India’s rich are just as furious as its working class, but their anger flows in opposite directions. While the ‘cockroach’ movement grew from college students demanding fair exams to schoolchildren protesting broken roads—all training their ire on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government—the corporate elite have turned their knives on each other.
Feuds among India’s corporate elite are not new, but their timing is striking.
Last week, Sashidhar Jagdishan said he won’t seek reappointment as managing director of HDFC Bank. This was the second high-profile departure at India’s largest private-sector lender in less than six months—chairman Atanu Chakraborty left abruptly in March, raising questions about governance that have kept getting more serious.
Following Chakraborty’s exit, analysts began to ask if the chief executive and his deputy, Kaizad Bharucha, were in sync. In July, the lender’s board penalized three top executives including Jagdishan for “business overreach” in an arrangement to garner large deposits.
A US class-action lawsuit alleges HDFC Bank misled investors by masking higher interest rates to a state firm as marketing expenses to win deposits. The bank says the claims are without merit.
HDFC Bank, however, is not the only large Indian business experiencing a leadership vacuum.
A power struggle to gain control of the $350 billion Tata Group led to Natarajan Chandrasekaran’s decision last month to step aside as chairman of Tata Sons, the principal holding company, at the end of his term in February 2027.
The timing could not be worse for the 158-year-old conglomerate. A cyber attack in June on Tata Electronics, Apple’s partner for iPhone parts and assembly, leaked more than 200,000 files onto the dark web, tarnishing not just the vendor’s reputation but also the credibility of Modi’s ‘Make in India’ campaign.
There is no clarity yet on when the electronics unit will be able to produce India’s first 28-nanometer chip, even as its foray into semiconductors keeps guzzling capital.
Nor is a turnaround in sight at Air India, which the Tata Group took over more than four years ago. Even a Singapore lawmaker is asking if the city-state’s taxpayers will be on the hook to cover the mounting losses at the carrier, in which Singapore Airlines owns a little over 25%.
Yet nothing can move at Bombay House, the group’s Mumbai headquarters, until Noel Tata, representing the controlling trust, resolves the decade-old squabble with the Mistry family, his in-laws and second-largest shareholders in Tata Sons. Chandrasekaran was the first group chairman who came from outside the Tata and Mistry clans.
Elsewhere, long-standing rivalries have descended into public spectacles. After the opposition questioned the fairness of a bankruptcy-tribunal ruling granting media owner Subhash Chandra a 99.97% debt haircut and some banks threatened to appeal against the order, Chandra took to the airwaves.
He accused Mukesh Ambani, India’s second-richest tycoon, of sabotaging his Zee’s 2024 rescue and orchestrating media smears on his rival network, which includes CNBC’s local unit. “Mukesh ji, please stop the wrong propaganda against me and my group,” he said, before adding in Hindi: “I have nothing left to lose—but you do.”
Ambani’s flagship Reliance denied the allegations as baseless. “Our media brands have never been used to attack anyone,” it said in a statement. On Monday, the bankruptcy tribunal said the insolvency petition against Chandra will be heard afresh.
Ambani isn’t the only large business facing accusations of using its control of media to trounce corporate rivals. Weeks earlier, Mukesh’s younger sibling Anil Ambani, a former billionaire now in the crosshairs of a bank-fraud investigation, alleged in a Delhi court that rival Gautam Adani’s NDTV was publishing defamatory articles to snap up his assets on the cheap. The Adani Group has not publicly commented on the claims.
Why are India’s billionaires trying to pull each other down precisely when as a group they are failing to build anything enduring? As Ha-Joon Chang, a South Korean economist at the SOAS University of London, has argued, firms in the world’s most populous nation are too enamored with short-term profits to create long-term value. They are not keen on serious industrialization, he told Frontline last year.
Millennial and Gen-Z heirs increasingly show little appetite for traditional industry, while the healthy ‘animal spirits’ of India’s 1990s liberalization have curdled into predatory asset grabs.
Rather than pushing frontiers—the AI revolution is passing India by—captains of industry are squabbling over turf, state contracts and legacy commodity businesses. Startups remain focused on gig-economy apps rather than technological innovation, while private R&D spending remains negligible even for large firms.
Data this week showed that the economy expanded at a better-than-expected 7.8% rate in the June quarter, despite the supply shock from the Iran war. But why isn’t rapid growth translating into jobs? The anger spilling into the streets is the product of 40% unemployment among young graduates; the turmoil in the boardrooms is the sound of billionaires fighting over crumbs because they no longer know how to expand the pie.
The cockroach movement deserves attention for what it will mean for the legitimacy of the Modi administration as the 2029 general election draws nearer. For investors, however, the broader malaise within India’s corporate class—mostly simmering as innuendo and finger-pointing but occasionally erupting as destabilizing shocks—is no less important. ©Bloomberg
The author is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering industrial companies and financial services in Asia.