Adani Ports and Special Economic Zone (APSEZ) will be removed from the Dow Jones Sustainability Indices on April 15 said Dow Jones in a statement, citing the firm’s business links with the Myanmar military responsible for the coup that overthrew the country‘s democratically elected government on February 1 and the human rights abuses that followed. APSEZ is building a container terminal with an investment of $290 million along Myanmar’s Yangon River on a 50-year deal.

It is one thing for the US government to impose sanctions on 10 serving and former Myanmarese military officials allegedly responsible for the February 1 coup as well as on Myanmar’s military holding companies — Myanmar Economic Holdings Public Company Limited (MEHL) and Myanmar Economic Corporation Limited (MEC) but absolutely another for penalizing a foreign investor for its imagined hobnobbing with the military dictators.

Adani group is rightly worried about the possible repercussions on its fundraising activities following its unceremonious and peremptory ouster from the bellwether index. The adage a man is judged by the company he keeps does not apply to foreign investors in particular and businesses, in general, when what has beckoned him to a country are business opportunities. Investors go where there is an opportunity, period. APSEZ was at pains to explain that “the land acquisition for the project was facilitated by the Myanmar Investments Commission led by U Thaung Tun, its Chairman and Minister of Investment and Foreign Economic Relations, under the guidance of State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy government” to protest its innocence. There is absolutely no shred of evidence to prove that Adani played ball with the military rulers in their coup.

Come to think of it, the who is who of the American corporate world made a beeline for China at the first hint of opportunity when it adopted FDI as the vehicle for growth and ending unemployment. They all knew China was the worst human rights violator with its horrific Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989 still raising one’s hackles. Even otherwise Chinese repressive measures are widely known to bear repetition. Has Dow Jones ever even thought of ousting any of them from any of its indices? De Beers has been the virtual monopolist in the diamond trade and thrived when apartheid was widely practised in South Africa. Was it its fault that South African rulers practised and condoned the worst form of human discrimination?

While it is all right for the world’s oldest democracy and its institutions for drumming up support for democracy in countries ruled by dictators, it is entirely wrong to revile its businesses especially those who have gone to countries only to make them economically better of course with an eye on their own bottom-line. Dow Jones of all the institutions should know investments and returns are not dirty words.

That Dow is tilting at the windmills will be more apparent if one considers the fact that most of the MNCs including those headquartered in the US is guilty of tax evasion in countries they set shop in by devious and deplorable means such as base erosion and profit shifting, the practices squarely denounced by OECD. Many of them also practice anti-competition policies much to the detriment of smaller firms. Google’s overweening presence in households to the point of becoming the worst peeping Tom selling innocent family chit-chats to sellers too alas has not aroused the conscience of Dow.

The short point is one, especially, a financial world bellwether should sit in judgment over a company’s activities and cast aspersions on its reputation merely on the basis of surmises and innuendos as well as on the bases of political developments unfolding in its investment destinations unless its subversive role in undermining democracy is established. APSEZ neither instigated the Myanmar military rulers to carry out the coup nor do they have the means to undo the wrong. Its business is business, nothing more nothing less.

First Published:Apr 25, 2021 1:56 PM IST