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M a h a b h a r atain Polyester
The making of the world’s richest brothers and their feud
haMish McDonalD
1 Protean capitalist 1
2 a persuasive young bania 9
3 lessons from the souk 24
4 Catching live serpents 34
5 a first-class fountain 48
6 Guru of the equity cult 66
7 Friends in the right places 84
8 the great polyester war 101
9 the paper tiger 121
10 sleuths 145
11 letting loose a scorpion 159
Contents
12 business as usual 181
13 Murder medley 198
14 a political deluge 215
15 Under the reforms 232
16 housekeeping secrets 260
17 Dhirubhai’s dream 274
18 the polyester princes 298
19 Corporate Kurukshetra 312
20 Mother india 333
21 the ambanis apart 345
22 Goodbye, Gandhi 374
notes 389
index 397
acknowledgments vii
Glossary x
1
1
Protean capitalist
In January 2007 a Bollywood movie had an unusual launch in three
corners of the globe. The full-length Hindi feature film, incorpo-
rating the usual song and dance sequences, was shown simultaneously
in Mumbai, Toronto and Sydney – thereby claiming to being in the
vanguard in the globalisation of Indian popular culture, although in
Sydney at least audiences were almost exclusively of Indian origin.
The ‘purely fictional’ film was titled Guru and told of the rise of one
Gurukant Desai, son of the local headmaster in the Gujarat village of
‘Idhar’. After a spell of trading spices in Istanbul, the ambitious young
Guru moves to the textile markets of Bombay, where he lives in a chawl
tenement with his new wife.
He battles to break into a closed trading circle controlled by an
aquiline-featured, wealthy young textile mill owner, prone to golfing in
M a h a b h a r a t a i n P o l Y E s t E r
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plus-fours and driving about in an open sports car. Intense, active and
always looking for loopholes to push through, Guru manages to build
up his company, Shakti Trading, diversifying into the manufacture of
polyester and raising his capital from adulatory shareholders, to whom
he delivers inspirational speeches at mass meetings held in a sports
stadium. He wins the friendship of newspaper baron Manikdas Gupta,
but the publisher becomes alarmed and insulted by Guru’s bribery of
his staff – from the peon’s polyester safari suit to the editor’s new car
– and sets Shyam Saxena, a bright young journalist of his newspaper
Swatantra, to expose him.
Posters summarised the film story as ‘Villager, Visionary, Winner’.
That the film was meant as more than just entertainment is clear from
the ‘foreword’ that Mani Ratnam wrote for the cover of the digital video
recording later put on sale:
If you are ambitious, if you have dreams, India is the place for you – today. But it wasn’t like this always. After independence we were a huge nation, a young nation, where abstinence was respectable, ambition was not, where society took precedence over the individual. Today we have moved from left of centre to the right. When did this happen? How did this happen? Or did it happen in front of us and we couldn’t see it? Guru is a revisiting of that time, of three decades during which India changed slowly but surely. And the mirror to that change is the life of one man – Gurukant Desai.
The film asserted, sometimes crudely, that Guru was a revolutionary
figure, representing a raw new India pushing against the constraints of
remnant colonial power structures and nostalgic doctrines. ‘I’ve worked
enough for the white man,’ says Guru when announcing his decision
to strike out in his own business. His dismissive rivals include Parsi
business leaders, dressed in the white robes and tall black hats normally
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worn at fire temples to make the point. ‘Neither you nor your khadi
army can stop me,’ Guru declares to newspaper baron Gupta, referring
to the home-spun cotton dress of his generation of freedom fighters
against British rule. There is a defiant address to supercilious judges
looking into the allegations raised by Gupta’s newspaper. He tells his
shareholders the establishment is against them all ‘because we are com-
moners, middle class’. One of the most contentious figures in contem-
porary India was being turned into celluloid myth.
Sixteen years earlier, the man being played by one of India’s hot-
test hearth-throb film stars, with music by the famous score-writer A.R.
Rahman, had dropped his name on our doorstep in New Delhi. In
January 1991 a messenger delivered a card, elaborately embossed with
a picture 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.
The young couple’s courtship had been a stormy one. The bride,
Tina Munim, was a girl with a past. A film starlet, Tina had had a
well-publicised affair with a much older actor before meeting Anil.
The groom 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 polit-
ical 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 con-
troversial. Ambani had gone into polyester manufacturing in a big
way and got huge numbers of Indians to invest in shares of his com-
pany Reliance Industries. In India, the home of fine cotton textiles, it
M a h a b h a r a t a i n P o l Y E s t E r
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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 increase his capacity,
Ambani had become a big political fixer. It was said his executives had
been shuttling briefcases of cash to politicians 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.
✤
The wedding was going to be big, so big that it was to take place in
a football stadium, the same one where Dhirubhai Ambani had held
many of his shareholder meetings. But it began in an oddly casual way.
As instructed, in mid-afternoon we went to the Wodehouse Gym-
khana 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 thick gold jewellery and
wearing lustrous gold-embroidered silk saris. Anil Ambani appeared
suddenly from the club grounds, dressed in a white satin 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 alongside 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,
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P r o t E a n C a P i t a l i s t
banks of marigolds and lights into a make-believe palace for 2000 of the
family’s closest friends and business contacts. They networked furiously
while a bare-chested Hindu pundit put Anil and Tina through hours of
Vedic marriage rites next to a smouldering sandalwood fire on a small
stage. Later, the guests descended on an elaborate buffet on tables that
took 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 22 000 of their not-so-close friends,
employees and second-echelon contacts.
The lavishness was eclipsed by bigger displays of wealth in following
years, but at the time it was seen as a gesture that Dhirubhai Ambani
had made it through the political travails of the previous few years and
was unabashed – and certainly not strapped for either cash or friends.
At an interview a month later, Dhirubhai Ambani came limping
around a huge desk and sat down at a white leather sofa. 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
rumours and responded evenly to 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’ who bought their poly-
ester and raw materials from him.
‘The orbit goes on changing,’ he declared airily. ‘Nobody is a per-
manent friend, nobody is a permanent enemy. Everybody has his own
self-interest. Once you recognise that, everybody would be better off.’
M a h a b h a r a t a i n P o l Y E s t E r
6
However, Ambani did point to an unfortunate trait in his coun-
trymen. ‘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. ‘Jeal-
ousy is a mark of respect,’ he said.
The Reliance public relations office continued to be attentive, sup-
plying advance notice of newsworthy events. But the company’s history
of political and corporate activity had put a sinister shadow across the
gleaming success. All 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. At a meeting of shareholders in a big Bombay 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 mêlée. In the shouting and jostling, the two Ambani sons
Mukesh and Anil had to flee the stage. The controversies kept con-
tinuing 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 busi-
ness 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 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 tre-
mendous emotional and sentimental appeal. He is their ultimate man
and has inspired many emulators. The second Dhirubhai Ambani is a
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P r o t E a n C a P i t a l i s t
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 sophisti-
cated 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 super-corporation 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 jour-
nalists 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.’
Phiroz Vakil, another senior advocate at the Mumbai bar, paused in
his tiny chambers in Bombay’s old Fort district, stuffing Erinmore Flake
tobacco into his pipe, before looking up intently and warning me that
people would suspect that writers asking for stories and opinions about
Ambani were being used as a stalking horse by the Ambanis themselves
to draw out information. For some others, favourable write-ups of the
Ambaris in the business media still rankled. ‘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 telephone 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
M a h a b h a r a t a i n P o l Y E s t E r
8
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 into the crowd. Those who did agree to talk
for the most part insisted on anonymity: they had to live in India, they
explained.
Reliance and Dhirubhai Ambani meanwhile went on to greater
fame and fortune – and more controversies. After his death in 2002, the
subsequent split of the Reliance group between his sons and their con-
tinuing rivalry make the story of this man and his methods pertinent to
understanding the return of India to eminence in the world economy.
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