Certainly, it will take more than one defaulter enjoying a sybaritic sojourn in his English country estate to give the Indian private sector a "bad name". There is no shortage of private sector corporations that give India a "good name" - Tuesday's news that Anand Mahindra and Aditya Puri figure among Barron's top 30 CEOs could be considered one small indicator.
Nor, however, can it be said that India's private sector enjoys an unvarnished reputation. For every respected corporate group there are others that attract attention for eyebrow-raising business practices - The Economist issue of August 2, 2014 is one eye-opener in that respect. Mr Mallya's default saga, thus, only taints the image a shade.
The real issue that Mr Jaitley may have overlooked is the close links between the corporate world and politics, which 25 years of economic liberalisation are yet to erase. India is no outlier; crony capitalism is such a standard feature of emerging capitalist economies that it has acquired the honoured status of a cliche.
Acceptance of a reality does not make it acceptable. The Mallya/Kingfisher episode has underlined the weak institutional structures that enable the rich and powerful to suborn systems to their purposes and made a laughing stock of our vigilance agencies.
It is hard to make up the serial collusion of state institutions in the Kingfisher Airlines saga: the casual due diligence by state-owned banks, the major lenders in the consortium, to a business that is deemed risky even in the best of times; the absurd designation by the United Progressive Alliance of aviation as an "infrastructure" industry to ease borrowing norms (for a facility used by less than five per cent of the population!); acceptance of a brand as collateral; the declaration of Mr Mallya as a wilful defaulter (fully two years after the loan turned bad); and, finally, his flight to the UK despite "look out" notices issued by the Central Bureau of Investigation.
In a country in which every crisis descends into an exercise in political finger-pointing, it is true that much of this controversy had its origins in the previous ruling regime - which is the real objective of Mr Jaitley's statement. But unless he is also suffering from amnesia, he may recall a controversy that erupted in July last year in which senior members of his party were associated. This concerns l'affaire Lalit Modi, the disgraced first chairman and commissioner of the Indian Premier League.
Despite an impounded passport for questionable forex and other deals, Mr Modi was given unilateral approval by India's foreign minister to travel from his UK refuge to Portugal, while business dealings with a ruling party chief minister were being investigated. Mr Modi managed the hottest property in world cricket in the IPL. Do his activities not give India a "bad name" too?
Equally, this regime cannot be described as maintaining an arm's length distance from the corporate world. Prominent businessmen accompanying the prime minister on his overseas trips have bagged big deals in infrastructure and defence. Nothing wrong with that per se - US businessmen, too, often ride on the coat-tails of presidential visits - but these deals are questionable only because some of their enterprises are dangerously in debt as well. They may not be giving the Indian private sector a "bad name" yet, but the potential for doing so certainly exists.
The corporate-political complex is often accepted as the price emerging economies pay for faster growth, especially in areas where public policy intersects with private capital. As an inherently amoral activity, business can be expected to maximise the advantages of favourable policy wherever it finds it. Only robust institutional oversight can act as a check and balance. Had it not been for an independent Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG), for instance, the blatant cronyism in the allocation of telecom spectrum and coal mines may never have progressed beyond the sotto voce suspicions that is the hallmark of opaque regulation. In both cases, the CAG's exposes forced partial correctives in policy.
This is the process that this regime is trying to extend - when it is not distracted by its social agenda, that is. If Mr Jaitley's government can make some real progress in weakening the industry-politics link, he will never have to worry about any aspect of corporate India's reputation again.