Morality tale

The Descent of Air India by Jitender Bhargava; Bloomsbury India; Price: Rs.499; 243 pp Right until the mid-1980s, Air India was universally acknowledged as one of the world’s top 10 airlines and unquestionably the best national carrier of the developing nations of the post-colonial order. Today it is a byword for unreliability, unpunctuality, indifferent if not rude ground and in-flight service, and disregard of elementary safety norms with very few to do it reverence. By penning The Descent of Air India which exposes the reckless neglect and downright plunder of this once prized national asset, instead of quietly fading into the sunset as is normative among public sector enterprise (PSE) managers, Jitender Bhargava, former director of public relations and communications of Air India, has rendered a valuable public service. Perhaps unwittingly, he has revealed all that’s wrong with India’s PSEs which as per the official policy of the disgraced Congress party, “dominate the commanding heights of the Indian economy”. It is pertinent to recall that Air India International was promoted in 1948 by JRD Tata (1904-1993), chairman of the business house of Tata, then as now, the country’s most respected business conglomerate. But newly independent India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru — a muddled Fabian socialist who ignored the subcontinent’s 5,000- years-old mercantile history and led the nation down the socialist state trading road — nationalised the airline. However, it must be said to his credit that Nehru and his daughter prime minister Indira Gandhi retained JRD Tata as chairman of Air India and substantially respected the autonomy of the airline. Ironically, the rot began under the Janata government headed by pro-business prime minister Morarji Desai, after it spectacularly ousted Mrs. Gandhi from power in the post-Emergency election of 1977. The following year Desai sacked Tata and appointed Air Marshal P.C. Lal as chairman of Air India. At the time your reviewer was editor of Business India and wrote the first in-depth civil aviation feature on Air India. Bhargava’s insider account of the descent of Air India into nepotism, debt, institutional corruption and unaccountability begins in 1989 when after serving with Crompton Greaves, Good Year India, and the public sector Coal India Ltd, he responded to an Air India ad for a chief public relations manager, and was selected for the “job that inspired such awe”. Although he expected to step into an organisation which “represented the future of India and was regarded as one of the best companies in the country,” Bhargava was soon disabused of his great expectations. At the time, the managing director and chief executive of the airline was Rajan Jetley, who was mysteriously given plenipotentiary powers by prime minister Rajiv Gandhi notwithstanding his disastrous decision in his previous posting as CEO of the public sector India Tourism Development Corporation, to paint Delhi’s iconic sandstone Ashoka Hotel a pedestrian white. True to form, jetley unilaterally undertook “a massive corporate identity change exercise for the airline” to reinvent “the logo, aircraft ambience, design of the aircraft exterior, offices…