No-nonsense industrialist

Rahul Bajaj was a rare India Inc voice

One of the wry jokes about India Inc was its penchant for double-speak, fulsomely praising the government in public but bitterly criticising it off the record. Rahul Bajaj, who died on February 12 at age 83, was not one of them. Throughout his long innings, from a businessman competing in shifting policy landscapes to his emergence as a grey eminence of Indian business, Bajaj could be depended on for a forthright opinion regardless of the party in power. His antecedents as a scion of a storied business family with links to the freedom struggle may have offered some safeguard but