all people all the time.
Even after India Inc. treated its employees the way it did post-lockdown, can one make a sanctimonious case for the prevailing corporate culture?
As of now, there are many innocents out on the streets unable to pay their housing EMIs and tuition fees for their wards. And for those still with jobs there’s still no scaling back, anytime soon, of salaries to pre-lockdown levels.
This, despite the Sensex breaching the 50,000 barrier, and the GDP on a roll with an expected double-digit bounce back this fiscal, when a certain MDA’s private little money plant has grown into a giant creeper, like Jack’s fabled beanstalk.
The salary of fresher pilots, one understands, is down to Rs 25,000 per month from peak Rs 4 lakh. That’s the average monthly take home of your personal Delhi-NCR driver.
Teachers, the bulwark of any civilisation, are taking home daily wages, sustaining livelihood on private tuition.
The stupendously horrendous case of loan defaults and outright thuggery, that manifested in sagely Manmohan Singh’s reign, flourishes till date, prompting kulaks to demand their dues i.e., the right to default on their loans.
Mr Ambani, may well be Asia’s, and not just India’s richest man today, but will his Mansion of the Gods, financed by a business that once started with licence grabs, ever get him the respect he craves for?
A certain telecom tycoon, Mr Sunil Mittal, may well be among the world’s biggest czars, giving good governance talks at Harvard, but history will always remember him as the middle man who carried a crore in cash stacked inside suitcase to PV Narasimha Rao’s PMO in the company of broker Harshad Mehta.
And then there’s one Mr Adani, India’s most powerful moneybag of late. He may well have graduated from pressing edible oils to managing airports across the land, but will he ever be able to shrug off history’s ever watchful eye, for paying his way out of a hostage situation, from the clutches of Dawood Ibrahim, the Mumbai-Dubai-Karachi don?
When the Prime Minister of an impoverished country, who struts his stuff in a million-dollar self-signed suit, or wrapped up in the choicest Kashmiri pashmina, makes a case for the ‘privileges of private sector moneybags,’ it’s no longer only a question of desirable culture, but the desirability of the nation’s moral character that must be addressed first.
Raising this question is not a clarion call for nationalisation. Certainly not.
But wonder why isn’t this man actually talking of accountability of the private sector ‘haves’ instead of lecturing the ‘have-nots’ on appropriate conduct?
Giving back employment to unjustly retrenched must be top priority above all for our corporate czars in these calamitous COVID times.
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