GIVEN the essential corporate interests involved, Narendra Modi’s victory in Gujarat is an outstanding market-moving story. In other words the weekend verdict is expected to have a major bearing on the way Mumbai’s stock exchange, to name just one Indian bourse, would behave when it opens for business on Monday and beyond.

The story reminds me of the days I worked with a major international wire agency, and the Rwanda massacres had been going on for weeks. Beginning on April 6, 1994, and for the next hundred days, up to 800,000 Tutsis were killed by Hutu militia using clubs and machetes, with as many as 10,000 killed each day.After a week or two, even as the mass murders were on in full cry, the story fell off from the editor’s attention span in most newspapers. Until one day, when the agency’s stringer in Kigali filed his insights on how Rwanda’s coffee crop was being adversely affected by the shortage of labour, a result of the daily killings. The story rattled the New York Stock Exchange and the world’s other major trading posts like a small earthquake. The stringer won rare accolades from the news editors who were based those days in Hong Kong. And that was that.

The power of market-moving stories is unfathomable. They are the lifeline of the mushrooming pink dailies and also sustain countless TV channels. So it should be in order that corporate leaders like Mukesh Ambani, who was briefly given the honorific of the world’s richest man, should be asked by some TV channel to comment on Modi’s victory. Ambani and Rattan Tata, India’s two leading tycoons, had publicly endorsed the venom-spewing chief minister of Gujarat as a model leader.

Their comments today would be important not for the Bombay Stock Exchange alone. Their thoughts about India’s leadership are important for a host of other reasons for they today influence the course of politics at the highest levels not only of the rightwing variety, but centrists and the leftist touch-me-nots too find themselves in their deep pockets, so to speak.

Historian Jacques R. Pauwels has recorded this nexus vividly in his thesis, American Corporations and Hitler. In the United States, World War II is generally known as “the good war”. In contrast to some of America’s admittedly bad wars, such as the near-genocidal Indian Wars and the vicious conflict in Vietnam, World War II is widely celebrated as a “crusade” in which the US fought unreservedly on the side of democracy, freedom, and justice against dictatorship. When American troops landed in Normandy in June 1944, however, and captured their first German trucks, what did they discover? They found that engines produced by American firms such as Ford and General Motors powered these vehicles. President Roosevelt had described America as the arsenal of democracy in the world. But corporate America, it turned out, had also been serving as the arsenal of Nazism.

Mussolini enjoyed a great deal of admiration in corporate America from the moment he came to power in a coup that was hailed widely as “a fine young revolution”. Hitler, on the other hand, sent mixed signals.

“Like their German counterparts, American businessmen long worried about the intentions and the methods of this plebeian upstart, whose ideology was called National Socialism, whose party identified itself as a workers’ party, and who spoke ominously of bringing about revolutionary change,” says Pauwels.

However, some leaders of corporate America, such as Henry Ford admired the Führer at an early stage. Other early Hitler-admirers were press baron Randolph Hearst and Irénée Du Pont, head of the Du Pont trust, who had already “keenly followed the career of the future Führer in the 1920s” and supported him financially. Eventually, most American captains of industry learned to love the Führer.

Mussolini’s fascination for the corporate world, and vice versa, stemmed from a business penchant to admire the virtues of the “leadership principle”. Hitler too practised what he preached first in his party and then in Germany as a whole. Although he cites other factors as well, it is essentially in such terms that Edwin Black, author of the otherwise excellent book IBM and the Holocaust, explains the case of IBM chairman Thomas J. Watson, who met Hitler on a number of occasions in the 1930s and became fascinated with Germany’s authoritarian new ruler. But it is in the realm of political economy, not psychology, that one can most profitably understand why corporate America embraced Hitler.

In the 1920s, notes Pauwels, many big American corporations enjoyed sizeable investments in Germany. IBM established a German subsidiary, Dehomag, before World War I; in the 1920s General Motors took over Germany’s largest car manufacturer, Adam Opel AG; and Ford founded a branch plant, later known as the Ford-Werke, in Cologne. Other US firms contracted strategic partnerships with German companies.

Standard Oil of New Jersey — today’s Exxon — developed intimate links with the German trust IG Farben.

By the early 1930s, an élite of about 20 of the largest American corporations had a German connection, including Du Pont, Union Carbide, Westinghouse, General Electric, Gillette, Goodrich, Singer, Eastman Kodak, Coca-Cola, IBM, and ITT. Finally, many American law firms, investment companies, and banks were deeply involved in America’s investment offensive in Germany, among them the renowned Wall Street law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, and the banks J. P. Morgan and Dillon, Read and Company, as well as the Union Bank of New York, owned by Brown Brothers & Harriman. The Union Bank was intimately linked with the financial and industrial empire of German steel magnate Thyssen, whose financial support enabled Hitler to come to power. Prescott Bush, grandfather of George W. Bush, managed this bank.

Prescott Bush was allegedly also an eager supporter of Hitler, funnelled money to him via Thyssen, and in return made considerable profits by doing business with Nazi Germany; with the profits he launched his son, the later president, in the oil business. Pauwels makes for fascinating read on a subject, which hasn’t lost its relevance for us even today.

Is it not for the same reason that the United States looked pretty much disinterested in the pogroms in Gujarat when the rest of the world, led by Europe, had come out in unequal condemnation of the BJP government, I had to pointedly ask Assistant Secretary of State Christina Rocca to comment on the violence before she gave a grudging disapproval of the mayhem there.

Later, Ms Rocca told the US Congress that Gujarat’s legal authority was robust and was pursuing the criminals of the violence. This was before the Tehelka expose ripped the mask off the “legal authority” at work under Modi.

According to The New York Times, the only public remarks about Gujarat that the then US Ambassador, Robert Blackwill, made in the aftermath of the violence was: “All our hearts go out to the people who were affected by this tragedy. I don’t have anything more to say than that.” Blackwill did not even visit Gujarat to see the fallout of the pogrom.

The then American National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, was asked by The Hindu newspaper about “why the United States has not been forthcoming in its criticism”. She responded that the BJP government of then prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee “is leading India well, and it will do the right thing”. Rocca did term the events in Gujarat ‘really horrible’, but she neglected to assign any blame. The focus of both women and the former ambassador, true to form, was on the arriving coffee crop, not on the bloodletting that often comes with it.

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