There was no mess when Ashok Kapur was around, which is why, Rana’s PR campaign wasn’t aggressive at all. To understand Rana’s media manipulation, we have to understand Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. In a paper in 1943, American psychologist Abraham Maslow proposed a hierarchy of needs for a human being. In ascending order, they are psychological needs, safety needs, belongingness need, self-esteem needs and self-actualization needs. Rana used all these needs of journalists and various publications to make sure that nothing negative about him came out. ‘He had that attitude of whatever it takes when it came to management,’ a person who had worked with Rana on his image management told me.
While Rana might have been aggressive and a control freak both at office and at home, he was a different man in front of the media — calm, sober and soft-spoken — at least on the face of it. He was always available. ‘Even if you called him at midnight, he would respond. Biwi ka phone uthaye ya nahi, media ka uthaata tha (Even if he didn’t receive his wife’s calls, he would receive calls from journalists),’ a person who worked with him closely said. He was available for each journalist — be it a cub reporter, rookie, correspondent or editor. He gave them free access to his cabin.
Now imagine this situation: a cub reporter who has joined a week back is working on a banking story. Somehow the reporter gets Rana Kapoor’s number. He calls him up, talks to him, gets a quote from him. A cub reporter, who was probably working on his first story, has interacted with the head and de facto owner of India’s fourth largest bank. What else does he need? Next time, he might feel obliged to Rana, who has played with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to his advantage here. While the cub reporter should have focused on safety needs, Rana played on his self-esteem needs. Also, for a journalist, at the end of the day, getting access to stories is the biggest thing. And Rana was giving them that access. There is a growing laziness on the part of journalists and increasing dependence on planted stories. Rana knew this and capitalized on it.
In fact, I personally experienced some strange behaviour from Rana. When I questioned him about his absence from the country at a crucial point in time, he talked it away in the sweetest way possible. I smelt something foul initially. Here was a journalist who was tracking him, yet he was sweet and courteous rather than being defensive. As I spoke to the people who knew him through all this, it was understood that the ‘smooth-talker’ act was a ploy he used to get out of difficult situations.
To give you some perspective, it has been four years since Vijay Mallya escaped India, yet the media has been unforgiving of him. In Rana Kapoor’s case, the media ire has died down. This is probably because Mallya rubbed the media on the wrong side during his stint at Kingfisher, unlike Rana, who was a different person.
He used to regularly organize polo matches at Jaipur Polo Ground in Delhi, mostly on Sundays. The capital’s elite polo lovers got together on those days to witness the match. From designers to business tycoons, a host of ‘stylish’ people would turn up. These were the elite and exclusive dos that Rana used to host. At these parties, he used to invite media barons and top editors from around the country. These were the parties where deals worth crores were made, and everyone wanted to be a part of it. Rana gave the access to this elite deal-making clubs.
On one such occasion, he invited an editor of a magazine that his family later went on to buy. The editor declined. When Rana’s team insisted, the editor said that he liked to spend time with family on weekends. Rana’s team members intervened saying, ‘Arey parr aap bhabhi ji ke saath aana. Bachon ko bhi saath laaye (You come with your wife. Get your kids along too).’ But the editor refused.
The editor left the publication at the end of 2013. In 2014, Rana’s daughter Radha went on to buy a substantial stake in that publication. The owner of that publication, who had bought it just a year ago from another media group by taking a loan from yet another media baron, was looking to deleverage, which in simpler terms means reducing debt. At this time, Radha Kapoor bought about 40 per cent stake in the publication for about Rs 12 crore and gradually increased it to 65 per cent. One of the later editors of the publication told me that there was allegedly a standing instruction to give wide publicity to everything related to Rana Kapoor and YES Bank. The plan ultimately was to buy controlling stakes in a few more media house. But since they were bleeding money on the first venture itself, the plan didn’t take off.
That said, there were journalists who tried to dig deeper. In such situations, Rana Kapoor allegedly used to write long mails to the owners of the media houses concerned, complaining about the journalist’s behaviour and the amount of money Rana Kapoor and YES Bank used to spend on advertisements in that publication, according to two different sources in the know. If the media owner didn’t budge, Rana didn’t shy away from getting political interference. ‘He had good friends in both parties (Congress and BJP). He wouldn’t even mind calling them to stop journalists from investigating him,’ one of the people who worked with Rana Kapoor on his image management told me. Rana allegedly didn’t mind filing defamation suits on publications if they still pursued and published the story, which was very rare.
This was not the only thing he would do. He would make sure that the image he sent across to the public was squeaky clean. He once called an editor, then the owner of the publication that
