Rahul Bajaj will always be Hamara Bajaj

Rahul Bajaj.

We live in the post-pandemic Age of Big Tech, and a smorgasbord of aggressive unicorns. Market valuations, PE investors, sexy apps, 5G, voice, hand and face recognition technology, cryptocurrencies, etc. we are a universe of infinite possibilities. The Tinder Swindler is a Netflix super-hit web series. As is Inventing Anna.

Even if the COVID-19 pandemic indeed wanes post-the third wave, humanity is irrecoverably hooked to the insuperable powers of Artificial Intelligence and emerging potentialities of Metaverse. Startup founders are the big newsmakers, and those who are grabbing gargantuan infrastructure projects are India’s most powerful businessmen.

The distinguished gentleman who passed away in Pune on February 12 did not feature of late among the most tech-savvy or the richest industrialists in India. He did not need to. He towered above all of them. He had created a case-study in making the building blocks of India’s middle-class story on two wheels. His company was a household name. He had a conscience. He had a backbone. His name was Rahul Bajaj.

I grew up in Pune, the soporific pensioner’s paradise of India. India’s Detroit (sorry Chennai) boasted of illustrious business houses in the manufacturing sector, with auto companies dominating the city’s architecture. Tata Motors, Firodia’s, Mahindra’s…they were colossus. One of them in that august list was Bajaj Auto.

In those days of production quotas and license allocations, possessing a Fiat, Standard or Ambassador was the ultimate luxury only a few with deep pockets could afford. Bajaj, Vespa and later on Chetak scooters, domestically produced under the visionary guidance of Rahul Bajaj, became India’s touchstone middle-class fantasy. The unforgettable ‘Hamara Bajaj’ campaign encapsulated that triumphant spirit. It perhaps best defined Rahul Bajaj, as India took baby steps in 1991 to becoming a free-market capitalistic system, leading to a deluge of foreign joint ventures in a crowded auto and two-wheeler bazaar. The Bajaj Group, a diversified conglomerate that he headed as Chairman Emeritus, has a Rs 12,000 crore turnover.

I was privileged to meet Rahul Bajaj a few times, and was always fascinated by his incisive awareness (and of late, palpable disillusionment) with the goings-on in India’s byzantine political ecosystem. Parochial politics disillusioned him (the Bajaj family made a stellar contribution in India’s freedom struggle), and he was visibly exasperated with the low-brow national discourse.

I distinctly remember a long conversation with him at a corporate event where I was by sheer happenstance the keynote speaker (my acclaimed senior Shashi Tharoor had requested me to fill in for him). Bajaj was in the audience. “Where are we headed as a country?” was his lament, his anguish incandescent. I jokingly told him that his era was sadly over, India now belonged to a new breed of political entrepreneurs. The absence of a moral fibre in public life and a political culture that asphyxiated freedom of expression troubled him immensely. He was a genuinely worried man. Because he cared. It also helped that he was fearless.

In 2019, when he raised questions about the Narendra Modi-led Union government’s functioning at a gathering, Bajaj spoke for millions of Indians, and perhaps a few of his pusillanimous fraternity (Kiran Mazumdar Shaw being among his few outspoken intrepid colleagues). A throttled democracy, lynching of innocent Muslims, and the choice of a religious fundamentalist with links to terror violence in Parliament, left him gobsmacked. As it did many.

But in a shocking manifestation of egregious intolerance, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders pounced on him like avaricious tigers on a hapless prey. It was unalloyed ugliness. Bajaj was accused of wilfully creating ‘fake narratives’, and the Finance Minister believed he had hurt “national interest”. It was repugnant shaming of an elegant voice of India Inc. The latter’s pitiable deafening silence was conspicuous.

In their vituperative endless fusillade against him, the Right-wing groups forgot that Bajaj had taken on their arch political rivals, the Congress too, leading to a calibrated retribution against him by the grand old party. When it came to India, Bajaj was politically agnostic. The pernicious diatribe reached an abysmal low when several BJP leaders criticised Bajaj, with even hinting at him being a darling of the ‘Tukde Gang’, the BJP’s boilerplate response to strong criticism it cannot answer.

They were wrong, because even when Rahul Bajaj is up in the skies, he will always be our Hamara Bajaj.