Rahul Gandhi says Tata is being 'criminally destroyed'; Sitharaman calls it politicising

He did not name a specific act in the post. The remark came while the group is in a dispute over the leadership of Tata Sons, its holding company.

The dispute behind it

The dispute has split the trustees of the Tata Trusts and has spilled into the boardroom of Tata Sons. Tata Trusts chairman Noel Tata has challenged the Tata Sons board resolution of 17 September that reappointed N. Chandrasekaran as chairman of the holding company, and has written to the company calling it void. Tata Sons says that the resolution is valid.

Gandhi's post does not say which part of the dispute he regards as criminal. The legal and commercial questions between the trustees and the board are matters for the company's own processes and, if the parties go there, the courts.

Sitharaman's reply

In her own post, Sitharaman said that Gandhi should stop politicising every issue. She called it unacceptable to label commercial and legal matters as criminal, and accused him of repeatedly criticising the successes of Indian industry and entrepreneurs. She asked whether he was trying to get business leaders to join him in spreading distrust and toxicity.

She said that the Congress had stifled entrepreneurs under the licence-quota raj, which she said had inflicted poverty on crores of Indians. The Modi government, she said, values industry as a creator of jobs and a driver of growth, and its policies are designed to enable enterprise, support industry and encourage investment. She said that parties, governments and institutions share a responsibility to support industry, farmers and young people, and should engage constructively and not make baseless accusations.

On the Constitution, she said it ensures justice and that the courts uphold it. She accused Gandhi's party and its former Prime Ministers of demeaning the judiciary, and told him to refrain from seeing ghosts everywhere.

The exchange follows a week in which the group has been in the news for other reasons. Tata Group has been at the top of the table of India's most valuable business groups for most of the past decade, and on Wednesday, after the stock market debut of Jio Platforms, Reliance Group moved ahead of it by market value on some counts, with about Rs 28.9 lakh crore against Rs 25.6 lakh crore. The reports do not link Gandhi's post to that change.

The reports of Sitharaman's reply do not show her commenting on the Tata Sons dispute itself. Her post dealt with Gandhi's choice of words and with the record of the Congress, and with the role of the courts, which is the place where disputes of this kind are decided if the parties take them there.

The reports do not say whether Tata Trusts or Tata Sons will respond, or what Gandhi's reference to the crimes refers to. Tata Trusts' position on the dispute is not described in the coverage of the exchange, and no court case is cited in it.

Business groups have generally kept out of political exchanges of this kind, and the silence that Gandhi describes may be a matter of the groups' policy not to comment on political disputes. For the Tata companies, the immediate question is how the dispute over Tata Sons' leadership is settled, and a political argument over it does not change the legal position of the trustees or the board.