Dhirubhai Ambani: The Heathcliffe of Indian business

The engine of a nation’s destiny is so far from the last third class bogie that too often a villager from rural India cannot comprehend with any historical perspective where his train is headed, or had taken a definitive turn. He continues to remain a karmayogi lost to the battles of his immediate life.

So it is possible that many an Indian villager cannot fathom the amount of television and press coverage of the death of India’s greatest business tycoon. But, the outpouring of emotions, the high-voltage homages, and the genuine sense of loss that so many felt at the death of Dhirubhai Ambani is a cue to another decisive turn that the engine of modern India has taken.

Those who know of Ambani only as the father figure of India’s equity cult, as the biggest wealth creator of the country are obviously those who have had their umbilical chords cut after Nehru’s ghost was finally exorcised by India. Children of Manmahonomics only know of socialism as a disease the country suffered from, till the good doctor delivered us.

As a young journalist trying to cut his teeth on the nation’s collective conscience in the early nineties, Dhirubhai Ambani’s Reliance Group of Industries was the giant every David wanted to take on. Ambani’s reputation as an unscrupulous and often ruthlessly unscrupulous industrialist was wellknown. That he was the most powerful man in India was a very easily spouted by drunk and undrunk journalists, bureaucrats and know-it-all fixers. The government had powerful patrons for Reliance, the press feared Reliance. His own rivals feared and loathed them.

I had started to carve out a separate field of reporting when crime no more excited me and there were few other beats that offered the chance to throw bricks at truly big guns. The excitement to pelt stones at those many times your strength is one of the most basic instinct of those who take journalism as a career of choice.

I decided economic offences was area that was little explored in the press. Most reportage on white collar crimes were essentially done till then in the mainstream press as expansion of handout by the Customs, the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence or the Income Tax, other than the police. The Central Bureau of Investigation’s most publicized cases till then were always corruption cases against politicians, because they immediately hit the front pages in politics obsessed Indian papers. I started to look out for the big story.

I was at the time with a paper that had spine to take on Ambani to accompany history of taking him on. I worked through the labyrinthine tunnels of various Indian revenue intelligence and enforcement agencies to first zero in on intelligence officials known for integrity, check their credibility, and then the long sparingly rewarding work of winning their confidence.

Eventually, I ran into officers of very high integrity who were sidelined, superceded, frustrated, even destroyed by or as an indirect consequence of their investigation of the Reliance cases. I realize today that besides getting information, I also gradually and unknowingly started to share their sensibility. I started to imagine Balzac-like that behind all great wealth there was a great crime.

My big story was finally never published by my paper. It was one of my career’s biggest disappointments. I have reasons to believe that my story might have been instrumental in changing the very equation of my paper’s relationship with Reliance. But these are unproved, and finally irrelevant things. I am myself not too sure if I am not being arrogant and self-important like other journalists in assuming so.

But that is beside the point. Eventually I realized that I was getting into an “enforcement agency” mentality. I began to imagine that all business was always wrong. After I worked for a business channel I discovered that there might actually be other factors. I discovered the difference between business practices and laws. I discovered also that Indian business in suffering from the clamps of an outmoded system of artificial controls imposed by a socialistic economy. And all investigators chasing them had an animus against big business. Those were the ones with integrity, others had long learnt to milk big business for personal gains by threatening them with those outdated laws.

My change in perspective took years. I have been out of the loop of investigative journalism for more than years now, but when I saw the outpouring of grief at Ambani’s death, I spied a symptom of a similar change in an entire nation’s sensibility.

The closest to national reverence that an Indian entrepreneur had reached was JRD Tata. He had the lineage of the legendary Jamshedji Tata. And yet, JRD’s death was mourned only by the select elite. There were no weepy scenes on the streets. There was no deluge of the hoi polloi that besieged Bombay.

When the scion of that other grand Indian business family, Aditya Birla died, it was a similar case. Both the deceased JRD Tata and Aditya Birla were exemplary businessmen. In the case of JRD, he was also entwined with the history of India’s economic engine, by being the founder of India’s national airline carrier. But compared to the turnout at their respective funerals, you would imagine Dhirubhai Ambani was a beloved national leader of the masses. The closest comparable event would have to be Princess Diana’s funeral.

So what does it portend?

I think in the death of Ambani, Indian sensibility might have finally changed course irreversibly from being primarily a socialist country to become an unabashedly capitalist one. I am talking of the sensibility of the country, otherwise the nation’s leaders had already put in force a irreversible economic reforms programme and the country was already under the mildly delirious tremors of the first flush of capitalist success. But by and large it remained a country socialist by temperament and capitalist by imitation.

Of course, many of our most shameful statistic of human development remain unclothed. But somewhere, and I would like to think along with the trajectory of Ambani’s own life, the nation’s value system might have been economically modernized to be more liberal, more in tune with the current ideology of money.

There is a lot that is lost in this kind of a transformation. A general uncritical red carpet to consumerism is already visible in urban India. Village India too is fast becoming the playground of a thousand companies selling far more thousands of products and services in an attempt to test all their theory of rural marketing. India’s proliferating cult of MBAs and their progeny are all at this new front in an all out war to map and milk the mythical Indian middle class.

There is a real fear that is being played out in this country. Tradition and its attendant rituals are making way for sponsored events of mass mediocrity in performing arts, theatre, folk music and dances. Even the Kumbh Mela is now being sold as a tourist attraction with newly laid infrastructure displacing local laity and their age old piety before the offering of white dollars.

Along the way value systems too have changed. Once corruption was an illusory dragon all opposition parties used to attack the ruling party with, and ride to power at the hustings only to be outsted in their turn on the same charges. But otherwise, the corrupt too remained outside the purview of a punishing law.

Ambani’s tale is much the same. He used all the power of an indomitable will and a superhuman ambition to reach his goals. By the time he died he had finished a journey those two ends had a small time clerk on one end and the head of a Rs 65000 crore company with interests in textiles, plastics, oil and telecom.

He also did one thing that only a post-Nehru entrepreneur could conceive of; sharing his wealth with individual investors who bankrolled his dreams on the strength of Reliance dividends. That was the modern virtue Ambani had that others did not. In doing so, Ambani made a huge base of small investors partake of his profits. In that respect he was a Robinhood to Indian investors, he may not be the most moral or even legitimate businessman, but he was generous to his hordes. And in the best democratic traditions, every Indian had a choice to to join his hordes.

Reliance’s 3.5 million strong shareholding community is a whopping two percent of India’s middle class that the world’s businesses’ are salivating about, and the largest pool of shareholders in one company anywhere in the world. The updated database of these shareholders is enough to unnerve any retailer from taking on Reliance.

And yet, this is a company that decided to troop into India’s notoriously miniscule group of income tax payers as late as the year 2000. In all its years of growing Reliance never felt the moral obligation to pay Income Tax to the country’s impoverished exchequer. It was one more aspect of Ambani’s heroic-even-in-notoriety in your face attitude that made Reliance possible.

Ambani may have broken all the laws of the land, manipulated all its politicians, and priced each and every influential man in power to reach where he did. But much like Maradona’s hand of God goal, eventually Indians will remember him and his company as the eventual winner, and Reliance shareholder will revere him as their deliverer.

To his credit, Ambani was a man of his times. He did not have the luxury of a Narayan Murthy of Infosys or even a Azim Premji, who could neatly dodge the bureaucracy and anachronistic laws to build their empires by the very nature of their businesses. Their dollars with respectability were earned at a time when both were at premium. They were educated and high end entrepreneurs. Ambani was not.

But by the time he died, Ambani had established and secured for his sons both latent fear mixed with respect of the establishment and formal qualifications fortified by his native but far reaching vision. The Ambani sons are not likely to have to resort to Machiavellian strategies to run their empires. His sons Anil and Mukesh will now chase the respectability that their father never got till he died.

In his death Dhirubhai Ambani the matriculate son of a modest school teacher from a village in Saurashtra had achieved far more than what was expected of him, including a medal from the famed Wharton usiness School. Ambani, like all prodigal sons in the throes of a passion and ambition beyond his own control, supplanted his need for the love and affection denied to him by earning respect and fear.

Ambani’s lasting legacy may still be that he took upon himself all the perfidy of his amoral rise and left his sons no moral ambiguity to negotiate with those who define morality within a climate controlled make believe world of dead ideology and even idealism. Anil and Mukesh Ambani have to be merely one tenth of their father to be ten times more respectable. In his death Ambani has become the Heathcliffe of Indian business.