Despite the intervention of the Indian Foreign minister, the Polaris executives
continued to be held captive by Indonesian Police. naavi.org is happy
however to note that Nasscom has decided on some action plan to advise and
assist the industry in such issues in future details of which should be
available shortly. However it has still not been able to ascertain and make
public the total exposure of Indian software countries to rougue countries such
as Indonesia so that the economic impact of the incident on the country can be
assessed.
It is learnt that Infosys is one of the other Indian companies that has a
significant exposure in Indonesia. The run of events in Polaris would make any
executive of Infosys visit Indonesia even for normal business meetings and it is
unthinkable how a software contract can be executed under such an environment of
lack of trust.
The Government should therefore consider extreme steps such as declaration of
diplomatic immunity for all Indian executives visiting Indonesia for business
contracts and also declare that unless the contractual dealings with Indonesian
clients are handled in a neutral territory, the existing contracts will be
deemed to be cancelled under a Force Majeur clause with no liability to India.
The Government should also refuse foreign exchange release for such
disputes unless the Indian Government is a party to the dispute resolution
mechanism.
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