The Polyester Prince (2 page)

The Reliance public relations office continued to be attentive, supplying advance notice of newsworthy events. At one point later in 1991, there was another glimpse of Dhirubhai Ambani’s energetic mind. His Delhi office passed on a request for information about Indonesia’s engagement in the late 1980s of the Swiss cargo clearance firm Societe Generale de Surveillance (
SGS
) to administer its imports and exports, thereby sidelining the country’s notoriously corrupt customs service for several years. I sent off some clippings, intrigued that the man accused of smuggling whole factories through the ports of India now seemed to be advocating Swiss efficiency in place of the lax adininistration of which he had supposedly taken advantage. The proposal got to a high level in the government before being canned, but not before causing panic in the Indian customs service-which may have been all Dhirubhai wanted to do anyway.

There were daily updates from the Reliance PR staff on an issue of convertible securities issued in the Eurornarket in May 1992, the first by an Indian company and tangible proof of India’s reforms reconnecting it to the world economy. There was a company-organised trip out of Bombay up to its new petro - chemicals plant at Hazira, involving a bumpy flight in a chartered turboprop to the airfield at Surat, bare of airport terminals or navigational aids as far as could be seen, and a drive through the old textile trading city, squalid despite its lucrative silk and diamond industries-and, a couple of years later, notorious for an outbreak of bubonic plague. Across the Tapti River, a glittering array of pipes and towers had indeed come up, and cryogenic tankers full of sub-zero ethylene were tied up at the jetty. Reliance was clearly not just a paper empire.

But the history of political and corporate activity had put a sinister shadow across the glearning success. M through the government changes of 1990 and 1991, the press carried references to a certain ‘large industrial house’ supporting this or that party or being behind certain politicians. Scores of party leaders, ex-ministers, senior bureaucrats, and heads of the big government - owned banks and corporations were said to be Ambani friends’ or Ambani critics’. Mostly it was the friends, it seemed, who got the jobs.

People made bitter and cynical remarks about the Ambanis in private. The press coverage, especially in the Indian business magazines, had a repetitive quality. A myth was being created and sustained. At a meeting of shareholders in a big Bornbay engineering firm named Larsen & Toubro late in 1991, convened to approve a takeover by the Ambanis, this undercurrent of hostility welled up into a physical melee. In the shouting and jostling, the two Ambani sons had to flee the stage. The controversies kept continuing right through the 1990s.

Dhirubhai Ambani attracted adulation or distrust. To his millions of investors, who had seen their share prices multiply, he was a business messiah. To one writer, he was a ‘Frankenstein’s Monster’ created by India’s experiments with close government control of the economy.

‘There are three Dhirubhai Ambanis,’ one of his fellow Gujaratis, a writer, told me. ‘One is unique, larger than life, a brand name. He is one of the most talked about industrialists., and for Gujarati people he has tremendous emotional and sentimental appeal. He is their ultimate man, and has inspired many emulators. The second Dhirubhai Ambani, is a schemer, a first-class liar, who regrets nothing and has no values in life. Then there is the third Dhirubhai Ambani, who has a more sophisticated political brain, a dreamer and a visionary, almost Napoleonic. People are always getting the three personalities mistaken.’

In a legal chamber lined with vellum-bound case references, a senior lawyer took an equally stark view. ‘Today the fact is that Ambani is bigger than government,’ said the lawyer in all seriousness. ‘He can make or break prime ministers. In the United States you can build up a supereorporation but the political system is still bigger than you. In India the system is weak. If the stock exchange dares to expose Ambani, he tells it: I will pull my company shares out and make you collapse. I am bigger than your exchange. If the newspapers criticise, he can point out they are dependent on his advertising and he has his journalists in every one of their departments. If the political parties take a stand against him, he has his men in every party who can pull down or embarrass the leaders.

He is a threat to the system. Today he is undefeatable.’

Surprisingly, the role played by Dhirubhai Ambani received only cautious side-references in most books about contemporary Indian politics. No biography of him was in the bookshops, although Indian journalists and conunentators had produced 1quickie’

biographies of other new celebrities in vast numbers. The work of the economic historians largely cut out in the 1960s. The few biographies of other Indian businessmen were commissioned works, not very well written, and notable for a worshipful attitude to the subjects. No one drank, cursed, cheated or philandered. Their workers were all part of the family. Almost everyone lived an abstemious vegetarian life, accumulating wealth only to give it away to temples, hospitals and schools.

By 1992, Reliance was tapping investors in Europe for funding, and international investment funds were being allowed to play the Indian sharemarket directly. A few years later, the company had started borrowing in New York on a large scale. The Ambani story was becoming of greater interest outside India, at least to investors and perhaps to a wider audience watching the explosive growth of capitalism across Asia.

The idea of this book occurred in 1992, and I put it to Dhirubhai Ambani later that year at a second meeting in his Bombay office. Ambani seemed receptive, and agreed that his life story could be ‘inspiring’ for a younger generation of Indians as well as interesting to those thinking of dealing with India. I left the meeting with an understanding that he had agreed to talk about his life at meetings to be arranged and that, if so, I would show him the completed draft as a courtesy and listen to any objections-but retain the final say on the content. The book would not be credible’ otherwise, Ambani concurred.

A year slipped away without further progress, and then relations with Reliance took a downturn. By the end of 1993, Reliance was in the bidding for several oilfields in the Arabian Sea. The government oil search corporation had discovered the fields but did not have the funds to build the huge production rigs, gas compressors and pipelines that were needed. Several contacts among rival bidders were alleging that the tender was being rigged in favour of Reliance. Indian politicians and bureaucrats are masters at tilting an

‘open and transparent’ tender into a one-horse race, by techniques such as keeping the weighting of bidding factors uncertain or secretly promising later concessions to compensate for underbidding. In the event, Reliance swept the field, and a director with one of the losers told me: ‘We were shafted, and for the wrong reasons.’

Writing about this would not advance my request for access to the Ambanis for the book, but my duty was to the magazine that employed me. The first of two articles in the Far Eastern Economic Review about the oilfields battle drew a bitter complaint from Anil Ambani that the report was ‘defamatory’-a complaint not sent directly to me, or to the magazine, but in a letter sent to the head of one of the rival companies, the Australian resources giant
BHP
, and copied to the heads of theamerican and Australian diplomatic missions in New Delhi.

Thereafter, I wrote occasionally about Reliance and, in July 1995, left my job with the magazine to spend more time on the book. A letter to Dhirubhai Ambani informing him of this move went unanswered. Over the following 18 months, the research led me into all corners of Bombay life, from the slum homes of the senii-criminal underworld to the offices of powerful business tycoons, to several cities and towns in Gujarat on crowded country buses and trains, to converted churches in London and Leicester ringing with the Hindu chants of the Gujarati diaspora.

The reception varied. Almost everyone wanted to know if the book was authorised or sponsored. It was neither, I said, but Ambani had been told and so far had not expressed to me a view either way about it. Many of those people who knew Dhirubhai Ambani in his early days in Junagadh and Aden and then starting his business in Bombay were willing to talk. Some others-such as his former Aden colleague and Middle East co-ordinator in Dubai, Bharat kumar Shah, asked for a letter of clearance from Ambani himself, which again was not forthcoming. One Bombay journalist who agreed to share his knowledge picked up the telephone immediately I arrived at his flat and rang Anil, Ainbani’s office. ‘I have told him if you are wanting scandal you will lose the whole story,’ he said down the phone to the executive who answered. The next day, I was invited to lunch by a pair of Reliance public relations executives and quizzed closely about my intentions.

Dhirubhai Ambani did respond to a birthday greeting sent at the end of December 1995, but there was still no word about his attitude to the book. A month later, however, I flew especially to Bombay for an interview arranged with his former export manager, Rathibhai Muchhala, who according to numerous other sources ‘knew everything’ about the early days. At the appointed time, Muchhala was not at his office in the industrial belt behind Bombay’s airport. A secretary telephoned him: he was at the Reliance head office.

Muchhala was sorry, but Ambani’s office had advised him not to meet me.

Ambani’s personal assistant, Dinesh Sheth, then confirmed this: there were several proposals for biographies and some months earlier Dhirubhai Ambani had indicated to his staff that he did not want at that stage to encourage or co-operate with any of them.

Sheth professed ignorance of my previous letters, so I sent another the next day, offering to come at any time to discuss the book.

Ironically, the reception among those figures who had been critics or opponents of Reliance was also wary. Phiroz Vakil, a senior advocate in tiny chambers in Bombay’s old Fort, surveyed me intently while stuffing Erinmore Flake tobacco into his pipe and warned that people would suspect I was being used by the Ambanis to draw out information. Among some others, my earlier favourable write-ups of the Ambanis still told against me. ‘I suppose you think he’s a hero,’ said the retired Finance Ministry official and Cabinet Secretary Vinod Pande, down the phone.

Others just seemed too battle-weary When I rang the Orkay Silk Mills chairman Kapal Mehra and asked to meet him, there was a long pause. ‘I’m afraid that won’t be possible,’

Mehra said. The former prime minister Viswanath Pratap Singh did not reply to a letter and giggled nervously when I cornered him at a cocktail party in New Delhi. No, he could not possibly talk about any one company, Singh said, easing away quickly.

Those who did agree to talk for the most part insisted on anonymity: they had to live in India, they explained. Word of some of these meetings must have been passed back to Reliance, for in January 1997 a stiff letter arrived from Kanga & Co in Bombay, lawyers for Dhirubhai Ambani and the company, warn ing that their clients ‘understand and apprehend that the proposed publication contains material which is defamatory to our client’. It was claimed that ‘at no time’ had there been any attempt to verify the material with the clients. Action for exemplary damages and injunction against publication were threatened if the book was defamatory At this point it had not even been completed, let alone delivered to the publishers.

Fortunately, the several controversies that hit Reliance in the second half of 1995 produced a deluge of paper from Indian Government agencies. The various reports opened up many previously obscure and controversial aspects of the company’s operations. At the same time, the controversies compelled Reliance to give its own explanations, which became part of the public record.

Even so the overall result, unavoidably, has been a book that becomes progressively less intimate to its subject as the story advances, drawing more on published reports, available documentation, and anonymous interviews with those who had engaged with Dhirubhai Ambani and Reliance Industries from the outside. The book is less satisfactory and less sympathetic, perhaps, than it might have been with co-operation from the Ambanis and access to them. As my research and writing progressed, however, word came from several sources that the family was compiling its own record of Dhirubhai Ambani’s life and his company’s growth, so a version of events from the inside may also be put to the public soon.

Among all the 550-odd princely rulers left, with British Residents at their shoulders, to run their domains in the last years of the Raj, few were more eccentric than Mahabatkhan, the Nawab of Junagadh.

The Nawab’s family had run this fiefdom, one of several in a political jigsaw covering the Saurashtra peninsula in Gujarat, since a faujdar or military commander of the Mughal Empire named Sher Khan Babi founded his own subordinate dynasty in 1690. Two and a half centuries later, this warrior’s descendant was best known for his love of dogs.

Mahabatkhan had 150 of them, with an equal number of dog-handlers on his payroll and individual quarters for all the canine retinue. To celebrate the ‘wedding’ of one canine pair, the Nawab was reputed to have spent two million rupees (then worth about £150 000 sterling) and to have given his 700 000 subjects a public holiday.

The Nawab was the first political target to come into the sights of Dhirubhai Ambani, although it is unlikely that he was ever specifically aware of it. It was during a movement aimed at overthrowing the Nawab’s rule and securing Junagadh’s accession to India during the Partition of British India in 1947 that Ambani, then a teenage high school student, had his first experience of political organisation and his first brushes with authority.

It was the only moment in modern times that junagadh has figured in the calculations of nations and statesmen. Even in the 1990s, Junagadh and its surrounds, known as the Kathiawar region, remains one of the quietest, most traditional regions of India, and one of the least accessible in the otherwise busy northwest coastal area of the country.