Mohammad Ali Jinnah was about to leave for Karachi on 7 August 1947 to take over as first Governor General of Pakistan on 14 August. He was to dispose of his 10, Aurangzeb Road bungalow at New Delhi. His industrialist friend Ram Krishna Dalmia, popularly known as RK, bought it paying Rs.10 lakh. Destiny of India and Pakistan was decided by the three key leaders of British India who stayed nearby: Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru on 17 York Road (renamed as Motilal Nehru Road), Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel on 1-2 Aurangzeb Road (renamed as Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam Road) and M.A. Jinnah on 10 Aurangzeb Road. Incidentally, Dalmia never stayed at the bungalow he bought from Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan but it was turned into the head office for the anti-cow-slaughter movement, a cause that RK strongly propagated!
RK aspired to have control over the finance ministry and used his Times of India, which he bought over, to attack Prime Minister Nehru. Unfortunately, he landed himself in Tihar Jail following the maiden speech on 6 December 1955 by Nehru’s silent backbencher son-in-law Feroze Gandhi in Lok Sabha where he exposed the insurance scam of Bharat Insurance Company owned by the Dalmia-Jain group which had misappropriated Rs.22,00,000. Shashi Bhushan, a friend of Feroze and a former Member of Parliament, in his book “Feroze Gandhi: Political Biography” gives description of the Mundada and Dalmia scams Feroze Gandhi exposed leading to the resignation of T.T. Krishnamachari, the finance minister and a close friend of Nehru. Following inquiry Dalmia was sentenced to two year jail and was sent to Tihar Jail. Shashi Bhushan writes that Dalmia hardly stayed in the jail as he bribed the doctor by gifting a car and spent most of his time in the hospital. Immediately, after his released RK married his sixth wife.
Dalmia’s own daughter and a celebrated writer Neelima Dalmia Adhar has written RK’s biography titled “Father Dearest: Life and Time of RK Dalmia”. Adhar has written “The Secret Diary of Kasturba” also. Ashok Malik writes about Neelima’s book on her father: “Father Dalmia does not come across as an agreeable sort. He married six times, his money and odd charisma drawing a series of confident, young women into a lifetime of insecurity, servitude and extended family intrigue. Dalmia also fathered 18 children. To most of them he was more occasional visitor than parent. To all of them he passed on "an enviro-genetic dysfunction". Writing about him was, for Adhar, a "form of cleansing, even empowerment". Her relationship with her father remains a strange one. He died in 1975 but in many ways, she says, she understands him better now. Dalmia was a sort of Marwari hustler, a gambler who made killing after killing on the silver market and then graduated to the status of industrialist.
RK funded the Congress-owned, at different times, National Herald and The Times of India. Post-1947, he became a trenchant critic of Nehru, seeing him, rather immoderately, as a rival. Dalmia was typically untypical. His campaign against cow slaughter, for instance, was headquartered in the house he bought from an old friend, one M.A. Jinnah. His public profile was smeared when he was jailed for a financial swindle. According to her, RK married the first of his wives, Narbada, as an adolescent. Narbada became his sexual slave, and his cruelty extended to beatings at night, while keeping her swathed in veils during the day, till she died of consumption a few years later.
Apparently, RK was heartbroken, and spent the rest of his life in search of other Narbadas to bed; the unlucky ones, so it appeared, would share his name, and his shame, forever. Durga, his second wife, bore him a daughter, but as a chronic patient, could not provide him the conjugal companionship he devoted himself to. A glimpsed ‘Narbada’ in an ashram he proposed to spurned his advances, one of few who would not fall for either his wiles or his wealth, saying she would rather marry a dog. Hurt by the rejection, RK found himself proposing foolishly over a public address system to a Sikh schoolgirl he had only just glimpsed. Strangely, his proposal was accepted by her ecstatic father, and Pritam Takhat Singh became his third wife. But she, unlike the others, was unlikely to toe his orthodox regimen, and like her stale lipstick, he had her wiped out of his life by settling a large alimony and dispatching her to a life outside India.
He was to marry three more times, wooing each bride with the promise that she would be the last addition to his harem, insisting on respect for the second and aging wife Durga, and keeping them in separate, palatial homes in Lutyen’s Delhi, with even the children forbidden to meet, or study in the same schools. The battle of the wives - and consequently the children - now took a new turn. According to this account, he accused one of sleeping with her aide, monitored their phone calls, paid servants to carry gossip back to him, used his purse-strings to buy loyalty, threatened, subjugated and whiplashed them into obedience, even as they monitored his affections for this family, or that, which manifested in even greater suspicion and ugliness. Adhar has written her father’s biography 25 years after his death in 1975. Adhar states: "My interest is only human behaviour. My father may come across as hateful, yet he was free spirited... And even negative feelings can be very alluring."
Next Column: Wealthy J.R.D.Tata’s simplicity
Photo Line:
R K Dalmia with M A Jinnah
