Rahul Bajaj: The last bastion of Gandhian industrialists

Rahul Bajaj, veteran industrialist chairman emeritus of Bajaj Auto, passed away on Saturday, aged 83. He was a luminary in India’s business landscape who drew reverence from all quarters. He grappled with pneumonia and a heart ailment, and was admitted to the Ruby Hall Clinic a month ago. With his death, India lost its last bastion of industrialists whose business philosophy was heavily influenced by the Gandhian modus vivendi.

A member of the illustrious Bajaj family, he was born in the erstwhile Calcutta in colonial India in 1938. He was the grandson of Jamanlal Bajaj, the businessman-philanthropist who founded the eponymous Bajaj Group in 1926, and was the fifth “adopted” son of Mahatma Gandhi. The Bajaj family was well-known for their bonhomie with the Nehru-Gandhi family — with Jawaharlal Nehru suggesting that the infant should be named Rahul. His father, Kamalnayan Bajaj, attended school with Indira Gandhi for a while. The Bajaj family was also intimately involved with India’s independence movement — with Jamanlal even being the treasury of the Congress Party for some years.

A myriad of degrees bore Rahul Bajaj’s name. He graduated in economics from the famed St. Stephen's College in 1958, and later went on to earn a law degree from Bombay University, and an MBA degree from Harvard Business School. He started his long stint in his family-run business as a Deputy General Manager when his father was at the helm of operations, having succeeded the founder patriarch in 1942. Rahul Bajaj was appointed as the CEO of Bajaj Auto in 1968, and after his father’s death in 1972, he became the managing director of the company.

Initially, the company manufactured two and three-wheelers in collaboration with the Italy-based Piaggio, which was forged in 1960. However, the Indira Gandhi-led government’s refused to extend the collaboration with Piaggio in 1971, which surreptitiously also became a watershed moment for Bajaj Auto. It quickly jumpstarted the indigenisation of its products, and captured the void in the market. Under Rahul Bajaj’s leadership, the company’s Chetak line of scooters became a household name in the 1980s. Millions of people from all walks of lives used it, and its legacy was eternalised with the “Humara Bajaj” jingle.

When his company was at its zenith, the waiting period for a Bajaj scooter was as long as a decade. People who got their hands on the elusive Chetak and Super scooters were avaricious enough to sell it in the parallel, black-market economy that had also burgeoned with Bajaj scooter’s popularity. Some Bajaj dealers were nefarious to charge an extortionate amount to jump the queue. Contrary to expectations, Rahul Bajaj refused to exploit this hitherto tempting situation, a result of the Gandhian values that he grew up with. “Ensuring that the consumer obtains the best possible product at the lowest possible price, and the employee gets a fair wage for a day’s work is the criterion of ethics in business,” he was quoted in Gita Piramal's book Business Maharajas.

Instead, he sought permissions to increase production operations of its now cavernous production facilities in Maharashtra. Although the government conceded that Bajaj ‘did not take undue advantage of its dominant position’, but it did not approve the expansion of Bajaj’s operation to cater to the burgeoning demand, citing that it would further consolidate its monopoly. This also came in light of the family’s souring ties with the Congress — when Kamalnayan Bajaj joined Congress (O) and did not support Indira Gandhi’s breakaway faction in 1969. When Indira Gandhi refused to relax production-related restrictions, Bajaj took a vehement stand. “My blood boiled when the country was in dire need of scooters, a common man had to wait for 10 years to get a Bajaj Scooter. In spite of this, I was not allowed to expand the production. What sort of socialism was this?” he lamented.

Although Rahul Bajaj grew up in affluent surroundings in Bombay’s opulent Carmichael Road, he made the uncanny choice of uprooting that Bombay lifestyle, and moving to the company's manufacturing complex in Pune. "Actions speak louder than words. I did not and do not believe in absentee landlordism," he remarked. His wife and children did not leave the complex even when arson and gunshots erupted at Bajaj Auto's plant in Akurdi post a labour dispute in the summer of 1979. "I didn't want people in the colony to think that Rahul's wife and children could just take off for Bombay when things became difficult," Rahul's wife Rupa once recalled.

Rahul Bajaj also carved a distinct image with his outspokenness. He would rarely mince words, and did not shy away from critiquing the government. In a media event in 2019, he described himself as someone who was born “anti-establishment”. In 1993, he criticised the government for expediting economic liberalisation — which purportedly put indigenous players like Bajaj at a disadvantageous position, with the proliferation of foreign players in the Indian market. In 2019, he ruffled a few feathers when he said, “This atmosphere (of fear), this is definitely on our mind, but nobody will say it, none of my industrialist friends. In UPA-II, we could give gaalis to anyone. (But) if we were to criticise you openly, we don’t have the confidence that you will appreciate that.”

Although he did not share the political ambitions of his grandfather and father, Bajaj had a political sojourn — when he served as a Member of Parliament in the Rajya Sabha between 2006 and 2010. He, however, presided over the leadership of apex bodies in the automobile industry — including a two-term stint as the president of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII). He was also the president of Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers (SIAM), and was also appointed as the chairman of Indian Airlines in 1986. He was also conferred with Padma Bhushan award in 2001.