The Polyester Prince

The envelope was hand-delivered to our house in Golf Links, Tan enclave in New Delhi whose name captured the clubbable lifestyle of its leisured and propertied Indian residents, soon after we had arrived in the middle of a north Indian winter to begin a long assignment. It contained a large card, with a picture embossed in red and gold of the elephant-headed deity Ganesh, improbably carried on the back of a much smaller mouse.

Dhirubhai and Kokilaben Ambani invited us to the wedding of their son Anil to Tina Munim in Bombay.

In January 1991, just prior to the explosion in car ownership that in later winters kept the midday warmth trapped in a throat-tearing haze overnight, it was bitterly cold most of the time in Delhi. Our furniture had still not arrived-a day of negotiations about the duty payable lay ahead at the Delhi customs office where the container was broken open and inspected-and we camped on office chairs and fold-up beds, wrapped in blankets.

The Indian story was also in a state of suspension, waiting for something to happen. The Gulf War, which we watched at a big hotel on this new thing called satellite television, was under - cutting many of the assumptions on which the Congress Party’s family dynasty, the Nehrus and Gandhis, had built up the Indian state. The Americans were unleashing a new generation of weapons on a Third World regime to which New Delhi had been close; its Soviet friends were standing by, even agreeing with the Americans.

The Iraqi invasion of Kuwalt had pushed up oil prices and forced the Indian Government to evacuate some three million of its citizens working in the Gulf. The extra half-billion dollars all this cost India was pushing the country close to default on its foreign debt.

Officials from the Ministry of Finance were already negotiating a bail-out from the
IMF
in Washington; the
IMF
was setting stiff ‘conditionalities’-in effect a complete shift from Nehru’s model of high external protection for the economy and government allocation of savings. Even the
CNN
clips of Tomahawk cruise missiles zipping neatly down the streets of Baghdad were in themselves part of another breach in India’s walls. The clites who ran the national TV monopoly or the big newspapers no longer had India’s half-illiterate population to themselves.

Little of this was admitted in New Delhi. The coalition government of V P Singh, which had swept out the glamorous Rajiv Gandhi on a battery of corruption scandals, had itself collapsed in November after less than a year in office. India was ruled by an even smaller coalition of opportunists under a wily politico called Chandrashekhar, kept in office at Rajiv’s pleasure for who knew how long. Everyone clung to the autarkic, Third World verities. Politicians and journalists pounced on the slightest admission by their fellows that perhaps India’s vision of the world had been flawed and it had better adjust to the new order. At the Ministry of External Affairs, in the red sandstone majesty of Sir Herbert Baker’s Secretariat buildings, a bright young official on a new economic desk assured me that India’s finances were strong enough to take the strains. At a party of intellectuals’ young academics and filmmakers in rough cotton kurta-payjama suits scoffed at the prospects for satellite TV. How would the advertising payments get out to the broadcaster through the maze of foreign exchange controls? Which foreign companies would want to plug products they could neither export to India nor make locally?

The wedding invitation was a good excuse to break away from this stalemate in New Delhi, and make contact with the Indian commercial class in Bombay. There it looked as if a raw entrepreneurial spirit was straining to break through the discouraging political crust. Word of the Ambani family and their company Reliance Industries had spread to Hong Kong as prime examples of this brash new India which might finally have its day, courtesy of the changes the Gulf War symbolised.

Everything about the Ambanis, in fact, was a good magazine story The young couple’s courtship had been a stormy one, ready-made for the Bombay show-biz magazines. The bride, Tina Munim, was a girl with a past. She had been a film starlet, featuring in several of the Hindi-language films churned out by the hundreds every year in ‘Bollywood’-most including improbable violence, song-and-dance routines, and long sequences with the female leads in wet, clingy clothes. Before meeting Anil, Tina had had a heavy, well-publicised affair with a much older actor. The groom, Anil, was the tearaway one of the two Ambani boys. His parents had frowned on the match. Bombay’s magnates usually tried to arrange matches that cemented alliances with other powerful business or political families. This one was not arranged, nor did it bring any more than a certain popularity.

Hired assailants had been sent with acid and knives to scar Tina’s face, so went the gossip (apocryphal: Tina’s face turned out to be flawless). Anil had threatened suicide if he could not marry Tina, went another rumour. Finally, the parents had agreed.

The father, Dhirubhai, was no less colourful and even more controversial. He had first worked in Aden in the 1950s. I recalled a stopover there in my childhood, aboard the S. S. Oronsay, a buff-hulled Orient Line ship, en route to my father’s posting in London with his Australian bank in 1958. The image was of grim, dark-brown peaks surrounding a harbour of brilliant blue, a host of merchant ships tied up to moorings, and a busy traffic of launches and barges. The trip ashore was by launch, landing at Steamer Point, where Arabs and Indians besieged the white faces, trying to sell us Ottoman-style cushions or to drag us into their duty-free shops. Now someone like those desperate salesmen in Aden was a tycoon in Bombay.

Ambani had got into polyester manufacturing in a big way, and got huge numbers of Indians to invest in shares of his company, Reliance Industries. In India, the home of fine cotton textiles, it seemed that people couldn’t get enough polyester. The only constraint on local producers like Reliance was the government’s licensing of their capacity, or where they built their factories. To jack up his capacity, Ambani had become a big political fixer. In the recent minority government formation, it was said, his executives had been shuttling briefcases of cash to politicos all over Delhi. There had been epic battles, with the press baron Ramnath Goenka of the Indian Express and with a textile rival from an old Parsi business house, Nusli Wadia. A year or so earlier, a Reliance public relations manager had been arrested for plotting to murder Wadia. The man had been released, and nothing was moving in the case. Was it genuine or a frame-up? Indian colleagues were not sure: no conspiracy was accepted at face value.

So we took our first trip inside India, making our way down to New Delhi Railway Station in a yellow-and-black cab, one of the 1954 Morris Oxford design still being made in Calcutta, in the rose-coloured haze of a winter afternoon; letting a red-shirted porter heave our bags on his head and lead us to the train, establishing our rights to the coveted two-berth compartment in the middle of the First Class Air-Conditioned carriage from the list pasted by the door.

The train slid across the flat beige northern landscape of wheat-stubble and square houses as night fell. In the morning we were trundling past palm trees and mangrove-bordered creeks before humming into Bombay through suburban stations packed with commuters.

If New Delhi was a city of books, discourse, seminars and not much action or precision, Bombay was one where people made the most of the nine-to-five working day before battling their way home to the distant suburbs. Most crucially, Bombay had accepted the telephone as a medium of dialogue-not merely as a preliminary to an exchange of letters setting up a meeting. It was also unashamedly concerned with money and numbers. New contacts like Pradip Shah, founder of India’s first rating agency for corporate debt, with the slightly alarming acronym of CRISL, or Sucheta Dalal, a business journalist at The Times of India, or Manoj Murarka, partner of the old stockbroking firm of Batlivala & Karani, rattled off the details of industrial processes, forward - trading in the sharemarket or conversion dates of debentures at bewildering speed.

The wedding was going to be big, so big that it was to take place in a football stadium, the same one where Dhirubhai Ainbani had held many of his shareholders’ meetings.

But it began in an oddly casual way. As instructed, we went mid-afternoon to the Wodehouse Gymkhana Club, some distance from the stadium. There we found guests milling in the street outside, the men dressed mostly in lavishly cut dark suits and showy ties, moustaches trimmed and hair brilliantined. The women were heavily made up, laden with heavy gold jewellery, and wearing lustrous gold-embroidered silk saris. Anil Ambani appeared suddenly from the club grounds, dressed in a white satiny outfit and sequinned turban, sitting on a white horse. A brass band in white frogged tunics struck up a brash, repetitive march and we set off in separate phalanxes of men and women around the groom towards the stadium. Every now and then, the process would pause while the Indian guests broke into a provocative whirling dance, some holding wads of money above their head. The stadium was transformed by tents, banks of inarigolds and lights into a make-believe palace, and filled up with 2000 of the family’s closest friends and business contacts. They networked furiously while a barechested Hindu pundit put Anil and Tina through hours of Yedic marriage rites next to a smouldering sandalwood fire on a small stage. Later, the guests descended on an elaborate buffet on tables taking up an entire sideline of the football pitch, starting with all kinds of samosas and other snacks, working through a selection of curries and breads, and finishing with fruits and sweets wrapped in gold leaf. The next day, the Ambanis put on the same spread-if not the wedding ceremony at another reception for 22000 of their not-so-close. friends, employees and second-echelon contacts.

Retrospectively, by the standards of Bombay a few years later, it looks a modest and traditional affair. Before their joint marriage of three children in 1996, the ingratiating Hinduja family had an elaborately illustrated book prepared on the Hindu marriage and sent to all invitees. Other business alliances were celebrated with elaborate stage-sets based on the ancient epics; lines of elephants led the processions of the grooms and diamonds were pasted to the foreheads of women guests. But at the time, the sheer size of the wedding was seen as a sign that Dhirubhai Ambani had made it through the political travails of 1989~90 and was unabashed-and certainly not strapped for cash or friends.

It was flattering to be there and to have a Reliance public relations manager take me up to meet the Ambanis-flattering, within a month of arriving in India, to meet the country’s fastest moving, most controversial tycoon. An interview was promised shortly, once the festivities were over. An early cover story was clearly a possibility, an antidote to the gloomy political news out of Delhi. It would help my standing at the Far Eastern Economic Review if India was an upbeat business story and I was right on to it.

That of course was the desired effect. Reliance was desperate to raise funds for expansion and was looking to foreign sources, so some image-building in a prestigious magazine was highly useful. A newcomer to India would be more inclined to play down the controversies and look at the company’s prospects.

The interview, when it took place a month or so later, was stimulating. Dhirubhai Ambani came limping around a huge desk when I was ushered to a sofa and greeted me warmly. Despite the obvious effects of a stroke in a twisted right hand, his mahogany skin was smooth and healthy, his hair plentiful and slicked back decisively in a duck’s tail. His attention was unwavering. Disarmingly, Dhirubhai admitted to many of the youthful episodes that were the subject of rumour, and responded evenly when I raised some of the criticisms commonly levelled against him. He didn’t mind people calling him an ‘upstart’ or even worse names. It just meant they were trapped in their complacency while he was racing ahead. But the disputes were now ‘all history’ and the former critics were now all his ‘good friends’ buying their polyester and raw materials from him.

‘The orbit goes on changing,’ he declared airily. ‘Nobody is a permanent friend, nobody is a permanent enemy. Everybody has his own self-interest. Once you recognise that, everybody would be better off.’

However, Ambani did point to an unfortunate trait in his countrymen. ‘You must know that, in this country, people are very jealous.’ It was not like in Hong Kong or other East Asian countries, where people applauded each other’s success, he claimed. In India success was seen as the prerogative of certain families. But he didn’t really mind.

‘Jealousy is a mark of respect,’ he said.

The interview resulted in a cover story for the Far Eastern Economic Review which portrayed Ambani as the business underdog trying to break through the government’s red tape and the prejudices of a tired Bombay business establishment. Naturally enough, Ambani and his PR men were pleased. His one quibble, I was told, had been my pointing out some glossed-over problem areas in the Reliance annual reports, which had been put in the notes to the accounts, fine-print areas that only the professional analysts really read. The comments were true enough, but they made it look as though Reliance was unusual among Indian companies in these practices.