Jawaharlal Nehru and Ghanshyam Das Birla first met in 1924 when Mahatma Gandhi, just out of jail, was recuperating in the industrialist’s beach-facing house in Mumbai. A year later, Nehru told Gandhi that he was a little tight for money. Gandhi mentioned Nehru’s plight to Birla. Almost overnight, Birla turned up at Nehru’s home at Allahabad and offered to help him out of the situation. Nehru was incensed, but managed to conceal his anger from his visitor. This was the beginning of the uneasy relationship between the two.
Nehru thought Birla supported the Hindu lobby within the Congress. Birla, on the other hand, found Nehru’s sympathies for the Soviet Union and his socialist bent of mind a bit too much to handle. In 1936, Birla wrote to Gandhi: “In London, Nehru was making speeches that Russia was India’s best friend and Japan a weakening power. I don’t know about Russia, but I definitely know that Japan is not a weakening power.” After Gandhi was assassinated on January 30, 1948, by a Hindu fanatic in the lawns of Birla House in New Delhi, Nehru wanted the house to become a national monument; Birla wasn’t keen. Another catfight was played out between the two. Independence didn’t help matters. Birla had to junk his plans to set up a steel plant at Durgapur in West Bengal because Nehru had decided that it was the job of the public sector to make steel.
Krishna Kumar Birla (1918-2008) inherited his father’s interest in public life. The various incidents are captured well in his autobiography, Brushes with History (Penguin, Rs 650). Much of the book deals with family history and his brush with politics, charitable work and correspondence with public figures and statesmen. Business is just 11 of the 665 pages. “My Business Activities” is the last of the 40 chapters of the book.
Unlike his father’s frosty relationship with Nehru, K K Birla was close to Indira Gandhi, Nehru’s daughter. Indira Gandhi had lost power to the Janata Party in 1977. Chaudhary Charan Singh, the home minister, lost no time in launching a vendetta against her and people perceived to be close to her. One businessman on the list was K K Birla. His crime was that his companies had put out advertisements in some souvenirs brought out by the Congress, and had given a few Jeeps to the party for election work.
K K Birla first went to Jayaprakash Narayan, the Janata Party ideologue who had at one time served as his father’s secretary, for help. But there was nothing he could do. The autobiography says that Singh point-blank asked him about the money stashed away by Indira Gandhi. Devi Lal said all cases could be dropped against him if could cause 15 or 20 Congress members of Parliament to defect to the rival camp. Nothing came out of these behind-the-scene parleys. Birla left the country just in time to evade arrest.
How did he manage to outwit Singh? Apart from the fact that the bureaucratic machinery did not move fast enough, K K Birla was able to stay a step ahead of Singh because he was on excellent terms with the then foreign minister Atal Behari Vajpayee. The Janata Party regime was trying to impound K K Birla’s passport to confine him to India. With Vajpayee’s intervention, K K Birla was able to keep his passport. A few weeks before his planned arrest, Vajpayee tipped off K K Birla who booked himself on a flight to Paris. A few months later, he returned to India after the all-clear signal from Vajpayee.
K K Birla was also close to Sanjay Gandhi, Indira Gandhi’s younger son who died in a plane crash in 1980. With his favourite people’s car project floundering, Sanjay Gandhi approached him to become a shareholder in the company and infuse some capital. But K K Birla was not convinced. He though that for Sanjay Gandhi to realise his dream, it would have to be a large-scale project requiring large investments. He even told Indira Gandhi that her son was leading an unwise project and needed to be restrained. Had he agreed to Sanjay Gandhi’s offer, K K Birla would have become a shareholder in Maruti Udyog, the country’s largest car company. But that was not to be.
