• Mukesh Ambani of Reliance Industries? Check.
• Kumar Mangalam Birla of the Aditya Birla Group? Check.
• Natarajan Chandrasekaran of the Tata Group? Check.
• Anand Mahindra of the Mahindra and Mahindra Group? Check.
• Sanjiv Bajaj of Bajaj Finserv? Check.
• Roshni Nadar of HCL Technologies? Check.
• 10,000 industrialists, business figures and delegates? Check.

The Uttar Pradesh Global Investors Summit 2023 in Lucknow ticked all the boxes, right? Wait a minute! Where’s the face that adorned the previous editions on February 21, 2018, and June 3, 2022?

That’s the unspoken question that hung over the 2023 summit stage on Friday, graced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath. Both the Prime Minister and Gautam Adani are getting acclimatised to unspoken references about their friendship.

(From left) Mukesh Ambani, N Chandrasekaran and Kumar Mangalam Birla at the summit PTI pictures

Modi did not mention Adani even once in his back-to-back speeches in the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha on Wednesday and Thursday regardless of Rahul Gandhi peppering the Prime Minister with specific questions in the wake of the Hindenburg report and its fallout.

That rare honour of naming the name that Modi won’t name fell on the Opposition, which regained its vocal cords and kept chanting “Adani, Adani” when the Prime Minister spoke in the House.

It is against this backdrop that the Uttar Pradesh jamboree began — and in keeping with the change in the weather, Adani was not among the participants.

Like in Parliament over the past two days, Modi did not make any reference to the Adani group while speaking at the summit.

The Prime Minister told investors that “an aspirational society” was waiting for them and that the society had become “very socially and financially inclusive”.

Coinciding with the turmoil that followed the Hindenburg report, the BJP government in Uttar Pradesh had on February 4 cancelled the Adani group’s Rs 5,400- crore tender to supply smart power meters to the Madhyanchal Viyut Vitran Nigam Limited, one of the four power distribution companies of the state.

Several employees’ unions at the UP Power Corporation Ltd have demanded that the Adani group’s tender for another distribution company be cancelled as well.

They have pointed out that Adani was given the contract even though his quotation of Rs 10,000 per meter was higher than the benchmark of Rs 6,000 fixed by the state government.

The unions have also said that the Adani group would act as a supplier, not manufacturer, of the meters.