The-Polyester-Prince

interest in various ways, Dhirubhai’s standard gratuity was a suit or sari length of
material made by his factory Gradually Dhirubhai also learned the channels for largescale
political donations in the top echelons.
In 1966, Indira Gandhi had become prime minister following the sudden death in
Tashkent of Lal Bahadur Shastri, who had been India’s leader since the death of her
father Jawaharlal Nehru in 1964. With her only ministerial experience the
Information portfolio under Shastri, but a lifetime of watching her father and her late
husband Firoze Gandhi in politics, Indira was well versed in Congress Party
machinations but had a shallow grasp of policies. Power steadily exacerbated a deep
psychological insecurity and a melancholic nature that led her to place inordinate
trust on unworthy people in her inner circle, as well as on her headstrong son
Sanjay, who was extorting funding for his pet scheme of developing an indigenous
‘people’s car’s .
Among the sweeping economic changes of 1969 was one small legislative
amendment that had the effect of entrenching corruption, though its ostensible
intention had been the opposite. Until then, a section of the Companies Act allowed
directors to make political contributions to any party. This was repealed in 1969. As
on of the officials who supervised the amendment later admitted, this led to political
payments by black money. Companies had to generate black funds by under/over
invoicing, fictitious sales etc. A pattern of wholesale corruption and large-scale
corporate malpractices, through double-accounting, over- invoicing and underinvoicing,
came into being, creating massive unaccounted-for and therefore untaxed
funds.” One of the conduits to Indira Gandhi was a private secretary named Yashpal
Kapur, a Hindu the Western Punjab in the 1947 Partition who displayed all the
financially grasping tendencies this community brought across to Delhi. In all these
Years, her memoir of the Nehru and Indira Gandhi years, the well-connected
magazine publisher Raj Thapar recalls Kapur thus: “ one glance at him and you felt
the grease all over you. He was smooth and unintelligent, outwardly vacuous and
inwardly scheming who then only performed what we called the chai-pani [teamaking]
jobs, or so we thought in our innocence.’ By 1971, Thapar noted how
Kapur’s role had taken on a weird shape. Yashpal Kapur, that oily cupbearer, was
growing in stature by the minute and his corruption was becoming legend and his
ability to get Indira to sign on the dotted line became the bazaar gossip,’ she wrote.
Thapar’s bureaucrat husband Romesh, who early had been a trusted confidant of
Indira, felt duty-bound to tell Indira. ‘e sought an appointment, went to the office,
gave her a run-down of what the average person was thinking, of how the PM’s office
now harboured a nest of corrupt people led by the favoured Yashpal. She was
furious. “You know I would never touch a penny.” “Maybe, but you are seen as the
queen bee. The others do the collecting.” Thapar went on:“…in unending string of
stories were current about Yashpal’s power, how he was sought by the high and
mighty, how he was well in with Sanjay who was beginning, bit by nibbling bit, to
tamper with the administration in his favour. Yashpal was of course no longer in the
PM’s office. His place had been taken by his nephew, R. K. Dhawan, who was rapidly
to assume much vaster powers than his erstwhile uncle and together they were to
manipulate patronage in this vast country.” Dhirubhai not only cultivated Yashpal
Kapur, says one old acquaintance, ‘e practically purchased him’. In due course, the
relationship passed on to R. K. Dhawan, who moved eventually from the prime
minister’s office under Indira and then Rajiv Gandhi into parliament and ministerial
portfolios himself. Over the years, Dhirubhai developed close ties with politicians in
many parties. These included figures such as Atal Bihari Vajpayee, senior leader of
the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party who became prime minister of a brief