Calcutta Diary

A M THERE are certain legalities and statutory provisions. No doubt proper obeisance will be paid to them. In any event, they cannot pose any major problems. Where difficulties of this nature have arisen in the past, amendments have been rushed through in Parliament. The issue however is not one involving legal quibbles; it concerns basic social and political attitudes. A subsidiary unit of a multinational corporation has in one case proposed to merge with a major industrial house. In the other case, the Industrial Development Bank of India has sold oft the shares it was holding in a cement manufacturing unit to a subsidiary of another multinational corporation. Some forms have to be maintained before these arrangements are completed; inevitably, the Union Ministry of Law and Company Affairs will come in. But in such matters negotiations would not have proceeded beyond a point unless some individual or other had first talked to x, y and z along the catwalks of power; the implicit concurrence to go ahead must have already been received. There could of course be references to the judiciary; in the case of the proposed merger, there has already been one such reference. Irrespective of how the legal issues are sored out, the significance of the two developments however lies in the light they throw on the changing political mores in the country.