Racial undertones accompany global rise of 'brown sahibs'

DELHI LETTER: A NEW breed of Indian sahibs is emerging on the Western industrial and business scene, quietly but resolutely buying up iconic brands synonymous with former British colonisers.

Ratan Tata of Mumbai - renamed Bombay by the British - heading the $29 billion (€18.4 billion) Tata group is one such "brown sahib" who, on Wednesday, acquired England's elegant Jaguar and macho Land Rover brands for over $2.3 billon, in a phenomenon market analysts term "reverse colonisation".

The 71-year old Parsee chairman of Tata Motors, who had earlier bought Tetley's, England's favourite tea, and the Anglo-Dutch steelmaker Corus, now owns a car brand that has been the favoured carriage of successive British prime ministers and the monarch.

The acquisition of this "jewel" in Britain's industrial crown, like the others, followed weeks of agonising debate in boardrooms and the media. The moot and worrying issue, replete with barely disguised racist undertones, was whether Indian ownership would tarnish the image of the very British stiff upper car lip.

"So what if the Kohinoor diamond - once considered the ultimate symbol of India's wealth and power - now resides with the Queen of England?" the Times of Indiaroared yesterday. But now a company from a former colony has emerged to rescue a beleaguered British brand it stated, adding proudly that Jaguar was now an 'Indian beast'.

Cheekily, the paper mimicked a patriotic British song to declare that "Tatas Rule Britannia".

"The deal also reinforces the global perception of India as a leader in international business, and not just in information technology," the Economic Timesdeclared.

Ratan Tata says he wants to preserve the brands' heritage and keep their identities intact, allaying British fears. Ironically, Tata is also the manufacturer of the indigenously designed four-seater Nano, the world's cheapest car, costing around $2,500, which was unveiled in Delhi earlier this year.

Sixty-one years after independence, enterprising Tai Pans of the former jewel in the British crown are ardently engaged in acquiring industrial units, business and commercial interests, not only in Britain and the US but most western, African and even Latin American countries. In late 2007 Indian companies announced 150 foreign acquisitions with a total value of $18.1 billion, a fourfold increase over 2005.

A consistent growth rate, the world's second-highest after China, a booming stock and property market and globally acknowledged competence in IT have collectively engendered a confidence amongst leading Indian corporations.

This, in turn, has led to them to expand their frontiers, consolidating global empires and business alliances and attracting much-needed foreign investment domestically.

"Westerners are being challenged on their own turf via their own market principles in which the highest bidder takes the prize home," states Sreeram Chaulia of the Maxwell School of Citizenship in Syracuse, New York.

The list of Indian acquisitions abroad is impressive.

Vijay Mallya's United Breweries, based at Bangalore in southern India, snapped up Whyte & McKay, the world's fourth-largest distiller of Scotch whisky, last year, while Bharat Forge of Pune near Mumbai is now the second-largest manufacturer of axle beams, crankshafts and various forged auto components worldwide after a rash of recent overseas buys.

Since the 1990s IT firms like Wipro, Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services have evolved significantly.

From being mere "body shops" and back-room operations for multinationals, they currently run large operations in major overseas markets, employ thousands of highly skilled personnel and have equity valuations of billions of dollars.

Earlier in 2006 the media and boardrooms across France and Europe were engrossed in a heated debate over India's Mittal Steel buying out Arcelor for $22.5 billion.

They somewhat unsubtly argued that Europe was losing its precious asset to an Indian predator who would threaten the future of white workers. Two years later all such fears have proven unfounded and Laxmi Mittal has emerged as one of Europe's most respected and feted steel magnates.

But muted and at times overt racism tends to spoil the corporate atmosphere where, surprisingly ethnicity tends to eclipse mammon.

Last year Tata, for instance, was locked in an ugly corporate row with racist overtones with the US-based Orient-Express Hotels for summarily rejecting Tata's offer of a strategic tie-up on the grounds that its "brand value" would be "diluted".

Tata's Indian hotel group, a minority shareholder in Orient-Express Hotels, accused the American hoteliers of using "libellous language" in spurning its proposal.

Operating 59 hotels at 40 locations in India, Australia, Britain, Malaysia, Mauritius and the US, Tata filed a formal complaint against Orient Express through the US markets watchdog the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Paul M White, president and chief executive of Orient-Express Hotels, responded in a manner that Indian corporate leaders, industry chambers and even senior government ministers said "reeked" of racism. He said his group did not believe there was a "strategic fit" between the "predominantly domestic Indian hotel chain" and the global luxury portfolio of Orient-Express Hotels.

"Overseas corporations will increasingly have to learn to deal with Indian entrepreneurs," Delhi businessman Rajpal Singh Kochar said. They are the new kids on the block with the money, the chutzpah and the business acumen, and cannot be ignored, he added.