Editor’s Cut

It is not often that you meet a writer confident about never writing another book. That is the import of TN Ninan’s answer to the last question in our interview. A few days before that, during the launch of his book at New Delhi’s India International Centre, his speech, tinged with mild humour, is devoted to the agonies of the first-time writer. It is also at the launch that Arvind Subramanian, the chief economic advisor to the Indian Government, says many things about why Ninan’s book, The Turn of the Tortoise (Allen Lane, Rs 699, 368 pages) is such necessary reading and then adds that if at all he had a gripe then it was that he would have liked the author to be ‘a little bit more angry’ and provided some grand explanations and prescriptions that economists love. And it is when I ask Ninan whether he will indulge Subramanian in his next book, that he speaks with assurance about none forthcoming. “It is too much work,” he says.

It should not have been. His columns and writings spanning decades have been about what the book goes into. In The Turn of the Tortoise, Ninan looks at India’s past and future through a variety of lenses—politics, economics, foreign policy and what falls within them like crony capitalism, class, corruption, manufacturing, poverty, China—subjects the chairman of Business Standard Limited has observed intimately as one of the foremost business journalists and editors of our time.

It is easy to see why the book has been so painstaking for Ninan. Every point that he makes is backed by voluminous data, gathered and gleaned from a wide spectrum of sources; then broken down to explain the issues with dispassion, followed by further analysis and insights. For instance, on corruption, Ninan writes that the chapter will address these questions: ‘What are the principal types of corruption today in India, and what are their causes? What is the scale of corruption, and is it growing? What is the relationship between economic development and corruption? Finally, what are the possible solutions?’ He goes on to talk about contemporary research papers by economists on corruption and how India fits into the pattern. He takes the big scams of the recent past, slots them according to type (spectrum sale and coal allocation is ‘scarce resource’, Robert Vadra is ‘land speculation’) and the root problem (spectrum sale and coal allocation because they were ‘underpriced’, Robert Vadra because of ‘non-transparent market, rules of land use’). He speaks about the policies that address corruption, why some work and some don’t, what is being done, what should be done and why it is not. All this makes the book not exactly a page-turner but by the end of the 20- odd pages of the chapter, an intelligent reader can have an argument on corruption with Arvind Subramanian and come out looking good.

In recent times, two senior editors—Rajdeep Sardesai and Sanjaya Baru—have written books and they have been racy and anecdotal, peppered with encounters with those who wield the levers of power in Delhi. Ninan, on the other hand, is self-effacing and even when there is a personal experience, you can’t help notice the absent ‘I’. This is more an academician or a pundit than a journalist writing, ironical since a journalist is all that Ninan has been, ever since he was drawn to the profession from his school days in Kolkata when he used to be a member of the junior club of readers that The Statesman had. “They had a library. I used to go fairly often to The Statesman office in Calcutta,” he says.

After finishing his MA in Economics, he joined Hindustan Times in its business desk in 1972. This was a period when India, under Indira Gandhi, had swung to the Left and the licence-permit raj was becoming firmly entrenched. Ninan says he too had mildly socialist leanings even if he was never a Leftist at any point. “It was only when I joined India Today and began covering business more actively that I think I gave up those leanings,” he says.

In India Today he was the business editor and then the executive editor. An interview of his remembered from those days is of Mukesh Ambani, probably the first ever of the now chairman of Reliance Industries Limited. In 1986, Dhirubhai Ambani had suffered a stroke, and his two sons had found themselves suddenly at the head of an embattled empire. The interview can be found online and the questions Ninan asks are direct—‘Did you take bank loans to acquire Reliance debentures in violation of Reserve Bank guidelines?’, ‘None of your competitors has the stipulated minimum capacities, so they can’t take advantage of it. Only you have that capacity.’

Ninan remembers Mukesh Ambani fielding them well. “VP Singh was doing various things as finance minister. He stopped the conversion of debentures to shares. And that left the company with a lot of debt that they had hoped to get rid of but couldn’t. There was financial pressure on the company and they had to redeem the debentures. Mukesh had come to the India Today office,” he says. Ninan told him that he needed to address the questions being asked about the company and asked for an interview. “He was reluctant and then he came again and finally said okay. We did the interview in my office and if I am not wrong it is the first interview that Mukesh ever gave. You could see he was very nervous because he had never done it before. But he took the questions well. I am speaking from memory, it is 30 years ago,” says Ninan.

After India Today, Ninan moved as editor to The Economic Times, the leading financial daily of the country. The book The TOI Story: How A Newspaper Changed The Rules Of The Game by Sangita P Menon Malhan talks about how Samir Jain, after taking charge of Bennett Coleman & Co, which owned The Economic Times, wanted to reinvent the newspaper and decided Ninan would be the right person for it. The book notes, ‘At that stage, The Economic Times had an annual revenue of about Rs 10 crore. It was a paper with 10 pages. Ninan brought in a fresh and wholesome approach to ET. He took into account the readers’ need for analytical, vibrant and thought-provoking content… At first, it (the paper) expanded the meaning of business and finance. From relying on government press releases and official briefings as its staple content, it started to report on subjects like management, marketing and advertising, consumer issues and personal finance, property and investments. Many of these were to become ‘mainstream’ subjects in later years.’

Ninan was already well-versed with foreign business publications like Financial Times and The Economist, and had a fair idea of what to do for the turnaround. One of the things that helped him was a new newspaper— The Business & Political Observer— being launched by the Ambanis who took away many Economic Times journalists. “I could staff it the way I wanted to. Second, the prospect of an Ambani challenge in the market made the publishers in Bennett Coleman far more willing to make resources available to me,” he says.

As the editor of The Economic Times when Liberalisation was begun, Ninan had a ringside view of that period. He remembers Manmohan Singh as a completely different personality then. “We did some very great interviews. Unlike what he was as prime minister, he was articulate, accessible, open. He would explain things. You could see that this was revolutionary change.”

Ninan had not anticipated the complete opening up that happened though change was in the air. “We were running out of foreign exchange and were negotiating with the IMF which wanted certain policy commitments. Yashwant Sinha (the finance minister before Manmohan Singh) in the winter session of Parliament of 1990 had actually given a policy statement to tell the IMF this is what we will do. The intention was that he would carry it out in his budget of March. But then the government fell and Sinha could not introduce the budget. People tend to forget Yashwant Sinha’s role in it. In a way it was all in the works. The great thing about Manmohan Singh was that he knew exactly what to do, how to do it, at what speed it could be done.”

Ninan left The Economic Times over a disagreement with the management. They had wanted a notice put in the paper which he found too wordy and edited it down. But the original was slipped into the Bangalore edition without his knowledge. “I said I am willing to continue in some other form but I will step down (as editor). I was there for six- eight months after that. They tried to make me change my mind but I said no. It was actually a fairly small issue. Though I must say Samir Jain was the biggest factor in Economic Times changing. It was not that it was a relationship of conflict. He was a very stimulating person. He had lots of ideas even if I didn’t agree with some of them.”

Ninan later became the editor of Business Standard. In 1995, the then owners of the paper, the Anandabazar Patrika Group, wanted him to handle the management as well but he refused because he thought editorial and management should not mix. The paper wasn’t doing well financially and Uday Kotak, as merchant banker, was to trying in vain to find buyers for it. “I didn’t really know Uday at all. When he came to Delhi and we met, he said he would buy it if I agreed to take over management. At that point, it was a question of saving everybody’s jobs. I had no choice. That’s how I took charge of the business side of it. I didn’t know anything about running a business,” he says.

It was not easy-going. The paper took time to stabilise because a long recession began with the Asian crisis of 1997. “It took about three years for that crisis to get over. Then newsprint prices went up. We basically lived on shareholder support,” he says. Business Standard, with Ninan as its chairman, is now counted as one of the best business newspapers in the country targeting a premium readership with high quality editorial.

The fundamental argument of The Turn of the Tortoise is that India is on a steady course of progress and it is happening despite ourselves. Ninan does not eulogise the India story and is particular about pointing out the many ways in which we fail or never seem to do the right thing in full measure. To take his view on corruption again, Ninan says in the book that we are not ‘near the end of the fight… not even near the end of the beginning…but we are probably at the end of the period of doing nothing…’

So even if the government makes welcome systemic reforms like auctions for distribution of spectrum and coal, it remains unwilling to address inconvenient root causes. He says, “So long as you don’t attack political funding you will have corruption. You may not see it. But it is there. Nothing has been done to address the issue on how is politics financed. That is why I say (we are not even at the end of beginning…)”

But a fundamental inevitability to India’s rising trajectory remains. He points out that in the last 35 years, there has not been a single year that the GDP did not grow. And except for a couple of years, the GDP growth in this period has always been more than 4 or 5 per cent. “This is a very stable system that delivers a certain measure of growth. There would need to be a really extraordinary set of circumstances to prevent us from continuing along this kind of track,” he says.

On the other hand is a tendency to be over-optimistic and self-delusional. Ninan goes into detail on our relentless desire to equate with China, to explain why there is no match and, what’s more, will never be in the foreseeable future. He writes in the book, ‘The different trajectories of the two countries show up most clearly in their successes and failure. Both countries have put in place industrial policy. But where Deng Xiaoping declared that it didn’t matter whether a cat was black or white so long as it caught mice, India had many more demands of the industrial cat, not just the simple business of catching mice. It should preferably be government- owned, located in an industrially backward area, be small-scale in its operations and use indigenous mice- catching technology as well as capital equipment. Inevitably, India hobbled its manufacturing sector, while China became the world’s factory.’

The Turn of the Tortoise makes three forecasts about India in the next 10 years. The first is that markets will explode in scale, driven by a burgeoning middle class. He writes, ‘India has so far been a 25-30 per cent economy: roughly 25-30 per cent of households belong to the middle class, and about that number own a private vehicle and have active bank accounts…The big change coming over the next decade is that the 30 per cent figure could nearly double. That is a seismic change…’

The second is the ‘retreat of the state’ as it allows the market to do what the government is incompetent at. And the last trend is the shift in power from Centre to the state and that the ‘logical corollary to this shift to greater federalism should be the empowerment of local government bodies’. I ask him whether it is not possible that this trend also leads into other directions. In the beginning of the book he mentions state leaders being natural dictators if India had not been a union. If power shifts to the states, as he predicts, then is that not a possibility? That is not a danger he foresees because India, having successfully dealt with numerous separatist movements, is well past any threat to a break up of the Union.

“But if you look at today’s news, a folk singer has been arrested in Tamil Nadu for singing an anti-Jayalalithaa song. If Modi arrested somebody for singing an anti-Modi song there will be an almighty uproar. It will be interesting to see what happens at the state level. Does she get away with it? Or will there be such a string of protests that she would have to undo it?” Folk singer Kovan is still in jail more than a week later. How it plays out is still a question. The Tortoise might act but as usual it will be after taking its own time.

booksManmohan SinghMukesh AmbaniThe Turn of the TortoiseTN Ninan