Bill Clinton (top), Dhirubhai Ambani

Washington, Nov. 7: Bill Clinton made an unusual request in March 2000 on the way to his meeting with Indian industrialists on Dalal Street: he wanted to stay back at the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) for 10 minutes after everyone else had left the meeting.

The President’s request threw both the US Secret Service and the Indian security into a tizzy. They both said there was no way Clinton’s carcade could securely move along Bombay Samachar Marg to his next programme because the streets would be clogged by the vehicles of departing Indian industrialists.

If the Indians were to be held back at the Phiroze Jeejeebhoy Towers, home of the BSE, the very purpose of Clinton staying back in the building would be defeated.

America’s 42nd President, as everyone knows, is not one to easily give up. His persuasive powers even with a stubborn Secret Service have been legendary and eventually he had his way.

When Clinton’s closest aides told Indian officials why their President wanted to stay back at the BSE, they were taken by surprise. He wanted to meet Dhirubhai Ambani alone to thank him for giving a contract to American conglomerate Bechtel to build the Reliance Jamnagar complex in Gujarat, the world’s largest refinery and petrochemicals hub.

Ambani’s contract created thousands of jobs for Americans.

The story of Clinton’s “thank you” meeting with the Reliance patriarch, told to his visiting successor Barack Obama by secretary of state Hillary Clinton a few days ago, is an anecdote that Obama has remembered, going by the laser-sharp focus on American jobs during his meetings and speeches in Mumbai yesterday.

But there is an even bigger reason why Obama is today grateful to the entire Indian business community, especially to Indian companies with a presence in the US, although politics and etiquette demand that he cannot talk about it in public.

Only days before Obama left for Mumbai, it was Indian firms operating in the US and American companies doing business in India that brought about a truce between the White House and America Inc, ending a long and ugly war between the two sides.

Or at least a ceasefire to facilitate Obama’s meetings in Mumbai after their fight had descended into attrition during the recent mid-term election that gave Democrats a drubbing.

Two days before Obama left for Mumbai, his treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, met the chief executive of the US Chamber of Commerce, Thomas Donohue, in a peace-making effort preparatory to Obama’s address to the Chamber’s subsidiary, the US-India Business Council (USIBC) in Mumbai last evening.

Geithner, who went to school in New Delhi and lived in the capital’s New Friends Colony as a child, was determined that Obama’s meetings in Mumbai should go off without any hitch because he had the experience of being at the receiving end of India’s displeasure during his last visit to New Delhi on account of a preoccupation with China throughout.

Last month, at the height of his war with Obama, Donohue, in an open letter, went so far as to accuse the administration and the Democratic Congress of “desperately trying to change the subject away from our stalled economy and nearly double-digit unemployment. They (Democrats) hope that by demonising those who oppose their failed policies, they can fire up their dispirited and disappointed base and silence our voice.”

Subsequently, the Chamber pumped money into Republican campaigns through anonymous front organisations and was significantly responsible for wresting the House of Representatives away from Obama’s party and dealing a serious blow to the President.

Three weeks ago, the White House was in jitters as it appeared that Obama’s meetings with industrialists in Mumbai might not take place: in which case, some of his top aides were of the view that like the aborted trip to Amritsar, the Mumbai leg of the presidential visit may also have to be called off.

Obama was very keen on demonstrating that he stood shoulder-to-shoulder with India on fighting terrorism by going to Mumbai and staying at the Taj Mahal hotel.

But his senior aides said that a visit to the city without engaging Indian industrialists and US businesses with interest in India would send a wrong message. Especially in the light of actions against outsourcing and H1-B visas by Obama’s administration and a Congress controlled by his party.

Desperate, Obama’s officials working on the Mumbai visit called Indian companies in the US and their representative organisations to the White House at very short notice for an emergency meeting on October 15.

That was a Friday. Normally meetings are not called at the White House on Friday afternoons because the President leaves for Camp David for the weekend and his staff try to take a break from their dawn-to-midnight pressure-cooker schedule.

The meeting was tense. The base of the Democrats had accused and named nearly 80 Indian companies of having contributed over $800,000 to the USIBC, which in turn had allegedly siphoned part of that money into campaigns against the President. Yet, a way had to be found to facilitate Obama’s visit.

Three days after that meeting, 26 Indian companies aided by three executives of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) met the Indian ambassador , Meera Shankar, here to work out a compromise under the auspices of the CII-India Business Forum.

A similar meeting was held four days later with the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry.

Kiran Pasricha, the CII’s Washington-based deputy director-general, refused to discuss these meetings or to claim credit for smoothening out Obama’s visit to Mumbai, but she said the stoic Indian corporate approach was that “issues will arise when we do business. But we want to expand relations with the US.”

She said the CII-India Business Forum, which represented Indian firms in the US, had all along been of the view that “barriers must be not be erected” back home as retaliation for US protectionism. “We will find creative ways to do business, which will be a win-win for both sides.”

Obviously, this was an approach that satisfied both the White House and the USIBC. It was an approach that was a key input into Obama’s public overture to the US Chamber of Commerce after the Democrats were defeated in the elections on November 2.

At his post-election news conference, the President said: “I think business took the message that, well, gosh, it seems like we may be always painted as the bad guy.”He humbly acknowledged that interactions with the Chamber had not been “managed by me as well as it needed to be.” That admission paved the way for yesterday’s successful meetings in Mumbai.