Tale of two RKs -- A slick operator slips, a phoney trips
VRINDA GOPINATH

NEW DELHI, MARCH 14: In the nether world of wheeler-dealers, R K Gupta and R K Jain have proven to be rank amateurs if their loud boasts in the Tehelka tapes are anything to go by. For if there is one golden rule among the big players in Delhi's drawing rooms, it is the iron code of silence. The braggarts made that one fatal mistake -- of assuming that the insider who introduced the undercover Tehelka journalists to them had checked them out. The insider was H C Pant, Deputy Secretary, Ministry of Defence.

It was their greed that was their undoing. Both Jain and Gupta -- the former is the national treasurer of the Samata Party and the latter is described as a `super-trustee' of the RSS -- are small-time players waiting to leapfrog into the big league and they could not resist the tantalising offer made by the undercover journalists on the fictitious yet lucrative defence deal.

Their desperation to prove their clout and grab the contract made them go on the rampage, disclosing incriminating and embarrassing details on how deals are struck and finalised that involve people at the highest level.

R K Gupta started as a middle-level clerk in the building department of Chandigarh Corporation, but in the mid-seventies the ambitious Gupta left his modest job to set up his own contracting business in the city. After all, he had inside knowledge on how the trade worked and he used his connections in his former job to soon set up a lucrative real-estate business. It was not long before Gupta set his sights on Delhi, and by the mid-eighties, he had already established a multi-storey, high-rise called Gopala Towers in Rajinder Place, a suburb in West Delhi.

As he bragged to the Tehelka journalists, Gupta's golden touch with the real estate business helped him bag the contract for the RSS headquarters in Jhandewalan in the Capital, which he generously donated to the organisation. ``I spent Rs 50 lakhs in 1967 to build that headquarters, and even today, if anyone asks who built it, the RSS people will tell you it was made by Raj Kumar (RK), an RSS worker, free of cost.''

While the RSS has hotly denied any association with him, Gupta claims he is very close to the RSS when he points to four bullet wounds in his leg which he says he got during the 1947 riots. He also brags that he donated Rs 1.5 crore to the RSS during the Emergency in the Tehelka tapes.

Gupta soon expanded his business and stepped beyond real estate when he finally set up his flagship company, United Group, which manufactured soya, polypropolene and medical diagnostic equipment and supplied watch movement to HMT. His empire now extended from Chandigarh and Delhi to Bhopal. But Gupta played dangerously to get to the top and very soon he was caught in the web of corruption with dozens of illegal and underhand deals. He was arrested under FERA in the late eighties and was in a litigation swamp with several court cases against him.

One interesting deal where he overreached himself was when he sold his apartments several times over and took the money but unfortunately for Gupta, his clients were mostly RSS officials. It was Atal Behari Vajpayee the RSS officials turned to, as he was then the Leader of the Opposition. Worse, Gupta could get no legal help as no lawyer worth his salt was ready to represent him -- he had a reputation of not paying his bills. He was finally forced to return the money.

While Gupta has introduced his son, 40-year-old Deepak, to the power-brokering business, R K Jain is a lone player. He sits alone in his office cubicle at Connaught Place and looks visibly shaken. Jain painstakingly repeats what he has been saying for the past 24 hours. The Tehelka journalists duped him, he says, by posing as NRI investors looking for lucrative projects to put their money into and that all those explosive details he made on camera about how he helped raise Rs 50 crore for the Samata Party through commissions from defence deals, with the active participation of his party president, Jaya Jaitly, and party colleague Defence Minister George Fernandes has been cleverly dubbed.

In the corridors of power in Delhi, deception is the name of the game and Jain has been a convincing phoney -- at least about his financial clout. Perhaps, the Samata Party would have done well to check Jain's antecedents but party members obviously fell for Jain's fund-raising genius if his boasts in the Tehelka tapes are to believed. Jain brags about how he raised overnight Rs 2.5 lakhs when Fernandes asked him to do so and was promptly appointed as the party's national treasurer.

But actually it was a broke Jain who was desperately looking for political clout to revive his plummeting personal fortunes. His only company, Pashupati Haryana, which manufactured woollen yarn, was declared sick four years ago and has been lying shut ever since. Though he soon set up an export company trading in rice and garments, he could not keep up with the fiercely competitive global market. He travelled to the US and Europe, and Moscow, hoping to push his trade but it was a difficult market.

His desperate attempts to woo financial institutions to invest in Pashupati to help revive it proved futile too. Neither did the BIFR bail him out when he declared bankruptcy and asked for a settlement. Jain says he survived because of his family interests in textiles, paper and breweries.

So, how has his party reacted to the devastating details on the purported defence deals he lobbied for with Fernandes? ``I have already said that the voice is not mine,'' he says nervously, ``but I did speak to Jayaji and Shambuji (Shambu Srivastav, spokesman for the Samata Party) on Tuesday evening and both asked me to make my stand very clear and then, they said, I would have nothing to fear.''

And what about his party president's compromising statements on the Tehelka tapes? ``I did not have the guts to ask Jayaji,'' he says sheepishly. ``After all, I am only a small worker.'' About his future role in the party, Jain is forthcoming when he says, ``I am ready to step down if they ask me but for now I will carry on with the work of hisab-kitab (accounts) for the party and I will carry on with my recent role as president of the Delhi unit of the Samata. There is a place for a third front in politics.''