RADIA GATE - BIO IV

That brings us to the enemy. When Ratan Tata made his famous Rs 15-crore bribery speech recently in Dehradun, one aspect got underplayed. Ratan was referring to the Tata Group’s three attempts to launch an airline with Singapore Airlines (where Radia was a consultant). “But an individual thwarted our efforts to form the airlines,” Tata said. And the person Tata refers to is Jet Airways’ Naresh Goyal, who lobbied heaven and earth to ensure that the Tata-Singapore consortium didn’t get its way. This was a powerful enemy for Niira, and was probably one reason why she didn’t get her way with her private airline.


Despite these failures, Niira’s stature as a person who could effectively “get things done” had been cemented. This brought her to the notice of Ratan Tata, who in the aftermath of the Singapore Airlines’ drubbing, was keen to centralise the public relations and advocacy functions for the Tata Group as a whole. There are numerous theories on how this eventually got done, but a former senior bureaucrat points to Bombay Dyeing’s Nusli Wadia as the man who finally gave his seal of approval on her to Tata (Tata biggie R.K. Krishna Kumar played a role too). In 2001, in one fell swoop, Tata gave Radia’s company Vaishnavi the entire account for the 90-odd group companies. There was speculation that the Tatas had invested capital in the agency, but most industry sources now disagree and say the money invested was Radia’s. This did not go down well with some CEOs of the Tata Group companies—initially there was considerable scepticism about her abilities and the “hold” she had on the Tata supremo. But all that died down when everyone quickly figured out that “rnt will not hear one bad word about her”.

After successfully managing the mess around Tata Finance in 2001—when the group took its former managing director Dilip Pendse to the cleaners on corruption charges—Radia made her mark. At a time when the BJP regime seemed unstoppable, she established links with politicians, bureaucrats and top print and TV editors. At this stage, the Tata Group had a furious battle with the Times of India Group, where it withdrew advertising (the Times group in return ignored the Tata group on its pages). While this battle was eventually resolved in 2004, Radia sent out a strong signal to the media that the Tata Group could not be taken for granted. Meanwhile, around 2002, Ananth Kumar got embroiled in the HUDCO scam—the case is pending in the Supreme Court. Given the subtext of her proximity to Kumar (which didn’t last for long after that), Niira had also made strong enemies in political circles. The BJP’s Arun Jaitley, for one, has been steering clear of Radia for some time now.