Chairman and Managing Director of Infosys Technologies Limited Kris Gopalakrishnan has urged not to be judgmental and jump into conclusions about persons whose conversations with the corporate lobbyist Niira Radia have now come out in the open.
Addressing a press conference on the sidelines of an IT summit organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), Mr. Gopalakrishnan said that a lot of issues (about the taped conversations) need to be decided from a constitutional and legal perspective.
“These tapes were made by the government for a specific purpose. A lot of issues like whether it was a private conversation and whether it was right to discuss it need to be debated. That’s why the courts will have to decide whether this (bringing it out in the open) was the right thing to do,” he said.
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Asked about the alleged role of former head of the CII Tarun Das, Mr. Gopalakrishnan refused to be drawn into specific cases stating that he was not the right person to judge or comment on the issue and was not “fully aware of the facts”.
He said that the judiciary and law and order system of the country should be let to handle the issue. "We have to look at the full context in which all these things happened,” he said.
“We are living in an age where there is a blurring of public and private lives. We need to understand that but we must also respect privacy and don’t judge people based on limited facts,” Mr. Gopalakrishnan said.
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He rejected the notion that corporate rivalry incited unethical practices stating that competition will always be there and was not the issue. The important thing is to figure out what are the right and the wrong way to do things, he said.
Asked whether it was proper for the corporate companies to meddle in power politics, Mr. Gopalakrishnan said that there was nothing wrong in the industry having interest in aspects like good governance and attracting investments. For instance, there’s nothing wrong if I am interested in Kerala and attract investments here or ask the government to improve governance, he said.
“Now the question here is where the line crosses from advocacy or lobbying into undue influence. That’s what we need to discuss,” Mr. Gopalakrishnan said.