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'No leadership vacuum, India has a very
powerful prime minister'
Sunday April 22, 2012 09:45:49 PM,
Arun Kumar,
IANS
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Washington: Asserting that India has a "very powerful, strong and acceptable
prime minister," Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee Sunday rejected
a suggestion from corporate America that a leadership "vacuum" was
chipping away at India's investment climate.
"How can I comment on the perception of some organisation or
institution," he asked when speking to reporters here when asked
about a letter from the US-India Business Council (USIBC) to the
White House. "I can only state the fact that there is no vacuum in
the leadership of the union government."
"And there is a very powerful, strong, acceptable prime minister,"
said Mukherjee, who was here to attend the spring meetings of
International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.
Harold 'Terry' McGraw III, USIBC chairman and CEO of McGraw-Hill
companies, is reported to have suggested in a recent letter to
President Barack Obama's deputy national security adviser Mike
Froman that with Indian cabinet ministers busy dousing political
fires, powerful bureaucrats were running the show in Delhi.
"What is apparent is that political power is devolving to strong
state leaders, and the vacuum at the centre is allowing forces in
government to move on issues that are harmful to India's
investment climate," McGraw said in the letter.
Referring to his meeting with the US treasury secretary, who had
raised the US business community's concern about certain
retroactive changes in the Indian tax laws, Mukherjee said he had
explained that the proposed changes were "not substantive, but
only clarificatory in nature."
The proposed changes to impose retroactive tax on some
international mergers that exchange Indian assets announced in the
budget couldn't be used to reopen tax cases more than six years
old as other legislation existed to prevent this, he repeated to
allay the fears of the US business.
(Arun Kumar can be contacted at arun.kumar@ians.in)
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