Book Review: 'The Founding Fathers of Fraud' by Bhaswar Mukherjee

It is a fact that in order to understand the present, it is essential that one knows the past. The present independent India with all her legacy of strengths and weaknesses came into existence on August 15, 1947, bedraggled with complexities like poverty, illiteracy, the ongoing population exchange with the ensuing communal violence and the need for rehabilitation of refugees, inflation, linguistic differences and an overall ‘fragile’ state of economy.
Amid such socio-political mayhem, there existed myriad financial opportunities for those who cared to notice. While most of the industrialists, notwithstanding their political connections, remained covertly resentful of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru’s socialistic proclivities, there were people like Ramkrishna Dalmia and Haridas Mundhra, who uncovered the opportunities behind the veneer of threats. Bhaswar Mukherjee deftly weaves in and out of their lives and their scams, to paint a vivid picture of the-then India. He delivers a compelling narrative of the Dalmia and Mundhra scams that reshaped the Indian economy indelibly and paved the way for the nationalization of the Life Insurance Corporation (LIC) and other government reforms.
Telling a story that involves such intricate economic and historical details, is not easy. It takes experience and tenacity to balance the ‘urge to be relatable to the general readers’ and the ‘itch to be informative’ for the serious ones. It is not difficult to understand the amount of research that goes into a book like this one, especially in a nation where opinions are fractionated by varying end goals and reasoning is often clouded with unreasonable sentiments. In the era of highly opinionated social platforms, it becomes difficult to produce a book that tells the story of the earliest financial scams recorded in sovereign India, without sounding politically inclined towards one side or another. To make matters worse, the Indian political scenario is not a plain see-saw that can tip only two ways, it is a complicated zigzag of lots and lots of interwoven threads of polity and interests. That Bhaswar Mukherjee showed the grit to delve into the socio-economic quagmire of the past and present and manages to emerge with a pearl in the form of this book, is surprisingly brilliant.
Mukherjee does not present either Dalmia or Mundhra as mere villains, he takes the readers through the different facets of their personality and the complex driving forces behind their good and bad decisions, so that their culpability is not based on a single story. Both men had backgrounds and personalities that were as different as ‘chalk and cheese’ in the author’s own words, and yet, the one common thing about them was the presence of immense ambition. The author describes Dalmia as a ‘strange admixture of puritanism and profligacy’ while he calls Mundhra a Machiavellian. Readers who are inclined to know more about the Indian political scenario, would savour the heady combination of constructive criticism of the socio-political outlook of the-then Pandit Nehru led government as well as the admiration for the efforts made towards economic investigation and reform.
Readers would amaze at how Ramkrishna Dalmia, arduously climbed up the rungs of power, to become a front-seat industrialist mentioned alongside the Tatas and the Birlas, his personal as well as philosophical choices, that were strangely so riddled with extreme contrasts, that it becomes difficult to really decipher Dalmia who was an industrialist, a Gandhian, had six marriages, was a brilliant and hardworking individual and yet, was evidently a deeply flawed man. One can almost start sympathizing with and seeing things from Dalmia’s POV, thanks to Mukherjee’s proficient penmanship and in-depth research. Mundhra’s trajectory from being a modest light-bulb salesman, hailing from a family of traders to his foray into the highest economic echelons of the newly sovereign nation is also discussed with equal expertise by Mukherjee, in light of the following exposé of the LIC scam.
Bhaswar Mukherjee ensures that readers get a fair brush with several oft-discussed ‘big names’ of those times, including that of Nehru’s son-in-law, Feroze Gandhi, who had a prominent and profound role leading to the enquiry, led by Justice Vivian Bose. He also makes sure that his readers do go through the Appendix and start reading more to understand the country’s history. In this way, Mukherjee does a wonderful job of an academician too, who can influence the ‘students’ to develop the habit of reading. The author intercepts the lessons of history with anecdotes concerning the enigmatic Dalmia and the charismatic Mundhra. He writes about political facts, and makes it feel interesting like fiction. Such is Bhaswar Mukherjee’s intelligence in handling the very complex subject. It is understandable when he does take a deep dive in the technical jargon of it, because he wants the readers to be satiated as well as stimulated in equal measures. If those parts of his writing seem too heavy for some, they can just skip those portions, but then, the stupendous sum of the money involved back then, and what it would mean now, will remain unrealized by those readers.
Overall, Bhaswar Mukherjee manages to tackle yet another complicated terrain with this book as he takes readers on a combo-joyride of knowledge and thrill. ‘The Founding Fathers of Fraud’ is a good starting place for beginners and a beautiful halt for experts because of the combination of the author’s unfettered enthusiasm for extensive research and penchant for great story-telling.
By: Debasree Banerjee, a Write India Winner and author of ‘A Place called Eden’, ‘A Trail of Roses’ and other works.