Yes Sir, Yes Ma’am: India Inc.’s Boardroom Apartheid Never Really Ended
There was a time when signs outside British clubs in India carried some version of the same ugly message: dogs and Indians not allowed.
The Raj is gone. The signs are gone.
The mindset found a new address.
The investor relations department.
Walk into earnings call season and you can see it play out with clockwork precision.
A handful of sell-side analysts get the microphone. Everyone else waits.
Retail investors. Independent analysts. Small funds. Anyone without an institutional relationship to protect.
Muted. Deprioritised. Sometimes simply invisible.
Access has become the new velvet rope.
And the guest list has not changed much. Only the doorman’s uniform has.
I am not going to pretend that the analysts asking softball questions are villains.
Nassim Taleb put the underlying problem better than I can. In Antifragile, he wrote: “I have two cats and a mortgage.”
It is a deliberately simple way of describing a complicated problem.
People with something to lose are less independent than people with nothing to lose.
The analyst on that call has a boss to please, a relationship with management to protect, a research franchise to maintain and a seat at the next management meeting that depends, at least partly, on not burning today’s relationship.
They may not have two cats and a mortgage.
But they have a boss.
“Yes sir.”
“Yes ma’am.”
That is how institutional incentives work.
It is not necessarily corruption.
It is incentive-driven self-censorship.
But understanding why someone stays silent does not excuse the silence.
Taleb had another, even more brutal formulation:
“If you see fraud and don’t say fraud, you are a fraud.”
The principle extends beyond fraud.
If you see something that does not make sense and stay silent because you are protecting your access, you have stopped being an independent observer.
You have become part of the system.
And then comes the ritual.
The numbers are ordinary. Perhaps even disappointing.
Yet the first question begins:
“Congratulations on a great set of numbers…”
Really?
Great compared with what?
That is not analysis.
That is customer service dressed up as research.
The analyst may not have two cats or a mortgage. But they have something equally powerful in the institutional hierarchy: something to lose.
Their access.
Their next meeting.
Their next factory visit.
Their relationship with management.
Their boss’s approval.
Corporate servitude, just with better tailoring.
And who ultimately pays for that servility?
Not the analyst collecting the salary.
The cost is borne by every retail and small investor who never gets the opportunity to ask the question that actually matters.
The question about margin compression nobody explained.
The question about working capital nobody volunteered.
The question about capital allocation.
The question about a related-party transaction.
The question about an auditor resignation.
The question about why management guidance was missed.
The question that makes everyone in the room uncomfortable.
That is precisely the question worth asking.
The Companies That Pull Up the Drawbridge
I will say this plainly, because there is no point garnishing the truth to make it look prettier.
In my own experience, I have never been successful in securing an opportunity to interact meaningfully with management at Jubilant Ingrevia, Eureka Forbes, Biocon and Syngene.
That is my experience.
I am not claiming to have audited their investor-relations policies. I am not claiming that every analyst receives the same treatment. And I am certainly not claiming that restricted access proves a poor business or poor governance.
I am simply saying that a repeatedly closed door is itself information.
Because a company’s character does not reveal itself only in an investor presentation.
It reveals itself in how it behaves when someone asks an inconvenient question.
Who gets access?
Who gets the microphone?
Who gets called back?
Which questions receive a direct answer?
Does management welcome disagreement?
Or does the conversation become more difficult once you stop being useful to them?
These are not matters of etiquette.
They are observations about corporate culture.
The Companies That Keep the Door Open
There is another side to the ledger.
In my dealings, companies including Navin Fluorine, Aether Industries, Orchid Pharma, Deepak Nitrite, Acutaas Chemicals, Neogen Chemicals, Shilpa Medicare, Concord Biotech, Gland Pharma, Cohance Life, Piramal Pharma, Neuland Labs, Anthem Biosciences, Apcotex Industries, NOCIL, Akums, Windlas, Chemplast, Sai Life Sciences, Sona Comstar, Narayana Health, Solara, Aarti Drugs, Entero, Viyash Life, Supriya Life and Laurus Labs have been willing to engage with questions without making pedigree the entry ticket. There are many more that are open and accessible. This list is not exhaustive, but the red list (above is!)
The question matters more than the person asking it.
That is how it should be.
A bulge-bracket analyst and an independent investor may not have the same resources, but a good question does not become less intelligent because it comes from a small investor.
And companies confident in their business should have little reason to fear intelligent scrutiny.
If the numbers are good, explain why.
If the numbers are bad, explain why.
If a strategy failed, explain what changed.
If capex is delayed, explain the bottleneck.
If margins are unsustainable, say so.
If a thesis is wrong, admit it.
Good management does not need every question to be friendly. It needs the questions to be intelligent. Read my Q4 FY26 questions to Narayana Health as one small example!
That tells you something about the operating culture.
It tells you something about management confidence.
And over time, it can tell you something about the quality of the organisation itself.
This Is Not About Hurt Feelings
I am not writing this because someone did not return my call.
That would be petty.
I am writing about something much larger.
Access asymmetry is information asymmetry with a human face.
When management decides who is allowed to question it, it influences the quality of information that reaches the market.
Not necessarily through accounting fraud.
Not necessarily through a deliberate attempt to mislead.
Sometimes simply through curation.
The friendly questions get answered.
The uncomfortable questions never arrive.
The narrative becomes cleaner.
The call becomes smoother.
And everyone goes home happy.
Except the investor trying to understand what is actually happening inside the business.
This is why I pay attention not just to what management says, but to how management behaves when challenged.
A company can manufacture a beautiful investor presentation.
It can rehearse its quarterly commentary.
It can prepare polished answers.
But you learn something different when an intelligent outsider says:
“I don’t believe you. Explain it again.”
That is where culture becomes visible.
And this is also why I would distinguish between what I call the good boys and the bad boys of corporate India.
The good boys are not necessarily companies with perfect numbers.
The bad boys are not necessarily fraudulent companies.
The distinction is simpler.
The good boys are comfortable being questioned. The bad boys are comfortable only when they control the questions.
That is not a verdict.
It is a signal.
And signals matter.
The British signs came down decades ago.
The hierarchy did not completely disappear.
It evolved.
The velvet rope replaced the signboard.
The investor-relations department replaced the club secretary.
The analyst access list replaced the membership register.
And the old message became more sophisticated:
Institutions welcome.
Friendly analysts welcome.
Large investors welcome.
Questions welcome, provided they are the right questions.
Everyone else?
Please wait outside.
The signs came down. The mindset simply learned better manners.
@ingrevia@Bioconlimited@kiranshaw@SyngeneIntl@Eureka_ForbesIN
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