Fallen titan: Re-examining Rajat Gupta’s tainted legacy

But Rajat Gupta was also once the chairman of McKinsey, the world’s foremost consulting company, so influential that it was referred to merely as The Firm. He was the first Asian and the first Indian to head the consulting giant during its glory years, when it still enjoyed a pristine reputation, before scandals like its advising of Purdue Pharma during the opioid epidemic and the Transnet affair in South Africa tarnished its name.

During his sterling career, Gupta also helped set up institutions like the Indian School of Business (ISB) and the American India Foundation (AIF). He sat on the boards of Goldman Sachs, Procter & Gamble, and AMR Corporation, and advised global philanthropic bodies, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, and the Rockefeller Foundation.

According to letters written by Friends of Rajat Gupta—a cohort that included Mukesh Ambani, Bill Gates, Kofi Annan, and Nandan Nilekani—to the judge during his trial, Gupta was “a man of exceptional integrity, generosity, and service”.

This month, he probably spent his 77th birthday quietly, contemplating what might have been.

Gupta’s life started far away from Wall Street. Born in Kolkata in 1948 to a journalist father and a school teacher mother, he lost both parents by the age of 18. A brilliant student, he completed his schooling at Modern School, Delhi, earned admission to IIT-Delhi, and then won a scholarship to Harvard Business School, graduating as a Baker Scholar at the top of his class.

He joined McKinsey straight out of Harvard in 1973, and climbed rapidly, becoming a partner at 34, and in 1994, the firm’s managing director (global CEO), its youngest ever leader and its first from outside the Western world.

For nearly a decade, he oversaw McKinsey’s dramatic global expansion and became one of the most connected individuals in global business. One profile crowned him Mr Davos, not an easy crown to wear.

The fall, when it came, was precipitous. The last 15 years have been spent in ignominy, detailed and dissected in two books: Fallen Angel: The Making and Unmaking of Rajat Gupta by Sandipan Deb and The Billionaire’s Apprentice: The Rise of the Indian-American Elite and the Fall of the Galleon Hedge Fund by Anita Raghavan.

Indeed, it is worth asking whether the magnitude of his punishment—social, reputational, and professional—was proportionate to his crime. And whether all those who took up arms against him did so only in pursuit of justice. This is not an attempt to absolve him but an invitation to reflect on our own motives in celebrating the fall of a man whose life ought to be more than the sum of his failings.

We live in a world where the ethical compromises of brilliant innovators are minimized. Many of Steve Jobs’s actions were borderline unethical, and much of what Elon Musk does today is offensive or reckless. Yet, we lionize such men for their groundbreaking brilliance and innovation. No such concession, however, is granted to Rajat Gupta.

While he certainly deserves sharp criticism for his misdemeanour—a single, grave breach of trust—that one ethical blot should not be allowed to completely obliterate his lifelong pursuit of excellence and his profound philanthropic work. The final verdict on his legacy risks validating Shakespeare’s tragic observation: “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.”