Mahabharata in Polyester

by McDonald, Hamish

  • • •

  Over this period, street protests and court actions against the government’s treatment of Reliance made little progress, although they kept the allegations against the company alive. In October 1988 the Shetkari Sanghatana (Farmers’ Organisation), which had been campaigning for three years against artificial textiles on behalf of cotton growers, announced that it would blockade the Reliance factory at Patalganga. But the movement’s leader, Sharad Joshi, was persuaded to drop his plan. In December 1988 two activists employed Mahesh Jethmalani and a colleague to sue the government and others over the CBI’s failure to prosecute on the evidence it was alleged to have assembled against Reliance. By contrast, the CBI had shown ‘extraordinary zeal’ in prosecuting trivial offences by those who had exposed alleged illegalities by Reliance.

  Bombay Dyeing’s lobbying got it nowhere. Dhirubhai was counted as a major backer of Congress for the general elections due at the end of 1989. Rajiv was turning back the clock in an effort to recapture the dynastic magic. In early March his mother’s former political manager, R.K. Dhawan, returned to the Prime Minister’s office as an officer on special duty. Rajiv had set aside his ‘preppy disdain’ for the ‘oily haired Punjabi babu [clerk]’ and returned to Indira’s style of functioning.1 Dhirubhai had his own contact back in court.

  By November 1989 Indian Petrochemicals cut off the supply of imported paraxylene altogether, while the government dropped excise on domestic supplies. Nusli Wadia was compelled to buy 4000 tonnes from Reliance, paying Rs 22 000 a tonne, which still left Dhirubhai a fat profit margin on his sale. By that time Dhirubhai had many other worries, but he must have savoured this humiliation for Wadia at the end of this second phase of the Polyester Mahabharata.

  13

  Murder medley

  Since March 1987 the tables had been turned against Nusli Wadia and the Indian Express, both beleaguered on many fronts.

  Ramnath Goenka’s health was failing, and the old Marwari newspaper baron was spending long spells in hospital. But he was continuing the fight, even though the Indian Express was facing its worst period since Indira’s Emergency. By the end of 1988 more than 230 prosecutions had been launched against the group by agencies in charge of company law, customs, income tax, foreign exchange and import quotas. Government advertising was withdrawn and banks directed to refuse credit. In Bangalore, the Express had continual trouble with its communications lines. Staff were harassed by goondas. A previous ally in exposing Reliance, the tabloid Blitz, had switched sides by mid-1987 when it captioned a picture of Express Towers as the ‘House of Forgers’ and called its editor, Arun Shourie, the ‘Ace of Liars’. By late 1989 the Express group was on the brink of collapse, Shourie later revealed.1

  From how high up the pressure started is indicated in the memoirs of the senior civil servant, Madhav Godbole. As Finance Secretary for the state of Maharashtra during 1986–89, Godbole was instrumental in denying requests by Reliance for additional concessions in state sales tax on production at Patalganga – one request being for sales tax breaks on production in excess of licensed capacity. Godbole recounts direct requests in person by Dhirubhai and Mukesh Ambani, lobbying on Reliance’s behalf by the Marathi-language writer Bal Samant and by Congress MP Murli Deora, a string of invitations to concerts at Dhirubhai’s home and a call from the Reliance public relations department asking whether Godbole and his wife would be interested in some shares from the directors’ allotment in a current Reliance issue. Godbole refused all requests and offers. In April 1989 anonymous telephone threats to his home late at night caused Godhole to obtain police protection. Finally, the state’s Chief Minister, Sharad Pawar, called Godbole in and told him of ‘a lot of pressure from 7 Race Course Road’ – the prime minister’s official residence in New Delhi.2

  After his arrest by the CBI in August 1987 for a wrong entry in a hotel ledger, Nusli Wadia encountered many other challenges apart from his intense battle over paraxylene. He and his companies were scrutinised for any possible violations of the Companies Act, the foreign exchange regulations and customs and excise regimes. Income tax inspectors revisited his tax returns for the previous thirteen years.

  In the early hours of 12 July 1989 Wadia returned to Bombay’s Santa Cruz airport from an overseas trip. Immigration officials served him with a deportation order, which said the Government of India had declared him an undesirable alien. Wadia had just over twenty-four hours to leave the country of his birth, where he had spent most of his life and where his family had a continuous record of business for more than 300 years.

  He began an urgent legal appeal and got a court to stay the expulsion order. But the message was clear: if Wadia did not buckle under to Ambani’s industrial supremacy and pay his prices, all mechanisms of the state could be manipulated to make his position in India untenable. His former friend Rajiv Gandhi had completely switched sides.

  But just as the opposing forces seemed to have backed Wadia into a tight corner, the most bizarre episode in Bombay’s textile Mahabharata began – one that was soon to cover the Ambanis and Reliance with great embarrassment and bring a collection of characters from Bombay’s violent underworld briefly on to the centre stage of Indian commerce.

  • • •

  A week after his return to Bombay, Wadia was told that his life was in danger in his home city. Chief Minister Sharad Pawar telephoned Wadia at his home fronting the Arabian Sea at Prabhadevi waterfront. Without giving details, he warned the textile tycoon of a conspiracy to assassinate him. A squad of police commandos arrived soon after to mount a twenty-four-hour guard on Wadia’s home. Two cars packed with armed police were assigned to escort Wadia’s limousine around the city.

  Pawar was an old friend of Wadia and no friend to Dhirubhai. He had parted company with Ambani’s principal political investment, Indira Gandhi, in the late 1970s and had run a rebel Congress Party in his own state. Brought back into the mainstream Congress only recently by Rajiv Gandhi and installed as Chief Minister, he remained an ambitious and independent-minded satrap whom Gandhi’s loyalists regarded with great suspicion. Prominent among these loyalists in Maharashtra was the former city mayor and the Congress MP for South Bombay, Murli Deora, the old yarn market colleague of Dhirubhai. By then Pawar was feeling some heat himself from Reliance for failure to overrule Godbole on sales tax and for other hold-ups in state government clearances. Pawar believed Reliance was stirring up certain land scandals being levelled against him by party dissidents.

  Even so, Wadia suspected that the security scare was a ruse to keep him under guard and keep his activities closely monitored. The next day, he gave the guards the slip and vanished for several hours. On his return, Pawar was again on the telephone and rebuked Wadia, warning him the threat was serious.

  Wadia continued to be tied up with his appeal against the deportation order. On 26 July he applied to the Bombay High Court to be recognised as an Indian citizen. On 28 July he faced no less than the Additional Solicitor-General of India, G. Ramaswamy, who spent an entire day in court opposing his application. In addition the CBI Director, Mohan Katre, came down from New Delhi and spent the day watching the proceedings, a highly unusual level of interest given that the case was not one involving his agency. As the CBI is the only agency that can investigate judges, his presence might have been intended to intimidate the bench. Ramaswamy argued that Wadia had never been an Indian citizen and that, even if he had, his application for British passports in 1964 and 1984 had automatically extinguished any claim to Indian nationality.

  But on the evening of 1 August a sensational development suddenly put Reliance in the dock. Detectives of Bombay’s Criminal Investigation Department arrested Kirti Vrijlal Ambani, a general manager of Reliance in charge of public relations and customs and excise matters, and charged him before a magistrate with conspiracy to murder Nusli Wadia.

  Also arrested and charged as chief co-conspirator was a strange companion for the Reliance executive: one Arjun Waghji Babaria,
already widely known around Bombay as a small-time popular music band leader playing under the name ‘Prince Babaria and His Orchestra’. Then aged 40, Babaria had frequently organised entertainment evenings that brought Bombay’s milieux of business, cinema and crime together. Favouring black sequinned suits, see-through black shirts and a gold medallion as stage costume, Prince played the drums in his band while ‘playback’ singers and dancers pumped out hits from Hindi movies. Such figures as the actor Sayeed Jaffrey, Haji Mastaan, who was during his life the reputed kingpin of gold and electronics smuggling in Bombay, and several senior businessmen are among those figured in Babaria’s photo-album of musical parties. Two years earlier Babaria had taken his musical troupe to Dubai to provide the night’s entertainment at the birthday party of Dawood Ibrahim, the pre-eminent don of the Bombay underworld, later to be accused as mastermind of the bombings that rocked the city in March 1993, killing nearly 300 people.

  Among Babaria’s circle of acquantainces was Kirti Ambani, then 47. A long-time Reliance employee, he was originally named Kirti Shah but became so devoted to the Reliance founder that he had changed his own name to Ambani. Babaria had called occasionally at Kirti Ambani’s office. At a party for Babaria’s young son in 1987 Kirti had been a chief guest, his presence being recorded on video and camera.

  The character of each of the two accused immediately threw a degree of implausibility over the alleged assassination plot: Kirti Ambani, a middle-management company man with an engineering degree, fond of playing chess, who had wife and children in the suburbs; Prince Babaria, a sentimental and pudgy figure of middling talent, desperately proud of his pretty wife Hema and their two children and living, as it turned out, in a police barracks at Bhendi Bazar – where his forebears had made a living for six generations as police informers.

  Bombay business circles were incredulous enough that a Reliance employee would even think of taking out Wadia. Life was and is cheap in the city: right through the 1980s and 1990s leading businessmen in the construction and transport industries were victims of contract killings carried out for amounts of less than two thousand dollars. But the Ambanis’ constantly expanding ambitions seemed to place them on a level of corporate behaviour well above this vicious jungle. Their chosen weapons were the robust publicity offensive, the judicious stimulus to bureaucrats and politicians, and an unfailing ability to interest big and small investors in their schemes.

  In compiling evidence on the alleged conspiracy against Wadia, the police also revisited earlier cases – such as the bashings and attacks met in the past by the son of Orkay Silk Mills chairman, Kapal Mehra, Jamnadas Moorjani of the Crimpers’ Association and embroidery exporter Bipin Kapadia. Statements were taken from Moorjani and Kapadia. Wadia also recalled a threat from ‘terrorists’ that had forced him to withdraw his two sons from their boarding school in the Himalayas at Kasauli in 1987. Nothing but the coincidence that all had at some time or other been in commercial rivalry to Reliance was established.

  The police case, as eventually presented to court in October 1990, was that Kirti Ambani was deeply involved in the Reliance fight with Wadia’s Bombay Dyeing Ltd for monopoly control of paraxylene. By limiting access to cheap imports, Reliance was trying to force Bombay Dyeing to buy Reliance’s surplus paraxylene, on which the price was 280 per cent above the production cost. The two companies were in a ‘hectic campaign’ during July–September 1988.

  After his job as Reliance press spokesman had been largely taken over by Anil Ambani and hired journalists in 1987, Kirti Ambani’s duties continued to be ‘liaison’ with customs and excise officials. The police presented one example of such a contact, a former customs inspector named Umedsingh Sarraiya, who in 1974 had handled the customs bond placed by Reliance. Sarraiya had frequently visited the old Reliance offices at Court House and had been introduced to Kirti Ambani by Dhirubhai’s nephew Rasikbhai Meswani, who was then in charge of customs matters. Sarraiya had continued social meetings with Kirti until 1989, at each other’s home, or at small hotels and restaurants around Bombay, with Kirti usually picking up the tab. Other customs officers sometimes joined them. Sarraiya also admitted to police that he had been demoted for graft in the early 1980s, having been caught taking money from a passenger while on duty at Santa Cruz airport.

  The police alleged that, in November 1988, the bandmaster Babaria had contacted a criminal called Ivan Leo Sequeira, alias Shanoo, whom he had known for a year or so through a mutual friend who played the Hawaiian guitar. Sequeira, then 29, had been convicted of a murder ten years earlier but acquitted on appeal in 1984. In 1988 he was again facing charges of shooting someone and was on bail.

  Babaria had a proposition. A big industrialist was to be attacked and killed. ‘He told me that we would be getting much money in that case,’ Sequeira later confessed in a sworn statement before a magistrate. Babaria later revealed the target was Nusli Wadia, but did not immediately reveal who was paying, saying only that he was a ‘big man’.

  On 13 December 1988 Babaria and Sequeira went to the Ritz Hotel in Bombay’s Churchgate area to meet Kirti. The Ritz is a small hotel close to the Nariman Point business district and was frequently used by Reliance and many other companies for middle-level meetings. Kirti had booked a room on the Reliance account and was generous with company hospitality at the lunchtime meeting, as the three consumed ten bottles of beer and various snacks.

  Sequeira, introduced as ‘Shakil’, said Kirti had then discussed the plan to attack Wadia. Kirti gave him newspaper cuttings with photographs of Wadia, as well as Wadia’s address and telephone numbers. Sequeira left the meeting and waited downstairs. Babaria came down, and Sequeira said he was interested in the job but wanted an advance. Babaria said Kirti had agreed to pay ‘50 lakhs’ (Rs 5 million, then worth about $300 000) for a successful job.

  The next day Sequeira rang Babaria and was told Kirti had agreed to pay Rs 500 000 in advance. The two met the same afternoon at a restaurant near Babaria’s home. Babaria went outside to a lane and came back with a plastic bag containing Rs 150 000 in cash, which he gave to Sequeira. The police collected evidence of substantial cash withdrawals from Reliance bank accounts around this period, advances made to company employees, adjustment of bad debts and internal cash transfers. ‘All these tend to suggest of [sic] possible manoeuvring of accounts for dubious expenditure,’ the indictment said.

  Thereafter, Sequeira dodged Babaria’s increasingly anxious phone calls inquiring about plans for an attack. After several weeks, Babaria went to Sequeira’s house and told him Kirti was inquiring about progress. At a second meeting, on 21 February 1989, the three sat drinking by a hotel swimming pool on Kirti’s Reliance expense account and again discussed plans for the killing. Sequeira pressed for more of the promised advance and was duly passed another Rs 150 000 via Babaria at the Shalimar restaurant the next day

  As more weeks went by without action, Babaria came under more pressure from Kirti Ambani. Sequeira said he was evading Babaria’s calls to a neighbour’s telephone and instructing his family to tell callers he was not at home. In April Babaria engaged another criminal named Ramesh Dhanji Jagothia to help carry out the attack. Jagothia was later to surrender to police two pistols made in local workshops, along with ammunition. Babaria also contracted a mechanic named Salim Mustaq Ahmed to steal a car and drive it in an ambush of Wadia’s limousine, at an agreed price of Rs 50 000.

  Together with Jagothia, Babaria went to Sequeira’s home later in April and managed to find him. Babaria pressed Sequeira to get in touch with Kirti, and the next day Sequeira telephoned the Reliance general manager at his office. ‘He was very upset,’ Sequeira said in his sworn statement. ‘He told me he was taken to task by his boss. I told him that I would return the advance money. But he told me that he was not interested in getting back the money. He was interested in getting the job done.’

  In May Babaria and Sequeira met a very unhappy Kirti Ambani at another hotel. ‘He told me that he was suspecting o
ur intention,’ said Sequeira. ‘He was upset. He was about to cry. He was saying he was unable to face his bosses. I assured him that the nature of the work was serious and if anything goes wrong each one would come in trouble. He was not very happy by hearing all this.’

  After this meeting, Babaria pressed Sequeira once or twice, but – according to Sequeira – came to realise that he was not really interested in the job, which Sequeira admitted himself. ‘When Babaria approached me with the offer I thought that it was a good opportunity to me to make good money,’ he said. ‘But when I came to know that the person involved is an industrialist and a prominent figure I realised that it was too dangerous and I decided to back out. However, I was knowing that the persons who wanted us to do the job were also connected with industries and it was possible for me to knock out as much money as I can by dodging them. With this idea I knocked from them the sum of three lakh rupees.’

  In a later interview, Babaria freely admitted to his role in organising the murder conspiracy and said that his assembled hit squad had actually tracked Wadia at three locations with a view to carrying out an attack. On one occasion, he claimed, they followed Wadia to a bungalow in the Western Ghats. ‘We wanted to kill him but were two hours late so the operation failed,’ Babaria said. On the other attempts, the gang tried to catch Wadia outside his home and again outside a hospital where Wadia had gone to visit the ailing Ramnath Goenka.