If anyone doubts the ability – and determination – of Indian companies to block foreign investors when they sense unwanted competition, the experience of the Financial Times newspaper demonstrates the reality in what is still a partly-controlled economy.

Just over 20 years after first eyeing the Indian market, the FT has failed to obtain permission to print the newspaper in India and has, in the past few weeks, walked away from a joint venture that had gone sour with the Business Standard, one of the countries leading business dailies.

The FT is now looking at a new venture with Network 18, a television-based group that has successful joint tv channels with CNN and CNBC, and is partnering with Forbes to produce a business magazine in India.

Network 18 is expected to launch a new business newspaper which would have pages devoted to FT syndicated stories and will probably have an FT equity stake - though the FT is also focused on developing its online audience with Network 18, and is primarily interested in printing its international edition in the country.

It is just over 20 years since the FT started trying to get a toehold in India’s newspaper market after it was approached (while I was its Delhi-based South Asia correspondent) by two Indian business families – the Delhi-based Modis and the London-based Hindujas– to print the paper in India.

Those approaches did not lead to a deal, nor did talks with the Bennett Coleman group, which owns the Times of India (circulation 2.8 million) and Economic Times (over 750,000), India’s leading general and business titles. Bennett Coleman has been blocking the FT’s entry, fearing the competition mainly in terms of staff salaries and quality. It registered Financial Times as a Bennett Coleman title, started protective legal cases around the country, and publishes a weekly inconsequential-looking four sheet supplement called “Financial Times” to underpin its rights.

About 15 years ago the FT joined up with the Business Standard, then owned by ABP, a Calcutta-based publishing house run by Aveek Sarkar, who has a successful and happy 50-50 publishing joint venture with Penguin Books and is talking to Time Warner, which owns Fortune, about launching a monthly business title. In the early 1990s the FT posted an associate editor into the Business Standard for three years, who helped raise editorial standards. Five years ago it bought a 13.85% stake in the paper, which it expected to raise to 26%, the maximum foreign direct investment (FDI) allowed in newspapers.

The FT quickly found it had run into more opposition. The Business Standard had by then sold by Sarkar to a group of Mumbai financiers, led by Uday Kotak, a leading banker, and the FT’s bid to boost its equity stake was turned down by the government because FDI in Kotak’s businesses allegedly pushed the total in the paper above 26%. Later the FT found its views were not listened to by people running the paper, and that it was receiving no help arguing with the government over the equity stake.

Sensing that it had found another opponent rather than a partner, it eventually decided to pull out – which it has now done, selling its stake to Kotak interests. T.N. Ninan, editor and publisher of the Business Standard, would not comment on these developments when I telephoned him, though he did say his newspaper was doing well with daily circulation rising near 200,000, and he seemed unconcerned that he will not be able to use FT syndicated articles from the end of this year.

Over the years the FT has secured the support of some government ministers but not enough for a majority in the cabinet, and no prime minister or finance minister has felt it a big enough issue to make it worth challenging their colleagues.

Meanwhile the Wall Street Journal has a partial presence through a (non financial) partnership with the Hindustan Times group in Mint, a one-year old business newspaper. Mint is raising the standards of accuracy, in-depth reporting, and quality in a branch of the media where such standards are rare.

Rupert Murdoch has talked since he bought the Journal of starting a paper in India, and could invest in Mint.  There are also two other local companies entering a booming but crowded market that already has six English language business dailies, some of which, including the Economic Times and Business Standard, are launching Hindi and local language editions.

And the moral of the story? Someone once said (about joint ventures in China, I think) that “your worst enemies are your partners” - to which one could add “and allies in their industry.” Only two foreign newspapers are currently published in India. One is the International Herald Tribune, which has successfully defied a government ban on foreign papers printing a special Indian edition. The other is the Daily Mail, whose UK publishers, Associated Newspapers, have a 26% stake in a look-alike semi-tabloid Mail Today which is also raising standards and seems to have escaped opposition from vested Indian interests because none of them saw it as competition.

Ratan Tata, who runs the Tata Group, one of India’s two biggest conglomerates, is buying into a history of trouble with his $2.3 billion cash deal, announced today,  to acquire the Jaguar and Land-Rover companies from Ford (F). Transfer of ownership is due to be completed by the end of June, and the  question is whether he can then break a cycle of decline.

It’s been 40 years since the British government, in a bid to rebuild the country’s automobile industry, cobbled together ailing car brands such as Jaguar, Rover, Austin, Morris and Riley into a giant called British Leyland. BL, as it became known, was a failure, mainly because of endemic labor problems, uninspired products, and poor quality. Since 1968, there have been many rescue attempts, but only rare short bursts of success. Several of the once proud names are long forgotten and none is British-owned; the iconic MG brand was bought three years ago by China’s Nanjing Automobile to make sports cars in China and the U.K., and the Morris Mini cult car is with BMW.

So could Tata succeed where others have failed? There’s reason for optimism. Ratan Tata isn’t expected to treat Jaguar and Land Rover like a traditional takeover: He says he’s not planning to overhaul senior management, close factories in Britain, or cut workers. And he doesn’t seem all that interested in instant profits – just as he doesn’t expect instant returns from the tiny Nano car he hopes to launch by year’s end. Instead, he is expected to use the brands and their U.K. plants, executives and labor to help build Tata Motors, which had $7.2 billion sales in fiscal 2007, into a global car company. His been on this mission for several years, buying Britain’s Tetley Tea in 2000, a Korea-based Daewoo truck plant in 2004, and steel giant Corus (previously British Steel) last year.

Ratan Tata’s hands-off ownership could win him crucial support as he tries to fold the Jaguar and Land Rover brands into Tata. Mark Norbom, the head of General Electric in Japan, wrote recently in the Financial Times about the importance of the “soft side” of a takeover deal. The “look in the eyes that (the buying) company is worthy” has special value, said Norbom, and is something that “does not come naturally to the typical western-trained dealmaker.” Well, it seems to come naturally to Tata and his people. It was evident in the Corus deal, and it seems to be at work again in their Jaguar and Land-Rover plans.

This could, of course, mean that Tata is seen - especially by British trade union leaders - as a soft option who will let workforces carry on as usual. Land Rover has had three years of record sales for Tata to build on. But there’s no telling how long the status quo can last, especially if demand slackens in the United States and elsewhere and Ratan Tata has to institute cutbacks at the luxury car makers.

Tata has said that Land Rover and Jaguar will benefit from India’s low-cost design and IT ability - and boost sales in Asia. His company will “add value in co-operating on engineering and development which are considerably cheaper (in India) than in the west,” he said. Tata Technologies, the group’s advanced industrial design house, is based in Pune and operates in twelve countries, with international headquarters in Singapore. It has been involved in the design of Tata Motors’ cars and vans, but does about 75% of its work for foreign clients, including Chrysler, General Motors (GM), Boeing (BA) and Airbus.

There’s another question hanging over the deal: Tata’s future once its 70-year old patriarch retires. He is not due to step down until he’s 75 - in December 2012 - but has said he would like to go earlier, and there are rumors it could be at the end of this year. That seems unlikely, if only because there is no clear successor. From inside the Tata family there is a reclusive cousin, Noel Tata, who runs some of Tata’s retail businesses, but there is no sign of him being groomed for the corporate and public life that goes with the job. One or two top executives from outside the family, and even outside the Tata Group, have also been rumored, but none has been publicly held out as a successor.

It is Tata who has provided the personal drive and leadership to turn Tata Motors into a business that can produce the Nano and buy two world famous brands - in the same year. There’s a big job waiting for someone – and Tata is not yet saying who. Until it does, the era uncertainty at Land Rover and Jaguar won’t be over.

President Pervez Musharraf made a strange television broadcast last night to the Pakistan nation in the wake of the assassination a week ago of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. Dressed in civilian clothes, as he now has to be, having retired from his army post, he looked far from confident.

But what was most surprising – at least initially - was the long-winded and painstaking way in which he spelled out details of the widespread riots, violence and damage to property that happened mostly in Sind, Bhutto’s home province, over the weekend.

“Daily wagers could not go to work,” he said. “The petrol pumps were set on fire due to which the public transport remained off roads and it was the general public which suffered….. rail engines and bogeys were torched, so much so that even the rail track was uprooted at some places.”

Also “jewelry and ammunition shops” had been targeted and “arsonists” had released prisoners from jails and destroyed election offices. Finally, “all the development work that was carried out there in the last few years has greatly suffered during those two days of violence.”

Then the reasons for the catalog of disaster became clear. They gave Musharraf an excuse for the Election Commission to delay a general election, which was due to be held next Tuesday, till February 18. The speech was also designed to try to justify deploying the army and paratroop forces “all over Pakistan to ensure that there is no violence during the elections.” Ominously, the forces would remain in place afterwards – doubtless to quell post-election protests.

That is not a very long delay and, initially, looks like a good compromise between mainstream political parties such as the Bhutto family’s Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) that wanted no delay, and Musharraf’s Pakistan Muslim League (Q) that wanted longer. But some of the sympathy vote that will go to the PPP following Benazir Bhutto’s death may get dissipated in the next six weeks and, more importantly, there will be plenty of time for Musharraf, the army and other forces to gain control of election arrangements and rig voting to try to prevent the PPP leading a coalition government.

Meanwhile, a few more thoughts on the Bhutto dynasty that has been re-established since Bhutto’s death with the naming of her 19-year old Oxford undergraduate son, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, as the PPP’s chairman, and his father Asif Ali Zardari as the caretaker co-chairman. This has not happened because there are no other capable politicians in the PPP – there certainly are, notably Aitzaz Hassan who I first met 20 years ago when he was leading lawyers’ protests against the military rule of the then-President Mohammad Zia ul-Haq.

Now a prominent lawyer (currently under house arrest), Hassan, and others like him, could easily lead the party and run an effective government. But none of them dare challenge the dynasty for fear that, if (when) they failed, they would be banished from the inner circle of leadership. Such courtiers’ and acolytes’ fears of exclusion help sustain dynasties everywhere.

Ironically assassinations, personal tragedies though they are, only enhance dynasties’ immortality because they raise the height of the pedestals on which the families perch and make it increasingly difficult for capable outsiders to take over, irrespective of the quality of the dynastic leadership.

“It is certainly not brilliance, foresight, erudition or heart, but rather the experience of living with violence – facing it and using it – that separates political families from the rest,” writes Dipankar Gupta, a leading Indian sociologist, in this morning’s Mail Today daily newspaper.

While Bilawal finishes his studies at Oxford, the party will be headed by Asif Zadari – a man aptly described by my colleague Jo Johnson in the Financial Times yesterday as “a roguish bon vivant whose reputation for corruption has been only partly offset by a sense that he has paid his dues during an eight-year spell in jail.”

Who would vote for such a man, one might ask. The answer, as we will surely see next month, is “millions” - in awe, memory and sympathy for the Bhutto name – even though Musharraf and his forces will try to divert the votes. That is when Pakistan could face serious social disorder because, if Musharraf overdoes the poll rigging, the PPP and other parties will organize massive and violent demonstrations that will be far more damaging than last weekend’s mayhem in Sind.

 My colleague Jo Johnson, the Financial Times’ south Asia correspondent, writes this morning that the “chief executives cocooned in the sandalwood-scented splendor” of Fortune’s Global Forum for the past three days would have learned more if they had left the grand old Imperial Hotel, where the Forum was being held, and met 25,000 landless workers “from the bottom of Indian society” who marched 320 kms to Delhi to highlight their plight.

“From the stunted and wasted frames of the landless, they would have observed how malnutrition rates, already higher than in parts of sub-Saharan Africa, are rising in many places, as wages lag behind soaring food prices. They would have learnt how the 120m families who depend on the land for subsistence agriculture, generating no marketable surplus from one season to the next, live in terror of expropriation by state governments operating land scams in the name of development,” Johnson says in his on-line column.

He has a point, a serious one, even though people at the Forum did learn a lot about India. But, with the Indian stock market zooming past 20,000 on Mumbai’s Sensex, this march of “indigenous tribes people and ‘untouchables’ from the bottom of Indian society,” who are excluded from the booming economy, aroused little interest when it arrived in Delhi on Sunday.

Newspaper front pages gave more space the next day to a local marathon run, and then focused on the stock market and iconic (India loves icons) visitors to Delhi - Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, Henry Paulson, US Treasury secretary, and Henry Kissinger, former US secretary of state. Kissinger became involved in lobbying for America’s proposed nuclear deal with India, but he was primarily in town for a convention organized by JP Morgan (JPM), the US investment bank, which took over the Global Forum’s elegant conference facilities in the Imperial Hotel today. That conference is also unlikely to focus on the plight of those sad disillusioned marchers.

Yet many of the executives attending both conferences are at least partially involved in the growing problem of the landless. Their finance and property companies are piling money into Special Economic Zones (SEZs) and other development projects that deprive the poor of their land and livelihood, once land use regulations have been changed (foreign investment is not allowed in agricultural land).

Low prices are paid for land whose values then rise rapidly, benefiting developers, politicians and bureaucrats who are often involved in land scams, while the poor are swept aside. Such people have little chance from birth of being anything but losers and, while disputes over land grabs do sometimes hit Indian newspaper headlines, the stories rarely leave much of an imprint.

The main issue is the plight of farmers and landless laborers, plus tribal people who live in remote areas, many of whom have had their land for generations. The authorities frequently claim that they will be fully compensated - last April it was announced that SEZs should provide one job for every family displaced. But, as I wrote then, that scarcely begins to tackle the scale of the problem, especially for the landless, those without ownership rights, and millions who have never had proper legal ownership documents. Even those with some paperwork fear, as frequently happens in such situations, that they will be cheated by local government and bank officials and their henchmen.

This is growing into a crisis. Land looks like it is becoming India’s most explosive social issue in the future, as those who benefit from land grabs become more greedy and those who lose out feel even further left behind. Industrial companies are also hit. Posco, the Korean company, has been having problems in Orissa on a planned $12 billion steel project that has become caught up in local tribal issues, fermented by Maoist Naxalite rebels who control vast swathes of remote areas. Four Posco officials were kidnapped recently.

On Sunday, as the march came into Delhi, there was unrest in West Bengal at Nandigram where a 10,000-acre chemicals SEZ planned by Indonesia’s Salim group ran into trouble earlier this year. Four people were killed in a bomb blast on Sunday, that was believed to be connected to the dispute, and a political leader’s convoy of cars was fired on.

One could dismiss these as isolated incidents, but they reflect growing anger and unrest that could explode. The government this week responded to the march by announcing the creation of a National Land Reform Committee to develop a new policy, but it is unlikely to achieve much - such committees rarely do.

Hey folks - I’ve enjoyed your comments on my India 60th post, but there are some misunderstandings. First, I don’t live in America, as some of you imagine, and I am not even American. I’m a British journalist and have lived in India for 18 of the past 24 or so years, first for the Financial Times in the 1980s and then, from 1995, back in Delhi and writing primarily for Fortune and The Economist. And yes, I have traveled extensively - to all states in India, apart from the North East (which I’ve never written about in Riding the Elephant). In the past two or three years, my city visits have included Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Cochin, Agra, Jaipur, Varanasi, Lucknow, Jalandhar and Kolkata, plus elsewhere in areas such as Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Orissa, Pondicherry and the Himalayan foothills. So I’ve seen a lot of the country, not enough maybe, because nothing is ever enough in such a massive, varied and rapidly changing place. But I have to wonder, without wanting to be too confrontational, how my journeys compare with those of some distant comment writers.

Please keep the comments rolling - je