The Polyester Prince (32 page)

Two days later, Kirti is quoted saying that ‘neither he nor his boss were interested in the work any longer’. Babaria had been dodging him for nine months, and Kirti had found out from his own sources that nothing had been done to execute the plan. Babaria pressed to be allowed to continue, but Kirti again asked for the money back and told Babaria to get Sequeira to ring him.

Soon after, Sequeira agreed to turn approver, or state witness, and co-operated in an attempted telephone entrapinent of Kirti Ambani. Sequeira rang to ask Kirti if he wanted his Rs 300 000 back. Kirti evaded a clear rely, but the police said it was clearly established that Kirti knew Sequeira (under an alias) and that the money had been paid to him.

When the full implications of the plot became apparent, the detective chief Inamdar briefed Bombay’s Police Commissioner, Vasant Saraf. In turn, Saraf took Inamdar and his case file up to Chief Minister Sharad Pawar, who carefully read through all the evidence. Having ordered the special protection for Wadia, he told the police to examine every finding with extreme care. On 31 July, Pawar rang the office of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in New Delhi, and briefed the Cabinet Secretary, B. G. Deshmukh. Pawar said arrests were imminent. 1(irti Ambani and Prince Babaria were picked up the following evening and charged.

Pawar’s message had raised the alarm bells in Gandhi’s office. As it was clear the Bombay police were too far advanced for their investigations to be called off, Gandhi’s advisers turned their efforts to damage control by getting the highly politicised Central Bureau of Investigation (
CBI
) on to the case.

Later reports said that Pawar himself had suggested to Deshinukh then that, in view of the ‘political sensitivity’ and ‘interstate’ aspects of the case, it should be taken over by the central government. Other reports said that Pawar had succumbed to strong pressure from Gandhi’s office to make the request. Pawar later insisted it was his own suggestion. Even before the arrests, the Director of the
CBI
, Mohan Katre, had suddenly arrived in Bombay on I August and started pressing the local detectives for details of the case. On 4 August, the central government issued a notification transferring the case to the
CBI
.

To the league of Ambani critics, this meant the murder case was destined for the same process of suppression by partisan investigation as the Gurumurthy allegations two years earlier. An action was mounted in the Bombay High Court, in the name of one Professor Ramdas Kishoredas Amin, opposing the transfer to the
CBI
, and asking for measures to prevent vital evidence being interfered with or deliberately ‘lost’. The High Court gave an interim stay order and placed all the records and cassette-tapes of telephone intercepts under the court’s own custody.

The central government appealed to the Supreme Court of India, fielding the seniormost members of its Attorney-General’s office, backed by hired senior advocates. The bench of three judges decided on August 16 to modify the High Court order, allowing the
CBI
access to the sequestered records and tapes provided that true copies were kept under seal. The case was left with the
CBI
, but the chief investigating officer of the Bombay Police was to be associated with further investigation.

Around the same time, the enterprising reporter Maneck Davar of the Indian Express, who later exposed a link between Reliance and the Bank of Baroda chairman (see Chapter 12) found evidence that tended to confirm suspicions that
CBI
director Mohan Katre was indeed one of ‘Dhirubbai’s people’. Davar had heard that Katre’s only son Umesh Katre had some sort of business relationship with Reliance through a company called Saras Chemicals and Detergents Ltd. Posing as a small industrialist, Davar placed an order for three tonnes of the detergent ingredient
LAB
. The transcripts of Davar’s telephone conversations with Katre junior make it clear that he and Saras were commission agents for Reliance chemical products, so closely related to Reliance that they were able to promise gate passes and receipts directly from Reliance to avoid extra sales tax for the purchasers.

Davar found that the younger Katre was earning Rs 5.4 million a year from his Reliance connection, enough to buy an apartment in Bombay at which the
CBI
director himself stayed when visiting the city, as well as a Mereedes-Benz car which was then a rare luxury in India.

The
CBI
director’s response was that he had no knowledge of his son’s business activities.

Arun Shourie commented in the Indian Express: ‘Is it possible-and that in an Indian household - that you, the only son, should suddenly start making Rs 5.4 million a year and your father should not know? Specially if, as is the case in this instance, you have no particular qualifications other than being the son of the Director of the CBI to bag such a lucrative agency?’

Shourie recalled a famous court judgement against a state chief minister, Pratap Singh Kairon, making it the duty of senior public officials to investigate rumours or signs that their children were extracting benefits or being given benefits by virtue of their parent’s position. The law against corruption fitted Katre to the dot, Shourie said.

As well as recalling Katre’s intervention to have the Express critic Gurumurthy arrested under the Official Secrets Act in 1987, Shourie listed five investigations that had been ‘buried’ by the
CBI
under Katre’s direction. the alleged gift of a Rs 250 million power plant by a foreign supplier; over-invoicing of raw material imports for
PTA
production; the surreptitious addition of a paraxylene plant to the Reliance complex at Patalganga without an industrial licence; clandestine royalty payments for chemical processes; and the antedating of letters of credit in 1985 to obtain Rs 1 billion worth of foreign exchange.

Katre had not only been assisting Reliance directly, he had been hounding Wadia as well.

‘When was the last time you heard of the Director of the
CBI
sitting at the hearings of a case—even a case as important as say the assassination of Mrs Gandhi or the trials of the worst terrorists?’, wrote Shourie. ‘But Katre has spent hours and hours personally sitting through, and in a most conspicuous place where the judge could see him, the day-to-day hearings on the case about Nusli Wadia’s passport, a case in which the
CBI
is not even a party!’

… should the agency [the CBI] in the control of and under the direction of this man be handed the responsibility of investigating the conspiracy to murder the man he has been using that very agency to hound-a conspiracy in which is implicated a senior executive of the very business house in whose interest he has been hounding the intended victim of the conspiracy?’

Wadia himself gave no sign of knowing anything about the conspiracy until after the arrests on 1 August. When a reporter rang him for comment about ‘the case’, Wadia initially started talking about his visa case. But when interviewed by the Bombay Police soon after, he certainly gave credence to the plot. ‘In the last eight to ten years there have been certain incidents in the course of our business and that of Reliance Industries,’ he said. ‘I feel that these incidents could have motivated 1Grti Ambani, an employee of Reliance Industries, to consider me an enemy.’

The Bombay Dyeing chairman went through some of the disputes over chemical imports, the harassment he had faced, and the difficulties caused to Reliance by the Indian Express exposures in 1986-87. ‘I am led to believe that it is the impression in the minds of those who manage Reliance Industries that I was associated and involved in the preparation of those articles against them.’

The articles had led to numerous inquiries and the government’s refusal to let Reliance turn its nonconvertible debentures into convertibles, and had been seen as the cause of Dhirubhai Ambani’s stroke.

‘It is thus apparent … that those who hold animus against me made one attempt after another to harass me and harm my business interest,’ Wadia said. ‘Despite all these efforts they have not succeeded in destroying or harming the business with which I am involved and which is professionally managed. This could perhaps have led to frustration in the minds of those wishing to do me harm and made them think of using other methods.’

In a later arnplification to a
CBI
superintendent in December 1989, Wadia admitted that he had been involved with the Indian Express as ,a friend of Ramnath Goenka, its owner:

‘Mr Goenka and I both shared the same perception that the Ambanis and
RIL
, their company, had subverted and manipulated the government to such an extent that they were able to have their way in virtually every field through assistance from the government being directed entirely in their favour. This was possible as they had a large number of powerful supporters both among the bureaucrats and politicians in power …

The Indian Express in a series of articles exposed many of the wrong doings of
RIL
and the favours that were granted out of turn to it. I through my association with the Indian Erpress helped and was indirectly involved in some aspects of the publication of these articles. I was also associated with Mr Gurumurthy who was the author of the said articles.’

Mukesh Ambani, when interviewed by the
CBI
on I June 1990, was at pains to play down the ‘rivalry’ with Wadia, and the effect of the ‘misinformation’ conveyed by the Express.

He did not blame the Express articles for his father’s paralytic attack in 1986, which he said was a hereditary illness. Kirti Ambani had come directly under Mukesh Ambani, but had no authority to spend large sums of money. About Kirti Ambani’s alleged involvement in a case of this type, we came to know through his arrest,’ Mukesh said. ‘In fact it is hard to believe that we needed or need any retrogative [sic] step for our survival, as a few times back, we were supposed to be close to power.’

In the immediate aftermath of the arrests, the response of Reliance had been to cast suspicion on a counter-conspiracy against the Ambanis themselves and to play up the rivalry angle. As the case is subjudice, we have been advised not to comment on the charges levelled against [Kirti Ambani],’ a company press release said on 1 August. ‘But [we] would like to state that this appears to be a deliberate frame-up aimed at embarrassing and maligning our organisation at a point of time when one of the group companies is going in for the largest public issue in corporate history It is a matter of great regret that an innocent employee of the company is being dragged into such an unseemly controversy resulting from business rivalry’

Reliance executives had spread the idea that the conspiracy had been cooked up by Wadia, Pawar and the Indian Express group with the simultaneous objectives of nobbling the debenture issues for the Reliance Petrochemicals plant at Hazira, getting Wadia out of his difficulties with visas and raw material supplies, and (for Chief Minister Pawar) striking a damaging blow at Rajiv Gandhi.

They pointed out that Pawar’s state government had appointed as prosecuting counsel the senior advocate Phiroz Vakil, who had earlier represented Wadia and Gurumurthy in the Thakkar-Natarajan inquiry into the Fairfax case. (It was not mentioned that Vakil had also appeared against Pawar in another case.) Had they researched the background of Babaria, they might also have pointed out his descent from a long line of police narks. An anonymous note was circulated among press people in Ahmedabad, alleging a history of mental illness in Kirti Ambani’s family.

Against a general scepticism that murder was part of the Ambani repertoire-and a belief that, if it had been, the plotting would have been more competent-this frame-up theory found plenty of takers. India is a society inclined to look for the conspiracy behind the conspiracy. Sharad Pawar had been in a squeeze within the Maharashtra branch of the Congress Party. Dhirubhai controlled about one-third of the Congress members of the state assembly and was able to turn on the pressure. Just before the arrests, Pawar had been making overtures to Dhirubhai. At the height of the crisis, Pawar managed to get a call through to Dhirubhai just before midnight one evening. The next day, Dhirubhai was telling his associates that the problem had been solved-possibly referring to Pawar’s decision to call in the
CBI
.

But could the incongruous elements of the murder conspiracy have possibly been set up?

An alternative theory was that the plot might have been a case of a follower being ‘more loyal than the king’-that Kirti had acted out of an excess of loyalty. The large sums of money paid to Babaria, surely far beyond the personal resources of a middle manager, would then have to be explained.

The revelations about the
CBI
director Katre’s connection with Reliance led the opposition Janata Dal to call for his immediate prosecution for corruption over this ‘venal nexus’. But on 27 August, the Home Ministry declared its ‘full confidence’ in Katre after hearing his response, which was undisclosed, to Maneck Dayar’s report. The press allegations were ‘motivated and calculated to tarnish the image of the office he holds’, a Ministry spokesman said.

The
CBI
continued to give every appearance of an active investigation, but a fatal flaw had ben introduced by the
CBI
into the prosecution case. The body of evidence amassed by the police against Kirti Ambani and Babaria was highly circumstantial, drawing on hotel records and bank transactions that backed the alleged sequence of meetings between the conspirators and the transfer of money to the proposed hit team, and on the telephone taps made at a late stage when Kirti Ambani was highly reluctant to take the plot further.

Was Kirti the instigator of the plot, or had Babaria trapped him into it?

The crucial additional evidence was the confession of Sequeira, the hit man who had turned government witness. Without his testimony, the plot looked highly improbable and amateur, with Babaria hardly convincing as a hard man of the underworld. Under Katre, the
CBI
arrested and charged Sequeira as Plotter No. 3-a step which invalidated his earlier testimony to the Bombay Police and completely destroyed any prospect of his testifying in court to implicate the others.