No Ordinary Person

When Seth Ramkrishna Dalmia was 18 he made his first million. Today at 60, Dalmia controls flour and sugar mills, cement and chemical plants, coal mines, banks, insurance companies and six news papers, including the influential Times of India. He is said to be India's third rich est industrialist.* Along the way, Dalmia has come to believe that he is indeed one among men, possessing unusual spiritual qualities. "I shall die peacefully with a smile on my face, "he once wrote, "an enviable state unattainable by ordinary men." And in the style of Indian saintly ones, he is always ready to confess his past misdeeds. Three years ago Dalmia confessed that he had made a big contribution to a government chanty, expecting that he would not therefore "be dragged into the sphere of action of the Income Tax Investigation Commission."

After so candid an announcement, poorer Indians waited to see what the government would do. Then one day last week some 1,000 red-capped policemen simultaneously raided 25 Dalmia offices and executive bungalows. They seized hundreds of ledgers, sealed the accounting rooms, and mounted 24-hour guards over the premises. Dalmia himself was temporarily beyond reach: he was in Europe consulting specialists about the health of his children.

* No. 1 is J. R.D.Tata (steel); No. 2, Ghan-shyamdas Birla (textiles), friend and backer of the late Mahatma Gandhi.

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