Polyester Prince

A FIRST-CLASS FOUNTAIN Dhirubhai Ambani remained in Bombay because manufacturing was only one facet of his business. For a decade, the textile plant at Naroda was supportive and subsidiary to his yarn trading activities. In addition, he was steadily augmenting his skills at breeding money from money, and at wielding political and bureaucratic influence on government policies and their interpretation. Dhirubhai was never simply an industrialist, a trader, a financial juggler or a political manipulator, but all four in one.

From his earliest days in Junagadh, Dhirubhai had learned that relationships were the key to unlocking help, and that the law could be argued with. ‘One thing I have noted with Dhirubhai is that if he starts an acquaintance with someone he will continue it,’ said Manubhai Kothary, the trade group Sasrnira’s president. ‘He never throws away any relationship.’ He was endowed with a photographic memory for faces and names, and any contact- however feeting - he could try to turn into a common background on which some affection could be based. For example, Sir Nicholas Fenn, who was British High Commissioner in New Delhi in the early 1990s, was amazed to find Dhirubhai claiming him as an old friend from Aden. In the early 1950s, Fenn had been a Royal Air Force pilot flying transports through to the Far East and Australia. Dhirubhai remembered him from refuelling stops at the Shell facility at Aden’s airport. philosophy was to cultivate everybody from the doorkeeper up. ‘I am willing to salaam [bow down to] anyone,’ he told a magazine interviewer in 1985, in a statement that shocked many readers for its bluntness. In the India of economic plans and government control of the commanding heights’ that had developed by the 1960s, a lot of grovelling was required for businessmen to get the clearances they needed. Inevitably, the bureaucratic signature needed to move a file from desk to desk came to have a price on it as well. The Congress Party had degenerated from a movement of freedom fighters into a dispenser of patronage, with ministers allocating resources and licences while the bureaucracy worked out ways to make the process look objective.

After getting on his feet back in Bombay, Dhirubhai used to make frequent trips to New Delhi. He frequently went in the company of Murli Deora, a fellow yarn trader who was then working his way up the Congress Party machine in Bombay. Deora later became the head of the Bombay Municipal Corporation -the mayor- and then for many years the representative for South Bombay, the area containing the business district and elite apartments, in the Lok Sabha (the lower house of parliament).

Dhirubhai and Deora used to catch an early fight up to Delhi, and park their bags with a sympathetic clerk at the Ashoka Hotel while they did their rounds of politicians and bureaucrats to speed up decisions on import licences. Too poor to afford an overnight stay, they would collect their bags and fly back to Bombay the same evening. Later, Dhirubhai could afford to keep a room ready at the Ashoka, a government hotel built in a vaguely Moghul monumental style. His nephew Rasik Meswani also came into the lobbying activity, and eventually selected a canny South Indian, V Balusubramaniam, as full-time lobbyist for Reliance in New Delhi. For the lesser bureaucrats, journalists and others who helped promote the company’s