Many months ago, C.M. Ibrahim's shenanigans vis-a-vis the then Tata-SIA airline proposal had appeared to be the last straw in a saga of government arbitrariness and cussedness which was quite remarkable even by Indian standards. It appears now that the utterly capricious civil-aviation establishment in the country is perfectly capable of persisting in its brazenness and of prolonging the agony for no good reason at all. Made to hang fire simply because Ibrahim as civil aviation minister was too attached overtly to Indian Airlines, and allegedly to some private ones, the proposal has since been restructured to keep foreign airlines from investing in it.To begin with, the requirement itself is an absurdity that all foreign investors are welcome in the civil aviation sector except those with the most obvious interest: foreign airlines. But what is even more startling is the brazen way it is still held up even after the Tatas have complied with all the arbitrariness and contrariness of government policy. It ismind-boggling that one proposal has prompted successive governments to play around with policy guidelines with the obvious aim of hobbling it. Plain bloody mindedness or is there more to it than meets the eye?Just what makes so many so paranoid about the venture? The latest example is the missive written by, who else, Ibrahim, alongside Amar Singh and Jayanthi Natarajan, to industry minister Sikander Bakht. Their brilliantly original complaint is that clearing the venture would damage Indian Airlines. Now would the government want such a thing when it has made explicit its intention to disinvest its stake in the airline, and won't this damage the airline's selling price? In different circumstances it would have been most ingratiating to see this language of the market on the lips of those who have done everything in their power to abuse it. As it happens it is disgusting to see that such is their resolve not to let this project through that they are willing to use whatever arguments it takes.Thebottomline is that it is extremely peculiar that civil aviation must remain the last dinosaur in a modernising and progressively more open economy. Why should there be fears about foreign ownership of private airlines when these fears have been overcome in equally crucial and basic infrastructure sectors such as power and telecoms? Civil aviation is neither sacrosanct nor the single most crucial sector in which domestic ownership is essential.It has just had the misfortune to be presided over by the most determined anti-reformers. And yet that is not to say that the denizens and bosses of this antediluvian ministry and others equally anxious to protect the public sector airlines have been doing a fine job of meeting their professed concerns. Foreign airlines are allotted slots at Indian airports without an insistence on reciprocity. Not only is this the guiding principle the world over, these flights then take traffic away from the Indian carrier. In any case, what will it take to convince the authoritiesin this sector that their job is to set basic and, yes, consistent policy, not guided by the fortunes of a single project but by something approaching a vision about what Indian civil aviation should look like in ten or twenty years' time.
