Author: Raoji

The Book ‘ The Rise of the BJP’ is written by Bhupendra Yadav and Ila Patnaik. Bhupendra is a long time BJP politician and is currently a Minister in the Union Cabinet. Ila is a well known economist.

The Book traces the journey of BJP from its origins as Jan Sangh to the current behemoth it is now.

The Book makes for a fascinating read as it covers all the general elections from 1951 to 2019. As such, it is full of interesting details and trivia.

I was surprised to see the consistent high vote share that Socialist/Communist parties got in India till recently.

Another surprise for me was the fact that Indian National Congress till 1980s used to get more than 40% vote share which fell to less than 20% in 2014.

The Book traces the various elections and the main issues of those elections. The Book obviously has a very symphatetic bias to the BJP but does a good job in covering the vicissitudes of Indian politics.

After PM Modi & Amit Shah took charge of the BJP, the kind of focus they brought to the organisation & elections is truly breath taking.

In India, a typical voting booth is a physical location where about 1,000 voters cast their votes.There are about 1 Million polling booths in India. BJP had a person responsible for each booth. After each election , a post-mortem is done to understand reasons of success or failure.

Each booth has pages of voters called panna. Each panna has names of 20 to 30 voters.Since 40% vote share is enough to win elections, BJP targets to win around 12-15 voters of each panna. It tries to convert many of these voters to members of the party.

With this kind of focus, its no wonder that BJP is the largest political party in the world with a claimed membership of 180 million !

I would recommend this Book only to those interested in Indian politics.

The Book ‘Forging Mettle’ is written by Pavan C Lall and covers the story of Nrupender Rao, the Founder of Pennar Group.

Pennar Group, along with the Nagarjuna Group, were amonst the pioneering business groups from Hyderabad. The book explains the cultural, economic and political context in which these business groups evolved.

Nrupender Rao was brilliant at academics. He went to IIT Kharagpur and then to US for his Masters. At the insistence of his family, he returned to India to contribute to the Motherland.

He started his career with the Coromandel, then Union Carbide and later joined Mr. Raju who started the Nagarjuna Group.

After a few years in the Nagarjuna Group, Mr. Rao set up the Pennar Group which was into steel initially.

The author does a good job of explaining how the Group grew and then its financial woes due to diworseification and finally how the Group recovered.

One of the most interesting takeaway from the Book was how Eight Capital helped turned around Pennar Group and some of the things they check to ensure Promoters don’t siphon funds away.

Mr. Rao and other entrepreneurs of his generation were focussed on creating jobs & employment. Hence they rarely made detailed financial plans about new ventures etc. They considered themeselves as industrialists first and business people later. This lack of focus on profits ensured many of their diversifications were not successful. But there is no denying the stellar role they played in the industrialisation of India

I would recommend this Book to those interested in Indian business