Murthy in no mood to relent

Murthy in no mood to relent

Nobody is indispensable, counters Deve Gowda, as CM tries for a patch-up

Daily News and Analysis


Infosys chairman NR Narayana Murthy is in no mood to take back his resignation as head of Bangalore International Airport Limited.
When Karnataka Chief Minister N Dharam Singh called him up in the United States on Saturday morning, Murthy snubbed him and cut the conversation short. Sources close to the chief minister said Murthy told him that he would talk to him on returning to Bangalore on November 7.

Murthy left BIAL in disgust on Thursday after former Prime Minister HD Deve Gowda accused Infosys of grabbing land and questioned his contribution to the project. The Congress and Deve Gowda's Janata Dal (Secular) are ruling the state in coalition.

Singh appeared disturbed on Saturday with the Congress high command telling him to get Murthy to withdraw his resignation even as Deve Gowda stepped up his attack on the software industry icon.Both Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress president Sonia Gandhi hold Murthy in high regard and are understood have told the chief minister that his resignation will sully the party's image.

But Deve Gowda publicly disapproved of any attempt to persuade Murthy to return. “Nobody is indispensable,” he thundered at a press conference on Saturday. The JD(S) is currently indispensable to the survival of the Singh government.

Gowda accused Murthy and former chief minister SM Krishna, now governor of Maharashtra, of being “two sides of the same coin” and joining hands to destabilise the coalition. “Murthy's resignation is the last weapon to bring down the government,” he said.

On Friday Infosys had issued a point-by-point rebuttal of Deve Gowda's charge of land-grabbing, but the former Prime Minister was in no mood to listen and asked why it was running a five-star hotel on one of its campuses. “More than 80 per cent of companies generating 3,00,000 jobs are doing business from rented buildings,” he said. “So far, Infosys has generated only 22,000 jobs.”

“He (Murthy) is not a solitary individual who has contributed to the promotion of the IT sector,” he said. “Behind an able man there are other able men. Did I make any statement (at a meeting last week) to hurt his feelings? I can't understand when I hurt him.”
“If the IT sector has any problems on infrastructure bottlenecks, it should approach the government,” he said.