Shut up and let money talk

There is a prick out there who is peddling fake MBA education to thousands of unsuspecting students who fall for his tall claims of rankings, international exposures and placements. In the end, most are left with a 'degree' that is not worth the paper it is printed on, and employability that will probably not get them through the front door of most corporations. 

Yet money talks, and it is quite true in this country that those who rock the boat are not looked at kindly. There is a Indo-British writer, Siddhartha Deb, who wrote a book called "The Beautiful And The Damned: Life In The New India", which explored the various ideas and aspirations that drove Indians from all economic backgrounds today.

Quite an interesting description by the person who is reviewing the book, a noted Indian writer in English in his own accord, Amit Choudhuri, who writes...

The book is divided into an introduction and five chapters. The first of these, "The Great Gatsby: A Rich Man in India" (Deb's second Fitzgerald allusion after the title), concerns the hugely successful but enigmatic entrepreneur Arindam Chaudhuri. His opening sentence reworks Fitzgerald shrewdly: "A phenomenally wealthy Indian who excites hostility and suspicion is an unusual creature, a fish that has managed to muddy the waters it swims in." How true: wealth, decried in the Nehruvian age, has never had a higher reputation in India.

Yet who is Arindam Chaudhuri, this grinning, pony-tailed, bespectacled man hovering on the edge of Indian middle-class awareness? Clearly, like other public or would-be public figures, he's an invention; but a uniquely self-driven one. We hear of him through his advertisements, and occasional reports containing accusations of fraudulence; Deb's piece is probably the first proper profile of the man. Deb speaks for many when he observes that, "throughout the years of Arindam's meteoric rise, I had been happily oblivious of him, although once I heard of him, I began to see him everywhere". Chaudhuri made his money running a business school that admits people who don't have the background or money to enter the canonical Indian Institute of Management; he then, in some magical strategy of auto-consumption, employs his graduates to run his business school. He's written a putative bestseller, Count Your Chickens Before They Hatch. None of these successes can be entirely verified, and they are, indeed, disputed. But Chaudhuri catches people's attention by insisting to them, repeatedly, that he's successful. In this, he conveys (via Deb's prose) something of the astonishing quality of present-day India.

What Arindam Chaudhuri has done is that he has sued the writer, Siddhartha Deb, the magazine - The Caravan, owned by Delhi Press and where Deb is a contributing writer and which published an excerpt from the book, the publishers Penguin India, and perhaps to attract more attention, Google India.

As much as I, and perhaps millions of others who can see the fraud at work and can see how this company is able to browbeat any criticism of its predatory activities, hate the situation, this article is not about this company. I strongly believe that Arindam Chaudhuri has embarked on his life in cinema using the money he has earned selling his fraud degrees to youth all across the country. His fraud company's advertisements in the media are worth crores of rupees, and that is the reason why any criticism against his activities comes only from smaller publications and from independent writers and bloggers. So when a question is raised in the Parliament if his company, which had paid Rs. 400 crores on advertisements in one financial year, had paid taxes, the government is quick to respond that everything is fine. So even when universities have said that this company is not legitimate, the advertising juggernaut still rolls on. 

What amazes me is the number of youth who aspire to be a top notch corporate executive with an MBA but do not even do the simple homework of checking the credentials of the entity they are going to join. Perhaps there is not much success for them in the corporate world then. While the big newspapers in the country shut out the bad news and instead stick to the lakhs and crores they are getting from advertisements, the internet is a vast place, and I feel any person aspiring to be an MBA should be able to get some access to the internet and use it. Yes, if you think the "institute" has any legitimacy because Shahrukh Khan advertises for it (he also advertises for other worthies such as skin whitening cream and the most popular shaving cream in barbershops), then perhaps you deserve this?

Unfortunately, higher education is big business in India. Every politician worth his or her salt owns an engineering college or a MBA school, and there are thousands of Random Institutes of Technology churning out graduates by the dozen, but the fact remains that quality education's capacity is very very limited, even today. Sure everybody can blame the IIM's for only taking in less than 2000 students in a year, but what stops other schools to aspire to have the same high level of education and industry is something i can't fathom. Is it that quality of Indian society that Amartya Sen wrote about - crabs pulling each other down? Anyways, meritocracy is something that is slowly being removed from our system, even with more quotas and other regulations.

In a recent article in The Guardian (it kind of makes me uncomfortable that so much of this blog is sourced from British newspapers), Mr. Deb wrote about the issue, and the broader issue of how this society somehow fails to defend all that we feel proud to boast of as a democracy - such as freedom of opinion and dissent, and is somehow more than accepting of browbeating and bullying from rich and powerful forces in the country to suppress any criticism against them. The politicians use brute force to silence criticism, especially from single individuals or groups of individuals, and the rich use their money and the loopholes in law to get the courts to do their dirty work.

In his article in The Guardian, Deb makes a few interesting points....

Built upon a series of interviews with Chaudhuri, a flamboyant, pony-tailed figure who is chauffeured around Delhi in a Bentley, the chapter was, to my mind, a nuanced portrait of the man and his business. It looked at the aspirations unleashed in the new India, both in figures such as Chaudhuri, whose face stares out at one from advertisements in virtually every newspaper and magazine of note, to the largely provincial middle-class students who flock to his schools in their desire to make it into the world of business management.

Nevertheless, on 30 April, a court in Silchar, a small town in the north-eastern state of Assam that is more than 2,000km from Delhi, issued an injunction against the Caravan article and the chapter. No notice was received by any of the defendants before the injunction was issued.

The injunction has received little attention in the Indian media. There has been hardly any discussion, as yet, of the fact that for all India's vaunted embrace of free-market capitalism and its frequent claims to being the world's "largest" democracy, it remains a place utterly reluctant to allow public criticism of the powerful and the wealthy. Indeed, India has had, in recent years, a very poor track record of defending either artistic freedom or critical nonfiction.

But the most mysterious of all such cases is the book The Polyester Prince, written by Australian journalist Hamish McDonald. This book was a biography of Dhirubhai Ambani, a shrewd investor who built a vast business empire that was inherited by his feuding sons Anil and Mukesh, two of the wealthiest individuals in the world. McDonald's book was published in India last year in an updated version under the title Ambani and Sons, but the original book, to be brought out in 1998, faced injunctions from Dhirubai Ambani's company and was never available officially in India.

This kind of suppression is far more insidious and much less visible than the way China locks up dissidents such as Ai Weiwei. It passes without notice in the west, but what is more significant is how damaging it is to India's fragile democracy. It promotes, in a country that is diverse but also deeply hierarchical, a culture of cringing before the rich and the powerful.

Business arrangements known as "private treaties" between media houses and corporations ensure positive coverage for the latter, a process known as "paid news". Arindam Chaudhuri himself produces a constant stream of advertisements for himself, and also runs a small media empire that includes a magazine called The Sunday Indian.

The sad fact is that this country, for all its thousands of years of history and philosophy and learning and apparent cultural "superiority" that we claim over other societies, has fast transcended into an intolerant cesspool where money drives the society, and power justifies all actions. If I get into a tirade of how our society has become an entity so materialistic and superficial, then it will not serve the purpose of this post. However, my main reason to talk about the frauds talked about in this post is to bring out the fact that with financial backing, it is quite easy to turn public action, or inaction, into your favor, and of course, much easier to take advantage of the clogged and hole-riddled law and order situation in the country.

Unfortunately, I do not believe it is as simple as the innocent versus the unjust, because in my view, no body's a saint, and I think every individual's first priority is one's own safety and security. When I deride our society for being so tolerant towards injustice and crime against women and children, it could be that its in our psyche, and it could be that as a society, we are now in such a constant state of bullying and subversion by politicians, business corporations and governments, that I think the ideas of change and justice remain in the minds only, and a common family man/woman would think of the safety of the family first, and if that means not getting involved in raising voice against injustice, then so be it.

Just to provide some closure to the story of the fraud institute versus Deb and Delhi Press, I suppose Delhi Press itself can boast of some strong credentials, and possibly some pull, so they have decided to fight out the case. The magazine is very forthcoming with the details of the lawsuit, and the reasons why they will fight it, and definitely the blogosphere has backed them, considering its the blogging community that is most vocal in bringing out the fraud at Chaudhuri's fake company. Its a good thing, because its always good to be totally open with information, and in this case, I think most people will see it as an individual using his money to shut down something written about him in the media. Its just like Harbhajan Singh and his mother not liking an ad poking fun at not him, but an ad which he had done for a rival liquor brand. Of course there is probably a big difference between the actions of Harbhajan and Chaudhuri. One is probably just embarrassed and the other, well, suppressing anything critical of his fraudulent activities is something that's been a regular feature.

So the magazine writes....

In addition to The Caravan and its proprietors, the suit charges Siddhartha Deb, Penguin (the publisher of the upcoming book by Deb in which the article is a chapter), and Google India (which, the suit alleges, has been “publishing, distributing, giving coverage, circulating, blogging the defamatory, libelous and slanderous articles”).

The civil court in Silchar granted the IIPM a preliminary injunction, enjoining Delhi Press to remove the article in question from their website, ex-parte, without any pre-hearing notice.

In 2005, the IIPM filed a case against Rashmi Bansal, a blogger and editor of Just Another Magazine (JAM), who published an article in print and online questioning many of the claims made by the IIPM in its brochures and advertisements, which highlighted that the IIPM had not been accredited by any Indian agency such as AICTE, UGC or under other state acts. The IIPM filed a case against Bansal from Silchar, Assam, even though she runs a small independent outfit based in Mumbai. The IIPM managed to get an ex-parte order from the court, forcing Bansal to remove the article from the website. The IIPM also filed for damages.

In 2009, Careers360 magazine, published by Maheshwar Peri, who is also the publisher of Outlook magazine, carried an article titled “IIPM - Best only in claims?” investigating the authenticity of many of the claims made by the IIPM in their advertisements. The magazine’s investigation revealed that the IIPM claimed that its students were eligible for MBA degrees from IMI, Belgium, but that NVAO, the accreditation organisation of Netherlands and Flanders (Belgium), did not recognise IMI. Also it reported that following a local agitation against the opening of a new campus in Dehradun, the state government of Uttarakhand had asked the Uttarakhand Technical University to conduct an enquiry on the activities of the IIPM, with which IIPM did not co-operate. The investigations revealed that IIPM could not in any circumstances award valid MBA/BBA degrees or conduct such courses in the state of Uttarakhand. The IIPM, again, filed a case against the magazine and the publisher in Silchar, and obtained ex-parte restraint against them. The IIPM also filed a criminal case against Maheshwar Peri from Uttarakhand, which was subsequently quashed by the High Court.

The Caravan intends to fight this suit because we believe that we must defend the right of journalists to report on controversial subjects or persons without undue fear of legal intimidation from powerful entities or organisations that seek to insulate themselves from criticism.

Those with money know its very easy to keep cases against them in courts for as long as they like. Some can have the pull to knock off witnesses and pay off the other parties, some are just content in agonizing the other party through their ability to pay lawyers who are good at finding the loopholes in the country's laws, and there are, of course, many, in addition to the fact that there are more than 300 crore cases pending in our judiciary system! It'll be interesting to see how this one pans out.