South Central 35: Vijay Mallya’s half-truths and…

South Central 35: Vijay Mallya’s half-truths and Kingfisher’s fall, Bharat Mata controversy in Kerala

In this episode of South Central, hosts Dhanya Rajendran, Pooja Prasanna, and Leena Reghunath first discuss the Vijay Mallya podcast and why political patronage for big businessmen is detrimental. Joining them is senior business journalist Sucheta Dalal.

“Vijay Mallya is among the luckiest; he bounced back like a cat,” says Sucheta Dalal. She adds that not paying loans and claiming bankruptcy were also methods Mallya used to pressurise the government into giving him leeways.

“Though Mallya, in the podcast, speaks of 2016 when his accounts were frozen, salaries to his employees were due much before that,” says Pooja Prasanna. She also observes that Mallya made himself part of the media glare and channelled it for the business, but turned hostile when things were not in his favour anymore.

“It is clear from the podcast that Mallya enjoyed political patronage. And this continues even today for businessmen like Adani, who enjoy such privileges and exclusive access to infrastructure and market deals,” says Dhanya.

In the second part of the discussion, the hosts delve into the Bharat Matha controversy in Kerala. P Raveendran, vice-chancellor, University of Calicut, attended an event organised by Seva Bharati, an affiliate of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, in Malappuram district in early July. Later, Kerala’s Minister for Agriculture, P Prasad, skipped the celebrations at Raj Bhavan after he learned that a picture of Bharat Matha with a saffron flag was going to be honoured. Even before the row over the incident died down, the Minister of Education, V Sivankutty, walked away from another official event where Arlekar was found paying floral tribute to a Bharat Mata portrait.

“Bharat Matha is not a constitutional symbol, it is emotional also. We all have grown up seeing that image in tableaus and public events as well. However, the problem lies in the fact that Bharat Matha holds a saffron flag, not the Indian flag. So whose Bharat Matha is it?” asks Leena Raghunath.

“This is happening in Tamil Nadu also, with RN Ravi. The larger fear here is about how governors are acting like the Sangh’s ideologues,” says Pooja Prasanna.

Dhanya adds that the problem is not the Bharat Matha but the saffron flag. “The VC going to a Seva Bharathi event also adds to the import of all this. It looks like a design to saffronise education and public events and so on,” she says.

All this and more – tune in.