Fault Lines - Implosion: India's Tryst with Reality - page 23

becoming President of India in 2012.) Earlier, McDonald reported, Prime Minister Indira
Gandhi had given 'a parting gift' to Ambani just before her government lost power in 1977
when she exempted all polyester yarn imports from customs duty. That was 'a gift of Rs
37.5m to Dhirubhai'. 8 McDonald also wrote that Dhirubhai had 'put his resources' behind
Gandhi's efforts to split India's coalition government that took office in 1977. In the late
1980s, he 'swung the appointment' of a Reserve Bank of India deputy governor. The topic
revealed how the government was suborned and policies bent, stock markets manipulated,
competitors unethically harassed and undermined, opponents pursued with vendettas, and
business partners and suppliers treated roughly. 9
Dhirubhai Ambani combined this with excellent project management, which has been
widely recognized, but he also enjoyed displaying his inside knowledge. A public relations
executive told me how he had once offered him a job, saying that a major part of the role
would be to discover in advance what big stories were being prepared by leading news-
papers and magazines. When asked why, he replied, 'So that I can say to someone when
I meet them at an airport, “I hear that so-and-so magazine is doing a big article on you -
congratulations.” He will then be impressed with my good information.' A parallel story is
told by Anand Giridharadas, an American journalist, in India Calling. 10 He recounts how
a former Reliance manager told him that a woman executive from Enron, the now-defunct
fraud-ridden American power company, told Dhirubhai in the 1990s that Enron had be-
come as powerful in India as Reliance. Dhirubhai's reply, according to the manager, went
something like this: 'Yesterday at 2.19 p.m., you arrived at the finance ministry to meet so-
and-so official. You talked about this issue and that issue. You left the office at two-thirty-?
ve.' The Enron official, stunned, muttered, 'OK, maybe almost as powerful.' (The refer-
ence was presumably to Rebecca Mark, a flamboyant executive based in the company's
Houston head office, who was in charge of Enron in India.)
Mukesh Ambani stressed to Giridharadas that the focus was on continuity of relation-
ships when doing business, rather than being 'transactional' on individual deals. Asked
about helping bureaucrats' children find and pay for places in American colleges, he ac-
knowledged that an executive or a company foundation could have paid. Giridharadas was
told by an unnamed source that, with Reliance, 'once you join, you're there for life'. This
included both active and retired journalists and bureaucrats. When I was researching an art-
icle for Fortune magazine in 2002, shortly after Dhirubhai Ambani had died, a rival busi-
nessman told me, 'They don't listen to stories about their bad public image because they
think they can buy their way out of any problem.' I tackled Mukesh on the allegations in an
interview and he claimed there was 'a difference between image and reality' and added: 'In
the '80s I used to get upset - now I realize they [the criticisms] are natural in a democracy
where people are going to say this sort of thing - this is not China.'