Word: dalmia
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Seth Ramkrishna Dalmia is the kind of man who has made capitalist a nasty word in India. Dalmia said as much himself a few years ago. "I feel that from the age of twelve to these 57 years of my life, I have been accumulating the sins of wealth and palaces. I feel as if I had sucked the blood of the poor in establishing the big name of Dalmia...
...time, Dalmia was pledging his life to the service of the poor. He could afford to. For this skinny little man with a split-melon smile had amassed an empire which controlled one-sixth of all Indian industry, ranged from banks to coal mines, insurance companies to newspaper chains. Son of rich parents who had lost their money, he says he made his first killing before he was 19 by cornering the Bombay gold bullion market. By 1937 he had made and lost three fortunes in speculations and won a hold on a cement factory, the foundation of an industrial...
When Seth Ramkrishna Dalmia was 18 he made his first million. Today at 60, Dalmia controls flour and sugar mills, cement and chemical plants, coal mines, banks, insurance companies and six news papers, including the influential Times of India. He is said to be India's third rich est industrialist.* Along the way, Dalmia has come to believe that he is indeed one among men, possessing unusual spiritual qualities. "I shall die peacefully with a smile on my face, "he once wrote, "an enviable state unattainable by ordinary men." And in the style of Indian saintly ones...
After so candid an announcement, poorer Indians waited to see what the government would do. Then one day last week some 1,000 red-capped policemen simultaneously raided 25 Dalmia offices and executive bungalows. They seized hundreds of ledgers, sealed the accounting rooms, and mounted 24-hour guards over the premises. Dalmia himself was temporarily beyond reach: he was in Europe consulting specialists about the health of his children...
Angriest of all was Deputy Prime Minister Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, who had been the Gandhi Fund's most persuasive agent among the industrialists. Last week Indian newspapers featured Patel's public reply to Dalmia. Said Patel: "If you will let me know what contributions you have made [I will return the money] and cleanse the fund from any taint which you have communicated to it . . . I do not see any possible connection between contribution to such a sacred object and escape from punishment for tax evasion...