Industrialist Gautam Adani on Wednesday said the growth of his business empire could not be linked to any one political leader, refuting charges of benefitting from his ties with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The Adani Group’s journey began more than three decades ago when the Congress’s Rajiv Gandhi was Prime Minister, he said.
“Prime Minister Modi and I are from the same state. That makes me the easy target of such baseless allegations… It is unfortunate that such narratives are being pushed against me,” he said in an interview to India Today.
“These allegations suffer from recency bias, seeing our group’s success through a short-term lens. The fact of the matter is that my professional success is not because of any individual leader but because of the policy and institutional reforms initiated by several leaders and governments during a long period of over three decades,” Mr Adani said.
“Many will be surprised to know that it all began during the tenure of Rajiv Gandhi as Prime Minister, when he first liberalised the Exim (export-import) policy… But for Rajiv Gandhi, my journey as an entrepreneur would never have taken off,” he said.
“The second big push I got was in 1991 when the duo of Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh initiated sweeping economic reforms. Just like many other entrepreneurs, I too was a beneficiary of those reforms,” he said.
The business tycoon ascribed the “third turning point” of his career to the 1995 election of BJP’s Keshubhai Patel as the Chief Minister of Gujarat and a focus on coastal development that led to him to build his first port in Mundra.