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Journalism of Courage
Everything L.M. Thapar did was gigantic but there was very little chance that the huge effort would ever be visible. That was the man’s style. He went like he would have wanted to. Quietly into the night. The huge Ballarpur empire, presided over and expanded by his nephew, Gautam, is one he was the architect of. Calculatedly global and of a size that dwarfs many other manufacturing giants, Ballarpur today stands as magnificent testimony to the grit of the man who built it in an era when socialistic controls had stifled most of those who dared to dream big.
At the height of his power, I remember encountering the man in what was in hushed whispers referred to, by those destined to stay outside, as his lair. He presided over one of India’s largest business empires at the time, from behind a huge desk in the magnificent caverns of Thapar headquarters on Janpath. Strategically placed was a lamp with a huge shade that ensured his face remained largely in the dark. From the shadows emanated a voice. Low, but smooth, it radiated control. Here was a man who revealed only what he wanted to.
This was an empire he had created. It spawned businesses that ranged from edible oils to glass, from prawns to gherkins, from chemicals to cement blocks. It was perhaps the last of the great conglomerates of its time. The story of LMT’s business growth has been played out many a time in the Indian economy. It was one of circumventing controls, grabbing licenses, setting up economies of scale that sometimes seemed excessive and often proved unprofitable.
This was a man who understood and played politics at the highest levels. He had the most tightly knit network of powerful political connections nurtured over decades. Some granted him critical favours and others stood by him in moments of high distress. One particular episode stands out. During the time of a V.P. Singh orchestrated governmental attack on him, Thapar had to go through the indignity of being arrested. While he was incarcerated for a night, on charges that were never proven, one of his most powerful political contacts and a powerful minister in the Manmohan Singh cabinet, sat out the vigil in his home, pulling strings that mattered to ensure that the big man was out by daybreak.
Though LMT was the archetypal businessman of the socialist era, combining a massive array of industries under one giant family umbrella, he never really belonged. He may have been arrayed along with those who were purportedly members of the Bombay Club, but he always had sharp points of significant, intellectual and, most importantly, operating differences that were expressed only privately but powerfully.
At a time when talent was not revered in the manner it is today, LMT’s lair was surrounded by the cabins of his cabinet — powerful chieftains who were all professionals. He grew them or stole them. At a time when poaching was unheard of, snapping up from IBM a ‘70s version of a new age financial whiz kid who today presides over the mergers and acquisitions of an equally large empire elsewhere, was the kind of coup only Thapar could swing.
Intensely private, LMT who chose to remain single, was truly a world citizen with an array of connections, friends and acquaintances who spanned the entire globe. If you were among the privileged to be invited over to lunch at his house, and you managed to escape the bridge foursome, you could encounter the world finest wines, nouvelle cuisine and global banter that could easily belong in a tony London club’s private soiree.
He was understandably mortified by the unbelievable media feeding frenzy around the bombshell of an allegation of a secret marriage many years ago. The episode left him more reclusive than before.
When LMT took over as chairman of Ballarpur in 1962, he was 31years old. He was to give it up at age 75, to his nephew Gautam, who he had spent time toughening under his steely gaze into an urbane inheritor of a weighty mantle. Though young when chairmanship was thrust upon him, LMT too had been well prepared for such an undertaking, having worked under his father’s stewardship after receiving a world-class education in India and the US. He took the industry his father left him — creating an empire. At one point under his stewardship, Ballarpur Industries was listed among the five largest business houses in India.
Convinced that the future of the group lay in paper, it was BILT, the paper division of Ballarpur Industries, that had been LMT’s business focus in his last years.
LMT believed that the key to India’s success lay in education. His company founded a college for engineering in Patiala. The Thapar High School in Haryana and the Thapar Vidya Vihar at Kamalapuram in Andhra Pradesh also bear witness to his belief that education was the first step to creating a truly classless society.
The hills surrounding his home in Rishikesh often reverberated with the strains of khayal, by vocalists such as Kumar Ghandharva, Prabha Talwalkar and Ashwini Bhidhe. Those hills may no longer sound to the orchestration of the master. But those who wander through the hills and hear that crackle of a colossus on the move, will always know who it was that passed by.
The writer is a public affairs specialist
