Let us try to understand the chronology:

Scene One: It’s the early days of  Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s prime ministerial innings. A sense of a new beginning was sweeping the country. An acting director of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), Trinath Mishra, taking at face value the new political elite’s tall talk of probity and accountability, sends a search team to the Dhirubhai Ambani residence. Blasphemy. The medieval code of sin and punishment kicks in. Within weeks, the CBI had a new acting director.

Scene Two: The 2013 edition of the Vibrant Gujarat – that very seductive platform devised to entice “investors” from home and abroad to lend respectability to Chief Minister Narendra Modi’s image and public persona – is underway. Anil Ambani is the opening batsman. He sets the tone, invoking the venerable Dhirubhai Ambani, to announce to the world that his father had long-ago concluded that “Narendra Modi was a long-distance runner.”

And, to be sure, Dhirubhai  was no mean judge of men and matters. It was clear that corporate India had shifted its affection away from Manmohan Singh and was now looking for a new horse to put its bet on.

In September 2013, Raghuram Rajan made his first speech as governor of the Reserve Bank of India. “He gave a clear hint of the wider battle he would soon begin to fight against India’s most delinquent tycoons,” writes James Crabtree in The Billionaire Raj, a cold and unsettling story of the political muscle at the disposal of the big business’ names. The love-affair between the “reformist Manmohan Singh” and corporate India was finally over.

Scene Three: September 16, 2016. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s birthday.  Anil Ambani writes a newspaper article, by way of an open and public tribute to the prime minister. Once again, he recalls, his father’ prophesy that Modi would one day become prime minister; and, then, goes on to declare bravely and boldly:

“India now stands transformed as a nation where cynicism has made way for pride, inertia for efficiency and red-tape for corruption-free decision-making.”

Scene Four: It’s August 2025 now. The CBI conducts searches at Anil Ambani’s residence and office premises, according to the Indian Express, “in connection with an alleged bank fraud which, the agency claimed, caused a loss of over Rs 2,929 crore to State Bank of India.”

Admittedly, this is a new normal in new India.

How to explain this latest edition of “corruption-free decision-making” that was hailed by Anil Ambani nearly a decade ago? The decision to let the coercive agencies make visits to a leading industrial house could not have been taken without any application of political mind. And, we need to remember Anil Ambani is no ordinary industrialist. Though it is easy to dismiss him as a “bankrupt crorepati,” he is the very man who knows something about the Rafale deal that was struck in April 2015. He is a man who has working relationships with all political parties and their leaders. He is a man who has a reputation of knowing every nexus, holy or unholy in our political arena. And, in any case, a sum of Rs 2,929 crore is chicken feed in comparison to all the hanky-panky going apace.

So, the question remains: Why? Why now?

By this time,  the country has got a fairly good idea that the use of the Enforcement Directorate (ED) and the CBI (as also of other coercive agencies) against high profile people is invariably dictated by political calculations of those whom the “national media” routinely hails as ‘Chankayas.” So, we are entitled to try to decode the meaning of the CBI’s attention to a son of Dhirubhai Ambani.

Is Anil Ambani being made to pay a price – as many others have paid – for treading on the toes of the most favourite of the crony capitalists? The breach has to be very serious, rather irrevocable, if the heavy-hand of the “agencies” is made to be felt on the shoulders of an Ambani scion. An old maxim alerts us to a falling out among thieves. This public humiliation of a CBI search of an Ambani residence can have unintended consequences.

Or, is there a serious rift among the India Inc.?  Have the leading industrialists (who are also the heaviest financiers of the ruling party) had enough of Narendra Modi?  And, is the empire striking back?  If so, then, there will be more corporate blood in the days to come. The regime is fully aware of all the transgressions of norms and rules by inflicted on the economy by “the delinquent tycoons.”

Or, has the Modi regime embarked on a new narrative of moral righteousness, claiming once again to trying its best to clean the Augean stables?  The prime minister’s middle- class constituency would very much like to be reassured that he has not lost any of his old crusading touch.  On the other hand, entanglement with the crooks is total and all-pervasive.  Could it be a case of “nau sau chuhe kha kar billi Haj ko chali?”

And, then, it would be necessary not to ignore the possibility of a foreign angle. After all, the bad turn that our relations have taken with Donald Trump’s America is not entirely on account of a dispute over tariffs. A section of Indian business leaders may be questioning the very wisdom of protecting one particular businessman from US law. This degree of intimacy with one business house goes against the grain of the political economy of crony capitalism since the model is supposed to involve several cronies, and not just one.

Even before the Anil Ambani-CBI episode, discerning noses were getting a whiff of something rotten in the ruling structure of our own Denmark. The Dhankhar mystery remains, disquietly, unsolved. Then, the Chief Election Commissioner is encouraged to hold that disastrous press conference, bringing no honour to the ruling dispensation. Now, Anil Ambani gets a visit from the agencies. Is somebody losing his marbles? Or grip?  Both India and Bharat would very much want to know.

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