Fadeout

Seth Ramkrishna Dalmia is the kind of man who has made capitalist a nasty word in India. Dalmia said as much himself a few years ago. "I feel that from the age of twelve to these 57 years of my life, I have been accumulating the sins of wealth and palaces. I feel as if I had sucked the blood of the poor in establishing the big name of Dalmia."

At the time, Dalmia was pledging his life to the service of the poor. He could afford to. For this skinny little man with a split-melon smile had amassed an empire which controlled one-sixth of all Indian industry, ranged from banks to coal mines, insurance companies to newspaper chains. Son of rich parents who had lost their money, he says he made his first killing before he was 19 by cornering the Bombay gold bullion market. By 1937 he had made and lost three fortunes in speculations and won a hold on a cement factory, the foundation of an industrial empire that burgeoned mightily during the war. "During the war years, I earned money through sinful ways," he confessed later.

No World War. Dalmia was never too busy to scour India for pretty women who might give him a son. Some times he married them, sometimes not. He admired Hitler, hung pictures of him on his walls, and insisted that if Britain had sent him to Munich instead of Chamberlain, there would have been no world war. Indian politics did not interest him.

Instead, he crusaded for One World, which he claimed to have conceived before Willkie, came to the U.S. to lecture on world government. He also gave a lot of thought to the cow. "Mankind cannot exist with out the abolition of cow slaughter," he proclaimed and founded the Cow Protection League.

After the war, a change came over Seth Dalmia. He devoted more and more time to public confession and philanthropic works. Most notable gift was to the Gandhi Memorial Fund, a gesture, he admitted publicly, that was made not from philanthropic impulse but because he expected it to help him with the government; he was being investigated at the moment for wartime tax evasion.

He hired a private guru and wrote uplifting moral tracts for his newspapers extolling the simple virtues -- while maintaining more sumptuously furnished houses than he could remember, and requiring one of his four wives to cook everything he ate and to massage him with oil every morning. For the Indian Who's Who he provided his own modest biography: "In spite of having monumental achievements, Dalmia views them with a sense of detachment, always realizing that he is not the doer of what he has done, but that in him God has fulfilled himself."

Two Gold Idols. Despite his philanthropic precautions, Dalmia's wartime tax evasion cost him a reported $2,000,000 in settlement. The government suspected worse but could not readily prove it, because Indian financiers notoriously keep three sets of books--one for the tax inspectors, one for their partners, one for themselves. Two years ago, police descended on Dalmia's offices and houses and seized all the records they could find.

It took months to analyze them. Last week, on orders from Nehru himself, a squad of policemen swept up to Dalmia's white-pillared house in New Delhi. Dalmia, clutching two small gold idols, was carted off to jail while the house resounded to the piercing wails of his wives. The charge against one of the world's richest men: embezzlement of $4,200,000-worth of government bonds from his own Bharat Insurance Co., keystone of his empire.

In court, Dalmia confidently offered bail "in any quantity." But even he was staggered when the magistrate demanded $4,000,000 cash and $4,000,000 in sureties. Dalmia was released next day after putting up $3,000,000 himself, plus an other $1,000,000 in sureties offered by two relatives. As Dalmia went home, Premier Nehru held a press conference to discuss the progress of India's socialism. "The rich tend to fade out -- a good thing," he remarked cheerily.

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