On Friday (March 1), Zoho Co-Founder and CEO Sridhar Vembu backed up the allegation from K Annamalai, the Tamil Nadu state president for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), that the use of narcotic drugs is spreading even to the remote areas in the state.
However, as Annamalai did, Vembu didn't directly attack Chief Minister M K Stalin of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), BJP's sworn rival in the state.
Politicians, almost always, like to keep their business interests under wraps. Similarly, it's unlikely for business owners to state their political preferences openly. On that count, Vembu is a clear outlier.
The 56-year-old entrepreneur, who was conferred the Padma Shri (the fourth highest civilian honour in India) in 2021, has denied any political affiliations in the past. Still, most of his views seem to overlap with those of the ruling establishment under Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Here's a look at where the founder of Zoho stands on the political spectrum.
Vembu, the nationalist
Vembu is among those who want Indians to shed the colonial baggage and embrace an Indian perspective on issues of identity and politics. According to them, this would include adopting the name 'Bharat' instead of India.
"The name 'India' is an English invention just like the names Madras, Calcutta or Bombay… "Bharat, Bharatham in Tamil, is the name we use in our languages. Why do the people who changed Madras to Chennai and Calcutta to Kolkata — changes I fully support — object to Bharat?," he said/tweeted in September 2023.
In support of the name Bharat, Vembu has criticised those opposing the move, without taking names.
Vembu likes Aatmanirbhar Bharat
The spirit of nationalism is visible in his love for the Indian government's policy to substitute imports with locally manufactured products called Aatmanirbhar Bharat.
He'd like Indian manufacturers and service providers to look at Coimbatore and Kanpur as target markets just as much as Chicago or London.
Vembu has generously praised the PM's support for homegrown technology like the Vande Bharat trains.
Before Aatmanirbhar Bharat became a buzzword, Vembu let the gravy train of venture capital pass and kept his startup bootstrapped until now.
Even without big investments from marquee names, Zoho crossed an annual revenue of $1 billion in November 2022.
Vembu like decentralisation
While he stands for a unified national identity and purpose, the Zoho CEO also champions decentralised development.
Even as an entrepreneur, Vembu resisted the lure of India's startup capital, Bengaluru, and built his venture in a remote town, Tenkasi, 650 kilometres away from the state capital, Chennai.
"We have already opened 15 rural offices in towns like Tenkasi. By this year, we will have 25 to 30 in rural centres all over the South," he said in an exclusive chat with CNBC-TV18 last year.
"In five years, 50% of our employees will work from smaller rural centres. So, we want to keep people rooted to their towns and villages and provide world-class jobs in these places," he emphasised in April 2023.
In 2021, Prime Minister Modi referred to Vembu's work in rural Tamil Nadu in one of his Mann Ki Baat addresses.
"To achieve durable, sustainable and equitable growth, we must think of Bharat as 800+ districts, each with 1.5 to 3 million people," he said in July 2023.
At the height of uncertainty in the startup and tech ecosystem last year, Vembu received a fair degree of praise when he told CNBC-TV18 in an exclusive chat that Zoho wouldn't lay off employees and that they had no reason to worry about losing their jobs.
Vembu for local languages
In a similar vein, Vembu would like to see the promotion of local languages over English. "We need an Indian civilisational renaissance and that starts with teaching our own literary epics, in all our languages… Tamil has a glorious literary tradition, but increasingly, middle-class children in Tamil Nadu learn little of it. Technology and tradition are not opposites."
Vembu recently revealed that he started to learn Hindi to deal with clients and vendors who prefer that language.
Vembu's take on the history of Indian economy
There's nothing unusual about CEOs praising the policies of the government in power.
Like many other CEOs, Vembu also praises the Modi administration for initiating the Aatmanirbhar programme, improving the ease of doing business, and elevating the country's global image.
However, he stood out of the corporate pack when he attacked economist Kaushik Basu when he praised previous governments under Congress Prime Ministers PV Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh.
"The professor carefully neglects to mention who inflicted socialism and stagnation on India before the reforms… India's curse was to trust these academic economists with their toy models, speaking with oracular authority as 'experts," Vembu said in response to Basu, the former chief economist at World Bank.
In a 2021 social media post, Vembu has come down firmly on "India-born, US-trained" economists, who, in his words, "preach to India the same policy (finance-and-consumption-led growth) that failed so miserably in the US."
Vembu has not shied away from taking potshots at the former governor of the Reserve Bank of India, Raghuram Rajan, a known critic of the Modi administration. Rajan, on his part, has added political hues to his career as an economist by joining rallies led by the parties in opposition to Modi.
Vembu doesn't hide his friendship with the establishment.
When social media users criticised Vembu for being the chief guest at an event hosted by the Hindu nationalist social organisation, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), which is also the ideological parent of the BJP, he hit back. "I don't decide my views based on Twitter attacks," he said in a post on X (previously known as Twitter) in 2020 in response to criticism for attending the RSS event.
In a clarification to CNBC-TV18.com at the time, a Zoho spokesperson said that the company's CEO was invited as the chief guest to "share his views on development, particularly in rural India".
Just last year, BJP president Annamalai visited Zoho's learning centre in rural Tenkasi, and Vembu often retweets and endorses the BJP leader's views.
So, how is he not the target of political parties in opposition?
Vembu may have made friends in the BJP with his candid political positions. Interestingly, he doesn't have a lot of enemies in other parties.
One of the ways he's managed that is by avoiding criticising elected leaders from other political parties. He attacks the ideas and not people, at least not those who wield political power.
The DMK, which is already in a no-holds-barred political contest with the BJP in Tamil Nadu, doesn't have a view or stance on Vembu. "That's because he hasn't really said anything about us or made any remarks that would elicit a response from us," said a DMK leader when asked about his support for Annamalai's allegation that the DMK government has allowed the free flow of drugs in the state.
CNBC-TV18 reached out to Vembu for his comments on this piece. He declined.
(Edited by : Sriram Iyer)
First Published: Mar 8, 2024 4:13 PM IST
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