DLF, the joke went, stood for Damn Lucky Fellow. Not without reason: its chairman, Kushal Pal Singh, has had five close brushes with death in his 81 years. Also because Singh is a rare phenomenon — a billionaire businessman from the Jat community. You will find his kinsmen as agriculturists, wrestlers and boxers, soldiers, bus drivers in Delhi Transport Corporation, cops on Delhi streets — but never in high business. Singh remains till date the only Jat to have ever made it to the Forbes’ List of Billionaires, a list dominated by Gujaratis, Marwaris and Banias. In popular lore, they are supposed to be strong and straightforward, and with a wit that hangs between dark humour and sarcasm. “Do you have to hang from a tree?” a Jat is likely to ask you if you enquire what time of the day it is — certainly not the smooth tongue so essential to make it big in business.
Still, Singh shows decent business sense. When he goes to buy land from farmers at Gurgaon, the Jat village next to Delhi, he wears a Dhoti and a beret from his cavalry days. The idea is to strike a chord with the farmer as well the soldier in the household. Conversations with a troublesome Jat trade union leader are in their thick native tongue. And once when Singh is abducted by dacoits near Bulandshahr in Uttar Pradesh, the place of his ancestors, Singh tells his abductors he is one of them. They offer him a tumbler of hot milk and let him off. What remains unsaid is if he reported them to the police. He ought to have; they were after all a menace to non-Jat travellers.
That Singh has left his outspoken Jat genes somewhere far behind reflects right through his autobiography. There are no villains in the piece, no business adversaries. Most people don’t even have shades of grey. Except perhaps Bansi Lal. Singh’s run-ins with the former Haryana chief minister are well known. At that time, all DLF’s investments were at Gurgaon. The political risk was not hedged. By twisting state policy, Bansi Lal almost drove DLF and Singh out of business. Singh traces the incident back to a dinner party at his home in December 1975. Bansi Lal, then the Union defence minister, was a guest. It was all going well till another guest, a serving army officer who had downed a drink too many, walked up to Bansi Lal, complimented him on the nice job he was doing and offered to put in a word for him with the most powerful man in the country, Sanjay Gandhi. Bansi Lal left in a huff, without waiting for dinner, and later took his revenge on Singh.
It was a twist of fate that pulled Singh out of the dumps of despair. One hot day, while he was seated on a charpoy in the shade of a tree, a car screeched to a halt and the driver asked for water to cool the engine. That’s how Singh met Rajiv Gandhi and sold him the dream of suburban development. To be fair, Singh does not leave loose ends in his tales. He met Bansi Lal many years later. The politician was shattered by the death of his son in an accident and admitted to Singh that he had needlessly hassled him. Singh also revisits his old girlfriend in England, who was distraught at his leaving for Dehra Dun to join the Indian Military Academy, only to find her married. Later enquires tell him she died early in Africa.
Though he may appear guarded in his observations and judgements, Singh really pours his heart out when he talks about his wife’s recovery from an injury in a helicopter crash near Mussoorie and her subsequent fight against cancer. The anxiety contained in these pages is palpable. You can see Singh pleading with doctors across the world to come and treat his wife. As complications mount, and unexpected infections show up, you can sense the trauma in the man.
Singh’s has been a roller-coaster life. He studied at a madrasa, yet became part of the British high society in England, the landed gentry complete with mansions, pheasant hunts and long horse rides. From there, he joined the cavalry, only to leave it a few years later to help his father-in-law, Chaudhary Raghvendra Singh, in business. After trying his hand at industry (Willard and American Universal), Singh took it upon himself to restore the fortunes of his father-in-law’s almost defunct company, DLF. Though DLF had built colonies in south Delhi, the government had taken all urban development in its hands. So DLF was left with no business, and Chaudhary Raghvendra Singh had decided to sell it for Rs 27 lakh. Singh pleaded for a chance. Chaudhary Raghvendra Singh probably had little to lose and handed the company over to his son-in-law.
Singh’s is a good example of the patience that is required to do business in India, especially real estate development. He waits years together for the feisty Rukhsana Sultana to vacate a building he owns in downtown New Delhi, though the court has issued a directive for her eviction. Singh, from his office at the top, sees goons from old Delhi in her apartment. Clearly, she wants to make a political tamasha out of it. Sensing her intention, Singh decides to stop all legal proceedings and wait for her to leave. The passive resistance works, and Sultana leaves quietly, though after several years.
WHATEVER THE ODDS
The Incredible Story Behind DLF
K P Singh (with Ramesh Menon
and Raman Swamy)
Harper Collins; 323 pages; Rs 699