There’s a shabby little pizza outlet on Mumbai’s Altamont Road, the leafy, hilly neighbourhood where some of India’s richest people live. It’s a walk away from Mukesh and Nita Ambani’s high-rise home, Antilia – which to be honest looked far better when I stood in front of it than when I saw its pictures in newspapers declaiming over-the-top aesthetics.

Over a soggy Smokin’ Joe pineapple chicken pizza, I settled down here on a rainy Monday afternoon, reading Hamish McDonald’s The Polyester Prince, the biography of Dhirubhai Ambani. Later that day in faraway Delhi, Sushma Swaraj would accuse the Congress of having received “mota maal” (love that phrase!) from the allocation of coal blocks made by the UPA government.

But at Smokin’ Joe, I was already enjoying reading McDonald’s old book (never officially published in India after the Ambanis had threatened to take the Australian publisher Allen & Unwin to the courts if it was published here), especially the following passage early on in which the author records Suresh Kothary, an old business acquaintance of Dhirubhai’s, narrating an incident in which about Rs 40 million worth of yarn was seized by the customs authorities in 1967:

“Many traders then defaulted on loans taken out to cover the imports. The entire artificial market was paralysed. ‘It could have made us all insolvent,’ Kothary said. ‘This is where I came very closely in touch with Dhirubhai. It was he who saved us all. We fought for about six months. I used to go with him to lawyers day in and day out. We went to Delhi to see Morarji Desai (then finance minister). That was the time I could see he was a wizard. He used all the ways and means.’”

McDonald goes on to write how the crisis “ended as quickly as it started, ostensibly after a one-day hearing of the importers’ appeal in the Customs, Excise and Gold Appellate Tribunal”. Kothary, according to the author, “indicated” that an agreement engineered by Dhirubhai was behind the judicial settlement. “The details are not revealed, but presumably come under the category of ‘That’s India!’…”

McDonald was careful not to be too obvious or explanatory in what Kothary had meant by “That’s India!” – a phrase and its variants which the author uses at more than one place throughout the biography. But at the Smokin’ Joe joint so near the house of Dhirubhai’s elder son, it didn’t take Sushma Swaraj’s ‘let’s-not-be-subtle-anymore-shall-we?’ description a few hours later for me to figure out what “That’s India!” might mean.

In the meantime, while the government was supposed to dodge bullets fired from the Comptroller and Auditor General’s gun, rather mysteriously the BJP has come to the UPA’s rescue by deciding to play Zorro. The Opposition wants the PM to resign and that the coal blocks which the CAG believes to have been allocated unfairly to 142 companies at a loss of Rs 1.86 lakh crore by a screening committee be cancelled. Lovely. But it doesn’t want Parliament to function before these conditions are met.

Now, I’m not a card-holding member of the Conspiracy Theories Club or any of the Left parties (most of the times, the two being the same thing), but there seems to be more than meets the eye than a straight Congress vs BJP war of attrition going on here. In any “That’s India!”-“mota-maal” transaction, there’s a giver and a taker. Coal not being a central resource, one can safely assume whatever mechanism it took to allocate the coal blocks were made across levels and boards of centre, state, region, extreme localisation etc. And since this was done in the opaque darkness of the screening committee, we have no way of knowing what the mechanism was.

The way Newtonian laws of physics break down at the sub-atomic “quantum” level, “mota-maal” percolates in every direction, blind to party politics. So while BJP leaders are banging their gongs away demanding the PM goes off to Mars and the coal block allocations identified by the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) as dodgy are scrapped, do they really want an investigation? Do they really want the CAG and its number-crunching sleuths to dig deeper? Really?

If the apocryphal “That’s India!” is anything to go by, it’s not just a coal minister and men in his ministry from one party who may have received enough incentives to push for certain companies being allocated over others. It’ll be all the players manning all the check-posts.

For instance, purely randomly, of course, if Reliance Power Limited (RPL) is seen by the CAG to have “fudged” its claim of fixed assets value – by reportedly including furniture, “refrigerators and other domestic appliances” – to qualify for a coal block, and the coal ministry passes that bid, the proverbial buck stops at the increasingly proverbial government’s door. But if this creative number-juggling exercise was evident to Ernst & Young calculators, who were hired before the coal blocks were allocated and who rejected the RPL figures, what made those now jumping on hot tin government roofs purr in some corner at that point of time?

Disrupting Parliament, blocking all debate and much-required explanations from the government seem to be quite an effective strategy by which the CAG’s actions (that would have led to many more spotlights being thrown on many more players) become of secondary, postpone-able importance. If 12 members of Parliament across party-lines were opposed to the UPA’s plan to introduce coal blocks being auctioned to the highest bidders in August 2004, one can assume that there will be hopefuls who wouldn’t like to be seen now as lobbyists – not just for continuing the policy of block allocations but also for individual companies getting bids.

Even the Prime Minister and the UPA chairperson have now got whirring into Zorro-like action, promising to show the ruling party’s democratic strength “on the streets”. Be sure that the BJP will join them there. All while those who are bent on not letting the “That’s India!” story in this coal scam seep out too much in the open get into extra action now to, if not shut everyone up, at least  get such a din going that the voice of the CAG gets drowned out. And by that I mean both the mota maal-takers and mota maal-givers up and down the great food chain of India.

At the pizza shop on Altamont Road, I was caught by a passage in The Polyester Prince that I’m tweaking because it’s a perception as applicable to the biography’s protagonist as it is to the India-India Inc. joint venture that he practically forged. Here’s the tweaked passage where a name has been substituted by ‘India’:

“There are three Indias…. One is unique, larger than life, a brand name. It is one of the most talked about economies… The second India is a schemer, a first-class liar, who regrets nothing and has no values in life. Then there is a third India, which is a more sophisticated brain, a dreamer and a visionary almost Napoleonic. People are always getting the three personalities mistaken.” Can one possibly describe the inimitable manner by which India does big business in circa 2012 any better?