The Ideal Buyer for Air India

July 4, 2017

Apparently the Indian government has finally decided that selling Air India is an option. I am not super confident that anything will come of it. For starters, right now there is only a cabinet resolution; which gives them a lot of wiggle room to back out of it later on. The working group, not yet constituted, could come up with impossible sale conditions. Parliament might scupper privatisation. Union politics might make the government do a hasty U-turn.

Also, as someone whose cynicism with regards to Arun Jaitley grows every month, the fact that the original announcement was made by him, makes me even more doubtful that anything will ever happen. The man seems to be trotted out every so often on to television to make the BJP palatable to liberals, and then nothing actually happens. Do you remember how:

  • before the Lok Sabha elections, he said that of course Parliament could legislatively repeal Section 377? Then when Shashi Tharoor brought in his private member’s bill, the BJP voted against it.
  • two budgets ago, he said that starting the next year, he would cut corporate tax rates by a percentage point every year? I’m still waiting.
  • he decided to not legislatively bar retrospective taxation, after all that sound and fury, instead just promising that he would never do it?

So when Jaitley says that selling Air India is a desirable objective, I for one suspect that this is just a new round of talk before meeting with funders, and actual action will be short on the ground. Of course, this assumes that anybody actually wants to buy Air India, which is a bit of an ask. So far, we have had the fun spectacle of seeing Anand Mahindra saying he isn’t brave enough to take it on, and its shareholders panicking at the thought that Indigo might be.

Which is the biggest problem, really. Even assuming that Bharat sarkar is sincere in wanting to sell Air India, and not just making suitable noises; and that union opposition is overcome, then what? Nobody who was accountable to shareholders, or had any sense, would buy it.

That doesn’t mean that nobody would buy it. There are people who aren’t accountable to shareholders, or who can defy them, and who don’t have sense. Ratan Tata, the past few years have shown us, comes close to that happy situation. But even he is surpassed by a certain class of dilettante airline operators. I speak, of course, of Arab sheikhs.

In the past few years, the Middle Eastern airlines have recklessly and cheerfully expanded. They run half empty flights to the United States, introduce new and unprofitable sectors just for the prestige of running ‘the longest flight in the world’, and are engaged in an arms race when it comes to just how ridiculously luxurious they can make their first class product. Alas, as oil prices have fallen, some cost cutting has started taking place, and maybe even the Middle East 3 won’t be brave or foolhardy enough to buy Air India. Emirates or Qatar Airways might just buy Air India to replicate the Etihad – Jet model and run shuttle services to Dubai or Doha as applicable, but I wouldn’t count on it.

Though the ideal buyer for Air India, in my opinion, isn’t Emirates or Qatar. It’s Saudia – the national airline of Saudi Arabia.

Why, you ask? This is not because I am a fan of Saudia (I have never even travelled on it) and feel that nothing would improve Air India flights like a no-liquor policy. It is more that I feel that the greatest contribution the government of India could make to world peace is to saddle Saudi Arabia with an airline that haemorrhages money every year, will give its owners severe grief when it comes to human resources issues, and pit the irresistible force of Ravindra Gaikwad against the immovable object that is the Ministry for the Prevention of Vice and Promotion of Virtue. Every riyal Saudi Arabia spends on keeping Air India aloft, will be a riyal they are not spending on setting up radical mosques or bombing Yemen or doing the dirty on Iran.

Maybe the way to get this to happen is to get Qatar Airways to express interest. And then Saudi Arabia would try to buy Air India instead, out of pure spite for Qatar. After which, we could try to add on persuasion by suggesting that running Air India would be the ideal way for one of the surplus princes to occupy himself.

One can dream.

Leave a Comment » | Arbit Fundaes, Business, Public Policy and Politics | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Aadisht

Promoting Virtue and Preventing Vice

February 16, 2008

Amit has blogged about the Saudi Arabian ban on red roses here:

The decision has been taken by the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, which sounds like something right out of Kafka.

There’s also a CNN story on this, which contains these priceless quotes:

Ahmed Al-Omran, a university student in Riyadh, told CNN that the government decision will give the international media another reason to make fun of the Saudis “but I think that we got used to that by now.”

…

Because of the ban on red roses, a black market has flowered ahead of Valentine’s Day. Roses that normally go for five Saudi riyal ($1.30) fetch up to 30 riyal ($8) on February 14, the Saudi Gazette said.

“Sometimes we deliver the bouquets in the middle of the night or early morning, to avoid suspicion,” one florist told the paper.

Anyway. As evil organisations which nevertheless have really cool names go, the Ministry for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice (according to Wikipedia, a more accurate translation is Committee for Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice) is right up there on both counts, scoring high on both evil activities and cool names.

Kodhi and me have concluded that the reason the name is so cool is that it contains not only the base objective (i.e., Promotion of Virtue) but also the negation of the opposite (i.e., Prevention of Vice). You could similarly make a fixed deposit sound cool by calling it an Instrument for the Encouragement of Savings and Discouragement of Consumption; or mobile phone silent mode sound cool by calling it the Mode for Preservation of Sanity and Reduction of Stress. We have also decided that our sitcom must contain either an organisation named on this principle, or constant Ministry for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice references.

The MPVPV also scores high on the being evil front. In addition to banning all things red, it has also banned cats and dogs, as pets are a Western influence and thus nothing to do with Islam:

“One bad habit spreading among our youths is the acquisition of dogs and showing them off in the streets and malls,” wrote Aleetha al-Jihani in a letter to Al-Madina newspaper. “There’s no doubt that such a matter makes one shudder.”

“Then what’s the point of dragging a dog behind you?” he added. “This is blind emulation of the infidels.”

It also beats up Catholic priests, junta who put daaru, and women found talking to men.

However, it’s greatest hit ever was in 2004, when it stopped firefighters from pulling girls out of a burning school building because – wait for this – they were not in burkhas and pulling them out would have incited lust in the firefighters. 14 girls died. The ‘BBC’ says:

According to the al-Eqtisadiah daily, firemen confronted police after they tried to keep the girls inside because they were not wearing the headscarves and abayas (black robes) required by the kingdom’s strict interpretation of Islam.

One witness said he saw three policemen “beating young girls to prevent them from leaving the school because they were not wearing the abaya”.

The Saudi Gazette quoted witnesses as saying that the police – known as the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice – had stopped men who tried to help the girls and warned “it is a sinful to approach them”.

Depressing as it is that in India we have to deal with nutjobs like the Hindu Makkal Katchi and Syed Imam Bukahri, we can at least take solace in the fact that we don’t have a Ministry for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. Holding Saudi Arabia as a benchmark is slightly unambitious, but it’s a start.

2 Comments | Language, Religion, Society, Weirder Than Fiction | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Aadisht