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In 2005, when Niira Radia was trying to start an airline in India, she asked a senior aviation ministry official why a Person of Indian Origin was not allowed to do so when an NRI could. The rules, she was told. Her reply, neatly interspersed with names of ministers and tycoons, was sharp: “Don’t worry, we will have the rules changed.” Within five years, she changed more than one rule. Her advocacy skills matched with an acute realism altered whatever came in the way of her client, most often her friend and mentor Ratan Tata. By 2009, Radia, expertly exploiting a corrupt system and compliant minister, was manipulating Cabinet portfolios in the UPA Government. The expose of her multi-dextrous interventions has smashed a cosy establishment, weakened a seemingly impregnable Government and cast a long shadow on the turbulent politics of 2011.

Her story, most of which is still unreported, began in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1959. She is the daughter of a Punjabi couple settled in Kenya, Sudesh and Iqbal Narain Menon (Menon is a distortion of Manan and Iqbal was a tribute to her grandfather’s best friend of the same name). She moved with the family to London and went to a school in Stanmar. In 1981, she married Janak Radia and became a serial entrepreneur, setting up and either dissolving or liquidating as many as eight travelrelated companies, most of them operating out of northwest London. In the middle class, predominantly Gujarati neighbourhoods of Wembley, Kingsbury and Hendon where the Radias lived for over a decade, people remember them as “the travel agent who had a shop where his wife also worked”.

A casual conversation changed that and brought her to India in 1994. Her father was chatting with Delhi-based Sahara Airlines advisor Sunder Lal at a party in London. Sahara Airlines had started operations in December 1993 with two Boeing 737-200 aircraft. They were looking for the new generation Boeing 737-400 aircraft as business expanded. Radia’s father, a mild-mannered soft-spoken gentleman, had been in the aircraft lease business, and told Lal that he would send his daughter to India to discuss the possibilities.

Radia flew down to India and met Uttam Kumar Bose, then heading the airlines’ operations. In a pattern that would be repeated, the two became close friends. She helped Sahara lease two Boeing 737-400s from the USbased International Lease Finance Corporation and also helped them obtain spares. She never looked back, moving on to represent KLM UK and a French company Sofema, among others.

In the 16 years since she first set up base in India in a rented office in New Delhi’s Vasant Vihar, she has been an aviation consultant with ambitions of setting up her own airlines, a powerful politician’s dear friend, an even more powerful religious guru’s loyal disciple and, most triumphantly, a publicist for India’s two biggest tycoons. Her parties on the terrace of her rented home in Safdarjung Development Area, just four houses down from where self-promoting godman Chandraswami lived, became must-attends for players in the aviation business.

Radia invested in the right people and made the extra effort when needed. When lawyer R.K. Anand helped her get KLM UK the possession of two of its aircraft from the Airports Authority of India, she spent many hours with his wheelchair-bound wife. Bose was her pointman in her dream project, Crown Air. She proposed his name as CEO. During 1999-2000, she came close to the then Union Civil Aviation Minister Ananth Kumar through her spiritual guru, Vishwesha Teertha Swami, the pontiff of Sri Pejawar Mutt at Udipi in Karnataka. In case papers submitted to his lawyer, Rao Dheeraj Singh, a former employee and close friend whom she later fell out with, says she became “too involved with Mr Ananth Kumar and all the deals and contracts of the ministry were going through her” (see box How to Use Friends and Influence People). A Kannada newspaper, Lankesh Patrike, at that point, wrote a story titled Anantana Monica (meaning Ananth’s Monica), referring to the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky relationship. It suggested that India’s aviation policy was being influenced by the minister’s relationship with Radia. Tejaswini, Kumar’s wife, took the paper to court. The case is still pending.

When Sharad Yadav became the civil aviation minister in 2001, he refused to give a No-Objection Certificate (NOC) to Crown Air even after Radia had got the Foreign Investment Promotion Board (FIPB) clearance. The NOC was denied after objections from the Aircraft Acquisition Committee (AAC) about the financial soundness of the company, and undeclared source of foreign funds. In 2004, Praful Patel became the civil aviation minister in UPA I. In 2005, he turned down her proposal to start the low-cost carrier, Magic Air, again citing her UK citizenship and FDI.

Radia could make friends as easily as she dumped them, something that Dheeraj, grand-nephew of former Haryana Chief Minister Rao Birendra Singh, realised. She had hired him for her company Crown Mart in 1999. They became friendly, and documents obtained by INDIA TODAY show American Express addressing her as Mrs Singh. In the case papers, Dheeraj claims that they “started living together and she then got her three sons, who were living in London with her sister, to India”. By that time, Radia had moved office to the upmarket South Extension and her home was a rented farmhouse in Chattarpur with a monthly rent of Rs 4 lakh.

He adds that they were soon “living like a family”. But Radia’s aides insist that he was no more than an employee who resigned in 2002. Dheeraj paid a heavy price for his association with Radia. In 2003, she accused him of abducting her then 18-year-old son, Karan, on the pretext of going for a long drive into Haryana and keeping him prisoner in a village till the boy escaped. Dheeraj spent almost two years in jail on that charge after Radia got ace lawyer Mukul Rohatgi to fight her case.

2001 was her breakthrough year. She met Ratan Tata while working on the Tata Airlines-Singapore Airlines joint venture. He was impressed with her knowledge of aviation. At that point, Indian Hotels had also signed an MoU with the Department of Culture for the preservation and upgradation of the Taj Mahal. Tata wanted to promote the brand association of the hotels and the monument. According to Dheeraj, Kumar recommended Radia for the job. Nudged by Tata, she started Vaishnavi Corporate Communications which initially handled the public relations of 14 Tata companies. She did not think small. By 2009, she was handling public relations for over 90 companies of the Tata Group with over 300 employees across 13 cities. Its 2009 revenues were Rs 57 crore. A senior Tata executive recalls meeting her in 1992 shortly after economic reforms were initiated, and before he joined the group. “She was Londonbased, pushy, aggressive and representing Siemens Plessey in a joint venture with AT&T in India. We knew little about her.” Then, he says, “One day in 2001, we got a mail saying all 90 group companies would now be represented by Vaishnavi.” Somewhere along the way, Radia, a believer in astrology, changed the spelling of her first name, adding an ‘i’. This was her most powerful avatar yet, even if sometimes her idle gossip was mistaken for professional gospel.

Gradually the company started adding non-Tata accounts and so parallel agencies were formed to handle their business. In 2007, she started Noesis Strategic Consulting Services to handle strategic and business advisory assignments-bagging a contract to restructure the telecom licencing framework for the Sultanate of Oman- and Vitcom Consulting (which handles the accounts of actor Priyanka Chopra, Bloomberg Businessweek, Marriott Hotels, UTV World Movies and Endemol).

In 2008, Mukesh Ambani’s trusted advisor Manoj Modi roped in Radia to handle the exclusive business of Reliance Industries and so was born NeUCom Consulting. She now controlled access to two of the most iconic business tycoons in the country. The media had no option but to interact with her. Only her.

She moved office again, this time to Barakhamba Road-the office has a giant Ganesh statue at its entrance  that is garlanded every day. She also finally bought herself a farmhouse, and gave it a faux British name, Oak Drive.

In a career dependent on spin, Radia’s ultimate reinvention has been herself. She changed from a modest travel agent’s wife to a Chanel-shopping, Vaishno Devi-visiting power woman who has torn UPA II asunder. The most significant side-effect of the Radia storm has been the near destruction of the prime minister’s image. He was always regarded as clean but weak. The manner in which he ignored or even presided over the scandalous sale of 2G spectrum has, however, put him in the direct line of political fire. At the Congress plenary session in Burari, Delhi, Sonia Gandhi rose valiantly to his defence. But at a rally three days later, the BJP made the prime minister its principal target.

Radia can be a steadfast ally. And her patrons have been supportive of her. Senior politicians recount receiving cautioning calls from her guru when they spoke in public against lobbyists. She has been generous as well. A giant portrait of the guru adorns the Sri Krishna temple in Delhi that he inaugurated on her birthday this year-November 19, a date she shares with Indira Gandhi. The swami says that the land for the temple was given by the Delhi Development Authority when Atal Bihari Vajpayee was prime minister. Radia and the Sudesh Foundation, set up in memory of her mother, “gave financial assistance in building the temple”.

She has always played long term. When Tata’s relationship with Dayanidhi Maran soured after differences arose between the Maran-owned broadcaster Sun TV and DTH operator TataSky on channel sharing and pricing, she cultivated Rajathi Ammal, Karunanidhi’s second wife and their daughter Kanimozhi. She also, as is evident from the tapes, pushed her cause and that of Raja, with whom she developed a rapport while he was the Union environment minister through his controversial private secretary R.K. Chandolia.

Radia has developed an amazing network of powerful bureaucrats, all at the top of their game in areas key to the Tatas, from telecom to aviation to FDI. Her biggest catch was former disinvestment secretary Pradip Baijal. As chairman of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India , Baijal was responsible for allowing fixed-line service operators obtain a universal access service licence (UASL) and offer full mobile services for the payment of a fee. This decision allowed Tata Teleservices, Radia’s client, and Reliance Infocomm to move into “unlimited” mobile services through the back door. In his affidavit to the Supreme Court, former telecommunications minister Raja says in his defence that he just followed Baijal’s decisions. He claims these laid the foundation for his own policy of first-come, first-serve.

Baijal continues to be the chairman of Noesis despite the torrent of controversy. Radia also recruited former finance secretary Chander Mohan Vasudev, Baijal’s batchmate, who joined her on the Noesis board in 2007, but he quit in 2009. Like Baijal, Vasudev held 10 per cent equity in Noesis. A former bureaucrat in the ministry of civil aviation recalls that Baijal tried to recruit other former bureaucrats into Noesis in 2007 over casual conversations at dinner parties without ever mentioning Radia. He suggested that Noesis was a venture that he and Vasudev were starting on their own initiative. While this particular bureaucrat declined the offer, others clearly did not.

In aviation, she drew on the expertise of former Airports Authority of India chairman S.K. Narula, and hired him with an offer of 50 per cent equity in Vitcom Consulting, which she set up in 2007. Ajay Dua, former secretary of the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion, responsible for the formulation of the Government’s FDI policy, of which she had fallen foul both times she wanted to start an airlines, was a director at Vaishnavi in 2008, although briefly.

Among Radia’s chosen methods of penetrating the establishment was using established journalists. She flattered journalists such as Vir Sanghvi and Barkha Dutt as well as captains of industry organisations like Tarun Das, treating them as conduits to the Congress, vital for someone whose relationship with the BJP was once stronger than with the Congress. She also threatened the media when she had to.

The Radia connect has ensured that the 2G scam will never be viewed as something solely perpetrated by an errant minister from a maverick regional party. It has also exposed how Radia had penetrated the system to the advantage of her clients, co-opting politicians, bureaucrats, senior journalists, sometimes pushing for coalitions (such as one she is proposing between Ratan Tata, Mukesh Ambani and Sunil Mittal) against business rivals and at other times exploiting family divides, as in the case of the DMK, for policy gains.

In all this sound and fury, Radia has been “composed, unflustered, extremely sharp and intelligent”, which is how an official of Enforcement Directorate (ED) described her after questioning her for eight hours at a stretch on November 24. When badgered by questions, she adopted a tone of patient exasperation, like that of a teacher explaining something to a particularly dull student, says the official. He was impressed that she knew the difference between PMLA (Prevention of Money Laundering Act), under which she had been booked and can be arrested, and FEMA (Foreign Exchange Management Act). The ED registered the case in March under the PMLA against unknown DoT officials and representatives of certain private companies in the award of new telecom licences in 2008. On December 21, she was questioned again, for four hours, this time by the CBI, which went to her sprawling Chattarpur farmhouse instead of summoning her to its office. She was questioned on her role in the grant of licences and influencing government servants. The CBI searched both her office and home for documents. The IT department is also investigating her for tax evasion.

Her aides claim that the Tatas are routinely discriminated against even today, whether it is on mining leases because “they are not willing to pay bribes”, or on GSM spectrum allocation. They say they are yet to be allotted spectrum in Delhi and 39 other districts though it has been 32 months since the policy came into force. In the past, she could not handle Tata’s Singur problems effectively and though she would like to claim credit for the move of the Tata Nano plant to Sanand, Chief Minister Narendra Modi is categorical that it happened at his own initiative. She did, however, deliver dual technology to Tata in telecom, which gave Tata Teleservices the 2008 spectrum at 2001 prices.

Her aides insist it is business as usual at Vaishnavi and her three other companies. They claim to have added three clients in the past three months apart from retaining their two major accounts. But for a publicist/lobbyist/advocacy expert, her most critical error was this: from selling the story, she became the story. And the biggest story of the year could end in tragedy in 2011.

story – Courtesy: http://indiatoday.intoday.in