Till the media was praising F1, giving acres of free publicity to his team, Sahara Force One, Vijay Mallya, was an indulgent accomplice. No sooner the spotlight shifted to disastrous Q2 results of Kingfisher Airlines, the embattled king of good times can’t stop his tweeting diatribe.

On November 14, as the tax payer worried whether her money would be thrown into the voracious Kingfisher’s belly, the beleaguered playboy posted seven tweets, six of them really angry ones scorching the media.

Addressing his 699,983 twitter ‘followers’, Mallya showered praise on our revered PM, the sagacious economist who “understands”, unlike bozos in the media who have nothing better in life than to be “prosecutors, adjudicators and judges” on Mallya as well as the acting CEO of the nation, who said so just the other day.

For someone used to Page 1 treatment on cataclysmic events like Kingfisher calendar shoots and his worthy son’s lip lock with Deepika Padukone, there is this sudden discovery of “paid media”, those satans of sensationalism, now out to cause an honest businessman collateral damage.

It is these “unique” folks like Arnab Goswami (I agree with Mallya’s example, but dispute the generalisation) who are “ambushing” our man at Bangalore airport, treating him like a “fugitive and criminal”; “twisting and turning” his “friend” Rahul Bajaj’s statement, which was: "if Bajaj Auto gets into a mess, would you bail me out… it's a free market economy, those who die, must die.’’

Bajaj, meanwhile, has done his familiar flip flop: having struck a bombastic note, he and Mallya are smoking the peace pipe claiming that the aforementioned statement wasn’t aimed at Kingfisher, but the private sector at large. Someone should ask the septuagenarian sound-byte-soldier’s-delight, why, in the face of the lady interviewer’s specific questions on Kingfisher and the aviation sector, did he need to pronounce a truism?

Returning to Mallya, without grudging the man his angst, I must dissect his effort to confuse us between ‘bail out, from the tax payer’s money’, which he claims he doesn’t want and “working capital management assistance”, that he admits he is lobbying for.

Without a fraction of his financial acumen, I wonder what the big distinction is. Only the utterly ignorant would expect finance minister Pranab Mukherjee to release budgetary support to “bail out” Kingfisher. If at all, the money would come out of public financial institutions, whose world shakes under the ground Mukherjee’s underlings tread, who do truly innovative things under the slightest covert hint from Raisina Hill.

Mallya’s litany of woes, ranging from high taxation on fuel to inadequate airport infrastructure (and abundant airhostess hires! Sorry, I’m being mean!), can be easily wrapped inside a complex deal that isn’t of course a “bail out”, but “working capital management assistance”, by the same name!
Mallya already showed his formidable canvassing power in April 2011, when one-third of Kingfisher’s loans (Rs 1,303 crore out of loans worth Rs 4,263 crore…wow!) were converted to equity, Rs 553 crore coming by way of preference shares at a rate of Rs 23.37 per share, just 60 percent above the then prevailing rate.

If that wasn’t a ‘bailout’, my driver Gajanand Yadav is Lewis Hamilton. Some Rs 500 crore was the revenue loss to financial institutions, not to mention a sea of red ink justifying the extension of tenure, repayment moratorium, and a decrease in interest on outstanding debt. For what? Mallya may be a national treasure, but can’t we afford to lose his Kingfisher? Try being a small businessman and fish around for a loan (and redeeming collateral five times the money you need) and you’ll know what I mean.

It will be prudent therefore for our economist PM to leave Mallya and the lenders’ consortium to their own devices. Also, to request his finance ministry colleague to do the same. If SBI, the prime lender, can get Mallya to sell a yacht or two, if they can arm twist him into bringing in more equity, let them execute their dharma. I hope some smart lender forces Mallya’s flagship company, United Breweries, to make good for the most blatant surrogate advertisement of liquor in the last six years. Shouldn’t UB pay Kingfisher Airline handsomely for the free ride the beer brand has across the country’s social/media landscape, dodging itself in from schools to churches to the TV channel licensed for the good times?

For a politician, leaving the FIs alone is a thankless proposition. But that’s the only way the government can avoid a queue of airlines on Raisina Hill, if not a full-blown encore of 2G.

That said, there must be some reason that everyone except perhaps Indigo is bleeding. Leaving aside Air India, not everyone among them could be mismanaged. It isn’t therefore the PM’s or Mukherjee’s or even aviation minister Vayalar Ravi’s job to save Kingfisher. Caesar’s wife must focus on industry-wide rationalisation of taxes and non-profitable routes, a bold doctrine for FDI into the airline sector, and revisit the sensible regulation regime suggested in the Naresh Chandra report.

While that is done, Kingfisher, Jet and other private-sector notables should not be allowed to get out of their settled licensing commitments to service non-profitable routes, a point that was core to the repeal in 1994 of the Air Corporation Act. Private airlines can’t just skim the cream, leaving Air India and Indian Airlines with the ‘national duty’ to keep the rest of the country connected.

Tailpiece: Some years back, Bajaj appeared in a popular courtroom drama at a TV channel I worked for. The format involved a celebrity judge, whose job was to pronounce, if she were lucky enough, in two lines, the people’s verdict on what transpired over 50 minutes. Maruti chairman RC Bhargava did that in one: “I sentence Rahul Bajaj to use his own product, the Bajaj scooter!” Bhargava’s pronouncement is still relevant for Bajaj, having maxed his way to the bank riding on government licences and FI support, now taking pot shots on the entire private sector.