Vijay Mallya becoming the poster boy of corruption is good for crony capitalism
He's heckled and booed as shouts of "chor, chor" fill a stadium in England where India is playing a rival at the ICC Champions Trophy, and the apple of his sporting eyes, Virat Kohli, is displaying confident captaincy. He's constantly in the headlines as the "thief" of good times, the absconder, the one who is being hunted down, wanted in an extradition case currently being fought in the UK.
Yet, between the legal ammunition and arguments in the court of law, and that of the media mania projecting him as the poster boy of corruption, liquor baron Vijay Mallya remains both defiant and crudely mocking of the Indian machinery. His taunt, perhaps aimed at the government which is fighting in the UK court of law to bring him back, after callously letting him slip away in 2016, is nevertheless hinting at the sorry fact of the Indian side not having furnished enough evidence to deserve a full hearing, let alone a favourable verdict.
But the #BringBackMallya, #MallyaInsultsIndia, #MallyaNabbed hashtags and the 24X7 surround sound that declare that "clinching evidence" of Mallya's criminality have been found, jump the gun, with a purpose. Mallya becoming the symbol of crony capitalism and corporate corruption — still synonymous with the UPA era — serves the larger objective of deflecting attention from the almost eight lakh crore worth of bad loans that the public sector banks are losing their wits to recover.
There is an overtly moralising tone in the campaign to bring back Mallya in the TV media, that does much to take away from the fact that the Rs 9,000 crore wilful default by the liquor baron, thanks to his misadventures with the now-grounded and defunct Kingfisher Airlines, is not even the tip of the bad loan iceberg, which runs into several lakhs of crores.
Interestingly, SBI chief Arundhati Bhattacharya has recently raised an alarm over corporate loans worth Rs 4.85 lakh crore in the telecom sector potentially turning bad, and a bailout package, partial waiver, moratorium and deferred loan payment, et al should be chalked out to prevent it adding to the already overburdening NPA (non-performing assets) problem weighing the banks down.
Reports on PSU banks finally taking "hard measures" such as knocking on the court's door and filing suits, after soft measures such as moratoriums etc having failed to recover corporate debts have been doing the rounds. While cases in which PSU banks have finally taken to court amount to Rs one lakh crore, it's nothing compared to cases in which they haven't yet, coming to over Rs 7.5 lakh crore. In addition, another Rs 2.6 lakh crore worth of loan may turn bad by next year, according to some estimates.
In this context, Vijay Mallya — embodying the fall of the glamorous, partying, 21st century Jay Gatsby, once the cynosure of Lutyens media, but now branded the charlatan — makes for a grand narrative. It's the narrative that seeks to showcase the Modi government's so-called "war on corruption", and by extension on the Congress-era beneficiaries, direct or indirect.
It's entirely another matter that Mallya in 2010 had secured the Rajya Sabha nomination through the help of the BJP and the JDS, even as the ruling party in the Centre uses Mallya as target practice, while not really providing clinching evidence in UK court to secure the liquor baron's extradition. That's a distant goal the game for which must be played out for the rest of the two-year period of the current tenure of the Modi government.
Mallya's taunt — "Keep dreaming of billion pounds" — roughly the Rs 9,000 crore that the consortium of 17 banks, including SBI, IDBI, et al, says he owes, as well as other cases of him defrauding, not paying back bank loans, is therefore both the last hurrah of a corporate gladiator still basking in the glory of his illicit wealth, as well as someone who is unable to gauge how times are changing fast.
Mallya is the chosen sacrifice to appease the pantheon of India's crony capitalists, led by names that currently ensure that laws come up to retrospectively help them legalise their systematic bending of free-market rules, competitive pricing, and to write off, or waive loans worth lakhs of crores, of course from the public exchequer.
Nevertheless, that doesn't absolve Mallya from his serial criminality and considering himself above the law. There's also the salacious gossip around Mallya's private life, his annual posing with the Kingfisher calendar models in swimsuits — all adding to the theatre of a sexualised masala movie with a corpulent mafia don-like semi-comic villain as its baddie.
Basically, the serial setbacks on the part of the Indian authorities aside, the Mallya affair is a made-for-TV saga of the seven-deadly-sins type in the age of Twitter and tabloidised TV media.