Thread by @sheshapatangi1

The Truth Behind #SuitBootKiSarkar.

On the occasion of death anniversary of #DhirubhaiAmbani, let us read how Indira & Co helped a clerk of Aden to become Polyster Prince of India or in other words Evolution of SuitBootKiSarkar with the help of Congress & Pranab Mukherjee.

When Congress was split into two, most big business of those days had sided with Congress (O) and Indira wanted her own moneybags whom she could trust and this was possible in the licence-permit raj where entrepreneurship could be engineered. A number of businessmen grew up

thanks to her largesse among them Dhirubhai Ambani, Kapal Mehra of Orkay.
DBA was a shrewd businessman but the initial help he got made Dhirubhai realise the power of the government. It could make or break business & with the sarkar on your side you could always be on the make.

So, he would spend a lot of time in Delhi and meet anyone who mattered - ministers, PAs, secretaries, joint secretaries, directors, section officers and even peons. The government had to be sympathetic. And he ensured it was most of the time.
The two FMs in the Reliance take-off

period were said to be positive were Pranab Mukherjee and N D Tiwari. So were petroleum ministers and sundry babus in the ministry. The first negative FM was V P Singh.
And his tenure coincided with one of the bitterest corporate feuds, involving Dhirubhai on the one side and

Nusli Wadia, Ramnath Goenka of IndianExpress and S Gurumurthy, on the other. Soon this feud spilled over to the government, causing a rift between Rajiv Gandhi and Singh, resulting in the ouster of Singh from the government and the Congress.

In an interview to IndiaToday

indiatoday.in/magazine/cover…
Goenka said “Rajiv declared his government was not for sale. But when we wrote 20 articles in the Express about Reliance, the Government did nothing. Instead, we were harassed."
When questioned about fairness of articles, he said
Yes. We alleged fraud

smuggling and other economic offences of hundreds of crores. Despite our challenge to the Government to disprove us, we were never contradicted. Nobody told us why the persons we complained about were not dealt with. There was no investigation of the offender; instead the

Express was harassed in a variety of ways starting with the raids and the arrest of Gurumurthy, our adviser. In fact, the CBI investigated several parts of our exposes & concluded that offences had been committed by Reliance but nothing happened.
What made Goenka look into DBA?

In October 1985, The Economic Times published a story about a CBI inquiry into the opening of backdated letters of credit by Reliance worth Rs 100 crore. Ambani sent a letter of rebuttal to PTI - the news agency I was chairman of - stating that the news item was engineered by

Bombay Dyeing.
I had to write an apology, PTI had never before apologised to anybody. I also found out that there had been pressure on the PTI desk to run the Ambani rebuttal. So, I went to Dhirubhai and said, 'You are pulling down a public institution - PTI. You should have

some values.' He gave me a reply that I would rather not go into with you but that is where I felt that his approach was highly prejudicial to the country. In fact that was the starting point of my investigation into Reliance's affairs.
#HamishMacDonald wrote #PolysterPrince

which was banned, in an interview to Outlook
magazine.outlookindia.com/story/he-wont-…
He revealed Pranab was a friend of Dhirubhai way back when he was a minister for commerce, giving all the export-import licences (to Reliance) & then as finance minister (FM) in the Indira Gandhi government.

It goes back to the time of those Isle of Man companies (1979-82), the dummy companies and the mysterious churning of Reliance shares. There were also perceived preferential treatments of the import duties on the ingredients of polyester, such as Reliance vis-a-vis Bombay Dyeing

The next big accusation of partisanship came when Mukherjee was put in charge of the ministerial committee that handled the Bay of Bengal gas fields and the gas pricing. By that stage, the linkage had moved on to Mukesh Ambani’s group. So people saw Mukherjee and Murli Deora

(then petroleum minister) being friends of the second generation of Reliance. But it was all done in a way that fitted all the norms…So the history of his relations with the Ambanis goes back a long long way to the 1980s where he is seen as having flourished under the patronage

of a very wealthy tycoon. But then, the whole Congress Party did, and Indira and eventually Rajiv also did after a lot of trials and tribulations.
I would like the readers to decipher themselves the magnitude of this relationship between Congress and Ambanis.
#VANDEMATARAM