Nitin Gadkari’s comments on Vijay Mallya have thrown the cat among the pigeons

There is no doubt that Vijay Mallya is a failed businessman. He squandered away thousands of crores of money by running an airline. In the process, he lost control of the jewels in his crown — United Breweries and United Spirits — the largest beer and spirits company in India respectively. But the question writ large is whether there was malice involved in Mallya’s refusal to pay back the billions he borrowed from the Indian public sector banks to fund his airline?

Certainly, Mallya is not the first person to fail in business nor will he be the last. He is also not the only person to lose everything when running an airline. The aviation business is brutal. In the past few weeks alone, a couple of start-up airlines in Europe have collapsed with others on life support. The situation of Mallya’s erstwhile ‘frenemy’ Naresh Goyal’s Jet Airways, too, is precarious with reports of delayed salaries and service cancellations filling newsprint in the business pages. This is an unforgiving business. Mallya will not be the only billionaire who ended up barely a millionaire, as the oft-quoted saying goes, after entering the business. But is Union Minister for Road Transport and Highways Nitin Gadkari right in saying that Mallya had no malice in not repaying his loans? This newspaper does not believe so. There are certainly questions that must be answered about why the Indian public sector banks kept loaning Mallya’s Kingfisher Airlines with money even when it was clear to all and sundry that the airline was going to crash and burn. There also arises the question about how Mallya managed to get a stunning valuation for his airlines brand when later it was not worth even pennies and how he used that valuation to acquire loans. Thus, it is contingent upon the Indian courts to prove that there was no malice involved and not for Mr Gadkari to give Mallya a clean chit. And Mallya, despite his protestations of innocence, did weaken his own case by fleeing to the UK.

There is no doubt that Mallya suffered from poor public relations. For example, he celebrated his birthday party lavishly in Goa even though his airlines employees were not being paid. His constant parties with nubile nymphets clad around him did make the public and authorities jealous. After all, which middle-aged man would not like to live life that way? It is also true that on the scale of things, Mallya is not the worst offender when it comes to not repaying banks. But he is close to the top. That, coupled with his extravagant lifestyle even in self-imposed exile in the UK, have made the gregarious, party-loving man a persona non-grata among his one-time friends. Mallya should now come to India to face justice and answer questions. As slow as the Indian justice system has become, until he answers those questions in an Indian court on Indian soil, he will always be considered guilty by the Indian public even if logically he might not be. It is, therefore, contingent on the authorities to pursue his extradition with haste, which oddly enough will also be good for Mallya himself.