Accepting Audacious Demands: The Curious Case of UC Irvine And The Dharma Civilization Foundation

By Romi Mahajan

28 February, 2016
Countercurrents.org

Several years ago I attended the annual South-Asia Conference at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and was delighted to see that Abhay Mehta was invited to give a talk about Enron’s deeds in India. The talk was “after-hours” and had sparse attendance but Mehta was brilliant- he knew more about the Dabhol Project and the unbelievable deal Enron made with the Government of Maharashtra and Government of India than anyone and gave a mesmerizing presentation on the degree to which one corporation could ask for and get such a sweetheart deal. He referred to what can be called the Enron “scandal” as seeming like “fiction of the absurd.” Replete with Mehta’s stunning recall of facts and figures, documents, and a deep knowledge of the energy industry, the talk was no doubt the highlight of the conference- for me at least. People who have read Paranjoy Guha Thakurta’s “Gas Wars” --about the Ambanis and their ability to manipulate the Government of India --will no doubt recall Mehta’s tour de force “Power Play” with admiration and fondness.

One might ask why-- Enron long gone and other far more capable people unmasking corporations for their depredations in India—I choose to open a piece with a paragraph on one talk Abhay Mehta gave almost two decades ago. I do so because of a moment about half-way through his talk when Mehta paused and said something akin to “I must admit a grudging admiration for Enron. The sheer audacity of their demands was stupendous. More stupendous, still, was the fact that two large governments and countless others gave into them for the smallest of favors.” I was stunned by Mehta’s brilliance- in understanding that the job of corporate executives is to ask for the moon and when granted the moon ask for the sun. Their job is to get the best deal to be, as Mehta put it, “audacious.” Anyone surprised at the audacity and the monumental lack of balance and fairness in negotiations doesn’t understand the essence of corporate logic. And anyone who is surprised at the degree to which the anointed negotiators on the other side are willing to sell the peoples’ birthrights for a pittance doesn’t understand the nexus and revolving door between big money, big power, and big government.

Mehta was spot-on: Enron deftly manipulated the situation in its favor and the Indian sides of the negotiation lay down and gave in to everything.

So who, then, is the blame for a deal that could have bankrupted the state of Maharashtra and subjected the Union government of India to charges any number of small time judges in the West could bring up against it?

Who is to blame for ratifying contract with no force majeure clause, subjecting the Government of Maharashtra to pay for power even if a natural calamity rendered the power plant useless?

Who indeed is to blame?

And how indeed should public institutions respond to the audacious claims that corporations and well-funded organizations will inevitably make?

These questions come to mind as we consider the curious case of the Dharma Civilization Foundation and its attempt to get certain professorships endowed at the University of California at Irvine. In an earlier issue of countercurrents, I wrote about the controversy in what I called a Goebbelsian turn at UCI. Put simply, UCI initially accepted monies from an organization directly related to the RSS to endow a number of chairs, with a number of stipulations and riders that no public institution should have accepted, no less an institution putatively respectful of academic freedom. Only after concerned students, professors and concerned community members insisted did UCI appoint a committee to study the transaction; this committee ultimately found several reasons to reject the money. The DCF, having like Enron created audacious stipulations which were initially accepted hook, line, and sinker by the UCI administration, upon hearing of UCI’s final decision, had this to say:

Dharma Civilization Foundation cannot be faulted for the Ad hoc Committee’s belated discovery of supposed flaws in its internal gift-acceptance mechanisms and its consequent rejection of a gift agreement signed into effect by the President of UCI, well over 6 months ago. DCF has been very civil in trusting the UCI Administration to guide the Foundation in following whatever protocols were necessary in securing consensus for these gifts, among the various stakeholders within UCI. It is one thing to say that the intentions of the Dharma Civilization Foundation are incompatible with the academic objectives of the UCI School of Humanities. DCF would have been happy to walk away from UCI, and look elsewhere for an institution that would be better aligned with DCF’s objective of expanding and supporting under-represented areas of teaching and research on Hindu Studies and Dharma Studies.

While I for one find the DCF’s brand of “Hindus as Victim” Hindutva disingenuous and their ties to the RSS disgusting, and their conflation of “Indians” and “Hindus” as symptomatic of fascist majoritarianism, I have to concede that they have a fair point- that they made a set of stipulations about the gift and that the UCI administration accepted them and only reversed its stance after protest.

Why do I believe the DCF has a point? Because as with Enron, the DCF has every right to make insane demands. As with so many other organizations, the DCF has the right to have an execrable agenda.

And just as they have those rights, institutions that represent the public and progressive citizens have the right and the duty to reject foul agendas and push back hard on the audacious rules and stipulations that will inevitably be made.

For those interested in confronting the forces of conservative and moneyed Hindutva, it is worth remembering that power indeed corrupts and that the powerful will always manipulate history and language to win. Further, they will use the force of political power and money to make preposterous demands of the polity.

Rejecting these demands is key. UCI’s Eleventh Hour decision, while certainly the right one, was designed clearly to save face—but only because of the watchfulness of students, professors, and community members. But the way they went about it (happily accepting money, dissimulating until the end, and then ironically referring to procedural issues (when in fact, they determine the procedures)) indicates that while this time the forces of sense might claim victory, that very victory will be pyrrhic if we assume that audacity will stop and that the negotiators on the other side will be circumspect and ethical.

Romi Mahajan is the founder of KKM Group a marketing firm, an author, an investor, and an activist. His career is a storied one, including spending 9 years at Microsoft and being the first CMO of Ascentium, an award-winning digital agency. Romi has also authored two books on marketing- the latest one can be found here . A prolific writer and speaker, Mahajan lives in Bellevue, WA, with his wife and two kids. Mahajan graduated from the University of California at Berkeley, at the age of 19. He can be reached at [email protected]