In that year Dhirubhai established his name among brokers and investors as a master of the stockmarket. From the middle of March 1982, a cartel of bear operators reputed to be based in Calcutta started driving down his and other stocks in the Bombay market. The selling pressure was intense on 18 March, creating a half-hour of panic just before the close. The bears sold 350000 Reliance shares, causing the price to fall quickly from Rs 131 to Rs 121, before Dhirubhai got his brokers to start buying any Reliance shares on offer. The more they sold, the number got to 1.1 million shares, the more Dhirubhai picked up, ostensibly on behalf of non-resident Indian (NRI) investors 'based in West Asian countries'. Eventually, the friendly brokers bought over 800000 of the shares sold by the bears.
It was an almighty poker game. The bears had sold short-in other words, they had sold shares they did not own in the expectation that the price would fall and let them pick up enough shares later at a lower price. Reliance itself could not legally buy its own shares. So who were the NRI investors who arrived so providently on the scene with more than Rs 100 million (then over US$10 million) to spend?
Six weeks later, after several further spells of bear hammering of Reliance shares, Dhirubhai called his opponents' cards. Every second Friday, the Bombay Stock Exchange stopped new transactions while its members settled the previous fortnight's trades or arranged badla finance to carry them over. On Friday 30 April, Dhirubhai's brokers used their right under the badla system to demand delivery of the shares they had bought for their offshore clients, failing which a badla charge of Rs 25 a share would be levied. The bear cartel baulked, throwing the exchange into a crisis that shut it down until the following Wednesday. In following days the price of Reliance shares rose to a peak of Rs 201 as the bear brokers desperately located shares to fulfil their sales, incurring massive losses.
By 10 May, the Reliance price started easing, signifying that deliveries had been made. But Dhirubhai and his company had clearly arrived. Reliance was henceforth treated by major news-papers as a 'pivotal' stock in the market, and Dhirubhai himself began