I last met Bhai Mohan Singh five years ago. Last fortnight, he called it a day. For India’s post-reforms generation, Bhai, as he was referred to, founded Ranbaxy, among the world’s top ten generic drug makers today. He was one of the four Midnight’s Children from Punjab who emerged from the holocaust of Partition to script India’s biggest corporate stories — H P Nanda built Escorts, Raunaq Singh Apollo Tyres, Bhai Mohan Singh Ranbaxy and Brijmohan Lall Munjal Hero Cycles and Hero Honda. Three of them have since signed off, and I pray, God grant long life to Mr Munjal.
For historical sanctity, I am not including other prominent businessmen from what’s now Pakistan, among the Fab Four — the late M S Oberoi had arrived as a hotelier, first at Shimla, and then, Kolkata, even before Partition. M L Mittal, father of the world’s biggest steel maker, L N Mittal was a Marwari scrap-dealer in Karachi and a refugee, no doubt, but not a Punjabi, and in any case, certainly didn’t script the kind of success the Fab Four did. I also understand the Mahindras of Mumbai have their roots in Pakistani Punjab, but I am not quite sure if their business was born out of post-Partition trauma. As far as I know, they were dealers for Jeep during the War and eventually became their licensed manufacturer in India. Mr Keshub Mahindra can enlighten me on that.
Back to the Fab Four. I’ve met all of them at some point of time or the other; either known them somewhat well or well enough indeed. Two of them were were Mona Punjabis, and two, turbaned Sikhs. I found Bhai Mohan Singh and Sardar Raunaq Singh, amazing storytellers. In their lifetime, both scripted larger-than-life stories of themselves. And then, in their very lifetime, both reduced themselves to footnotes in their own story books. Blind love for their sons reduced them to dots. Let me recount Bhai’s story.
Unlike most victims of Partition, Bhai’s family arrived in Delhi in style — no tattered clothes, no refugee camps, no doles — they chartered an entire plane from Rawalpindi to fly in kith and kin, with most of their wealth intact, even after paying a ransom tax of Rs 5 crore (a very, very big amount those days) to the emergent Pakistan government; in Delhi, they checked in at the Imperial on Janpath. With no house to call home in Delhi, Bhai soon invested in several bungalows, his first on Prithviraj Road. Even today, his family should be the biggest landlord after the government of India and Khushwant Singh in what Lutyen built as The City.
Given to Sikhism, Bhai was the only son of a Hindu landlord and money lender who made a neat pile during World War II, building PoW camps, airfields and a highway to Rangoon from Assam, employing thousands of Pathans and mules from Peshawar. In Delhi, Bhai resumed money lending and financed a chemist’s shop at CP named Ranbaxy. And when the store owner defaulted, he took over the shop. Soon, he shut that store, and became Pfizer’s India distributor. Had I been him, I would have lived happily ever after, but not so for Bhai. He found a bigger opportunity in the ’50s, when Nehru ushered in the licence- permit raj. So, when drug manufacturing and pricing were put under control, Bhai sank cash into an antibiotics plant in Okhla in 1960 as an equal joint venture partner with Lepitit of Italy. In five years, that JV collapsed as Lepitit refused to transfer technology on time. Bhai bought over his partner and Ranbaxy Labs was born. Over the next 30 years, Bhai surrounded himself with technicians, pharmacists and chemists; copied technology from Hungarians (part of the great Socialist brotherhood where India was a cherished cousin), and made medicines in frying pots and pans, flouting global patent norms. By 1978, he had ventured into Nigeria, and soon after, set shop in Malaysia and Thailand. Wisely, he also packed off his eldest son, Parvinder — a chemistry topper from Stephen’s — to Michigan to pursue a PhD in pharma on scholarship from Ranbaxy’s MNC competitor in India. By the time India opened its doors to reforms, Bhai had built Ranbaxy into India’s biggest drugs maker. And his story should have ended there. The Midnight’s Children, all four of them, had prospered under the licence-permit Raj, when older generations of family business had collapsed.
Bhai was a wise man. So, he wanted to end his story the way he knew it best. So, when came Manmohan Singh’s reforms in 1991, Bhai mobilised public opinion from Left to Right to shut India’s doors to competition and global patent norms. In normal course, he should have won. But he hadn’t reckoned that his nemesis was an insider at home, not an outsider.
Son Parvinder, who had returned from Michigan in ’67, was a truly Global Indian, not taken to a partitioned view of the world. Parvinder belonged to a borderless world and saw his fortune beyond India. Today, 75% of Ranbaxy’s earnings come from global markets. How that happened is another story.
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