The-Polyester-Prince

several years. I sent off some clippings, intrigued that the man accused of smugglingwhole factories through the ports of India now seemed to be advocating Swissefficiency in place of the lax administration of which he had supposedly takenadvantage. The proposal got to a high level in the government before being canned,but not before causing panic in the Indian customs service-which may have been allDhirubhai wanted to do anyway.There were daily updates from the Reliance PR staff on an issue of convertiblesecurities issued in the Euro market in May 1992, the first by an Indian companyand tangible proof of India’s reforms reconnecting it to the world economy. Therewas a company-organized trip out of Bombay up to its new petrochemicals plant atHazira, involving a bumpy fight in a chartered turboprop to the airfield at Surat, bareof airport terminals or navigational aids as far as could be seen, and a drive throughthe old textile trading city, squalid despite its lucrative silk and diamond industriesand,a couple of years later, notorious for an outbreak of bubonic plague. Across theTapti River, a glittering array of pipes and towers had indeed come up, and cryogenictankers full of sub-zero ethylene were tied up at the jetty. Reliance was clearly notjust a paper empire.But the history of political and corporate activity had put a sinister shadow across thegleaming success. M through the government changes of 1990 and 1991, the presscarried references to a certain large industrial house’s supporting this or that partyor being behind certain politicians. Scores of party leaders, ex-ministers, seniorbureaucrats, and heads of the big government- owned banks and corporations weresaid to be Ambani friends’ or Ambani critics’. Mostly it was the friends, it seemed,who got the jobs.People made bitter and cynical remarks about the Ambanis in private. The presscover-age, especially in the Indian business magazines, had a repetitive quality. Amyth was being created and sustained. At a meeting of shareholders in a bigBombay engineering firm named Larsen & Tourbo late in 1991, convened to approvea takeover by the Ambanis, this undercurrent of hostility welled up into a physicalmelee. In the shouting and jostling, the two Ambani sons had to fee the stage. Thecontroversies kept continuing right through the 1990s.Dhirubhai Ambani attracted adulation or distrust. To his millions of investors, whohad seen their share prices multiply, he was a business messiah. To one writer, hewas a ‘Frankenstein Monster’s created by India’s experiments with close governmentcontrol of the economy.‘There are three Dhirubhai Ambanis, one of his fellow Gujaratis, a writer, told me.‘One is unique, larger than life, a brand name. He is one of the most talked aboutindustrialists and for Gujarati people he has tremendous emotional and sentimentalappeal. He is their ultimate man, and has inspired many emulators. The secondDhirubhai Ambani is a schemer, a first-class liar, who regrets nothing and has novalues in life. Then there is the third Dhirubhai Ambani, who has a moresophisticated political brain, a dreamer and a visionary, almost Napoleonic. Peopleare always getting the three personalities mistaken. In a legal chamber lined withvellum-bound case references, a senior lawyer took an equally stark view. Today thefact is that Ambani is bigger than government,’ said the lawyer in all seriousness. ‘Hecan make or break prime ministers. In the United States you can build up a supercorporation but the political system is still bigger than you. In India the system isweak. If the stock exchange dares to expose Ambani, he tells it: I will pull my