Lobbying in U.S., Indian Firms Present an American Face -they've hired former * official as lobbyist

[Kadie]

Lobbying in U.S., Indian Firms Present an American Face

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS
Published: September 4, 2007

MUMBAI, India — In the heat of the 2004 presidential race in the United States, John Kerry compared outsourcing to treason, Lou Dobbs harangued against it on CNN and the Indian outsourcing vendors were left scrambling.

Engineers to the core, their leaders fired back with data-packed PowerPoint presentations. Outsourcing is good for the economy, they said. It increases efficiency. It creates more jobs than it costs. But in the eyes of many Americans, those arguments proved no match for accounts of laid-off software engineers.

“Telling someone who loses their job in North Carolina or Jacksonville that this is good for the economy doesn’t work,” said Phiroz A. Vandrevala, an executive vice president at Tata Consultancy Services, one of the largest Indian vendors, who serves as a Washington strategist for Tata and other Indian companies.

But if four years is a lifetime in Washington, it is an eternity in Bangalore. And as the 2008 campaign starts to pick up speed, the Indian outsourcing companies have returned to Washington as veritable insiders, slicker and better connected than ever.

They have hired a former official in the Bush administration as a lobbyist. They are humanizing the issue by bringing Americans they have hired into meetings with politicians.

And, most striking, they have mastered the Washington art of waging proxy battles through local organizations, which allows them to not appear to be foreigners with an agenda.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/04/business/worldbusiness/04outsource.html?_r=1&oref=slogin