Newsmaker 2010: Niira Radia: The Destroyer

In 2005, when Niira Radia was trying to start an airline in India, she asked a senior aviation ministry official why a Person of Indian Origin was not allowed to do so when an NRI could. The rules, she was told. Her reply, neatly interspersed with names of ministers and tycoons, was sharp: "Don't worry, we will have the rules changed." Within five years, she changed more than one rule. Her advocacy skills matched with an acute realism altered whatever came in the way of her client, most often her friend and mentor Ratan Tata. By 2009, Radia, expertly exploiting a corrupt system and compliant minister, was manipulating Cabinet portfolios in the UPA Government. The expose of her multi-dextrous interventions has smashed a cosy establishment, weakened a seemingly impregnable Government and cast a long shadow on the turbulent politics of 2011.

Her story, most of which is still unreported, began in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1959. She is the daughter of a Punjabi couple settled in Kenya, Sudesh and Iqbal Narain Menon (Menon is a distortion of Manan and Iqbal was a tribute to her grandfather's best friend of the same name). She moved with the family to London and went to a school in Stanmar. In 1981, she married Janak Radia and became a serial entrepreneur, setting up and either dissolving or liquidating as many as eight travelrelated companies, most of them operating out of northwest London. In the middle class, predominantly Gujarati neighbourhoods of Wembley, Kingsbury and Hendon where the Radias lived for over a decade, people remember them as "the travel agent who had a shop where his wife also worked".