Will govt be able to sell off stake in Bhel?

Politics makes strange bedfellows andeven quirkier logic. Petroleum minister Mani Shankar Aiyar, siding with theLeft, has asked FM P Chidambaram, not to go ahead with sale of 10 percent ofcapital goods maker Bhel. This is based on the logic that if government were tosell the family silver, how would it, in times of need, afford to pay thebutler.Obvious riposte would be, sack the butler. The truth is thata fiscally diarrhoeatic coalition government needs both Mani andmoney.The logic of opposing divestment is wonkier. The Left, whichhas always considered cars a luxury item, hence anathema, protects car ownersfrom a petrol price hike. The reason is purely political; it wants to get theKolkata Municipal elections, on Monday, out of the way. Aiyar, who is doinglaudatory work in trying to secure India's energy future, (even if that meansstanding up to America and signing a deal with Iran) is siding with the Leftwhich opposes petrol price hike, one that would curtail demand.Whyshould foreign holding be so nettlesome? HDFC has a foreign holding of over twothirds; does that in any way detract its Indianness? All its customers andemployees are Indian and so long as its management delivers superior returns, asit has been, who cares? There are several other examples.In a muchawaited corporate development, the feuding Ambani brothers arrived at asettlement, demerging Reliance Infocomm, which will go to Anil alongwithReliance Energy and Reliance Capital. The market hadanticipated the developmentand pulled up stock prices of these companies, thus pulling up theSensex.Sebi chief M Damodaran pulled up MF industry for showinglackluster growth in collection. With bank deposit rates giving low or negativereturns, net of inflation, investors ought really to be flocking to the mutualfund industry. This happened in America where the fund industry now controlsmore assets than the banking industry.