Adani & Modi walked in close steps: Ravi Nair

Umar Sheriff | NT

Bengaluru: Senior jour nalist Ravi Nair, during a session on the “Rise and fall of the Adani Empire” organised by Bangalore Collective at St Joseph’s College of Law, on Thursday, said Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Gautam Adani walked in close steps, adding Modi helped the latter grow to be one of the top richest men in the globe.

In 2002, the then Chief Minister of Gujarat visited Delhi to meet businessmen and attract investment. While few disliked Modi’s plan, Adani formed a rival faction to compete with the businessmen in Gujarat. Nair said that was when the relationship between the duo began.  

“When Modi became the PM of India, the geography changed. I can give you a few examples like how the PM’s office wrote a letter to the Ministry of Civil Aviation, in which six airports, Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Lucknow, Guwahati, Mangalore, and Trivandrum are privatized by the Adani group,” he said.

Taking a jibe at Modi, he also said the PM had turned the table to favor Adani for privatizing the airports. “The Civil Aviation Ministry should have written a letter and submitted it to the cabinet, but here the PMO wrote a letter by turning the table,” he said. The Ministry of Finance and NITI AAYOG were very critical of the privatization of six airports.

“When Mumbai and Delhi airport was privatized, it was based on the revenue sharing basis. However, in this case, it was changed to per passenger share. The catch is that the airport operator always charges the user charge. Adani’s Lucknow airport submitted a plan to the ministry to hike the user charges to 400% in the next three years,” he said.

In 2019, a few days before the dates for the general elections were announced, the Narendra Modi government announced the power project at Godda in Jharkhand as the special economic zone; he said and added it was the first to get such an acknowledgment in the country. “Adani doesn’t have to pay any kind of tax. For the first five years, he doesn’t have to pay a single penny in income tax. For five to ten years, he has to pay 15% of the tax.

Forteen to fifteen years, he doesn’t have to pay income tax if he is planning to develop the project or maintenance of the project. That is the relation between Modi and Adani,” he said. Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, another senior journalist, said there were no differences between the politicians and Adani, adding he has a lot of defamation cases against him.

"If Arvind Kejriwal accuses Adani, he won't be punished. But if we do, we will be punished," he said. He also talked about the Hindenburg report and said he was the only journalist to be named in the report which was a disaster for Adani enterprises.