> from what I hear in Vietnam, they're jerks to everyone.
It seems like the older generation of Taiwanese who came to age in the 70s and 80s have a bit of a superiority complex over the rest of poor Asia.
Tbf, Koreans and Japanese do as well (Korean and Japanese investors in ASEAN are total sleezeballs in my experience), but due to manpower constraints they at least try to develop local institutional capacity, while Taiwanese companies could always resort to hiring from within the PRC or the ASEAN Chinese diaspora.
> Does lobbying power from Tata or Adani influence over said politics?
Business lobbying within India is similar to that which happens in PRC. The same way you'd have local companies that are indirectly connected to local prefecture leaders (eg. The entire Construction industry within China), a similar thing exists in India.
That said, a lot of this is highly dependent on industry. High Value Sectors such as Pharmaceuticals, ICT, Petrochemicals, Automotive, Banking, and Green Technology can largely bypass all the local lobbying bullshit because the state and federal regulators for those tend to have domain experience because of 40-50 years of regulatory harmonization thanks to guidance from Japan (via the ADB), US (via the WB and Diaspora Academics), SK (via Look South), Israel (mostly under the radar but Israeli advisors are pretty prominent within Indian policymaking circles), and Australia (Australia 2035). That said, the industries listed above tend to not hire as much.
In labor heavy industries such as low skilled manufacturing, assembly, agriculture, construction, mining, etc you will face an extreme amount of lobbying and backroom dealing due to how heavily dependent such industries are to local laws and regulations, and also because they directly impact actual voters, plus direct action is a very common occurrence (often with tacit support from the local opposition - could be from any party be it BJP, INC, AAP, etc).
That said, this happens A LOT in China as well, it just isn't noticed in English media because any coverage of such events would be in Mandarin and on Chinese platforms such as Weibo, WeChat, Douyin, etc, while Indian coverage surrounding labor strife will occur in English on western platforms like FB, IG, etc.
Tl;dr - in my experience institutional and business norms in the PRC and India are actually pretty similar. In some cases, Chinese regulation is better than Indian ones but in other cases Indian regulations trump Chinese ones (VERY industry dependent)
> US automaker Ford, UK banking major Royal Bank of Scotland, US bikemaker Harley-Davidson and US banking behemoth Citibank have chosen to pull the plug their operations in India or downsize their presence here in recent years.
The US companies mentioned are divesting because there's an ongoing trade war between India and US (US wants India to open the agriculture sector to American imports, Indian politicians obviously don't want that as it undermines a critical voting block). This has lead to "India applied retaliatory tariffs of an additional 10% to 25%" on American goods [0]. There is a similar trade war going on with the UK as well.
Japan, South Korea, Australia, and Singapore on the other hand have implemented free trade agreements with India years ago and Israel+France have had economic pacts since the early 2000s, so unsurprisingly it's MNCs from these countries that tend to have an oversized impact in India (though within the ICT sector American companies still remain strong because of the point I made above).
In my experience, Japanese involvement hasn't really stopped in India (in fact it seems to keep growing). It's just not visible if you don't work in infrastructure - Japanese MNCs tend to dominate in Green Tech and Infrastructure projects such as the highway system, hydrogen cell R&D, automotive, and the train electrification project (already at 80% due to Pandemic era construction).
Whenever I'd visit India, I'd often see highways with signs saying "Built courtesy of grants from the Government of Japan".
This isn't to say that doing business as an MNC in India is easy - it isn't - but if you follow the right path (for example, make a Singapore, Mauritius, or UAE based corporation that has a majority ownership stake of the Indian subsidiary) it's not as difficult. Most Asian countries have done that for FDI within India, but less adept American companies seemed to have a preference and more experience with running operations from HK instead of SG.
What HK is to PRC, that's what SG, Marutius, and UAE are to India.
[0] - https://sgp.fas.org/crs/row/IF10384.pdf