AD “I don’t know the ABC of cars. I leave that part to my Japanese friends at Suzuki!” quipped Jagdish Khattar at the launch of the first Swift in 2005. What should have been taken as a casual, off-the-cuff remark had a lasting impact on me, because what Khattar, then managing director of Maruti, meant was that you didn’t need to be a quintessential car guy to successfully run India’s largest car company. Instead, Khattar was a through-and-through people’s guy, the right leader who came at the right time to lead a people’s car company. Khattar faced a trial by fire when he took over as managing director of Maruti Udyog in 1999. The company was at its most vulnerable and going through the toughest period in its history. The bitter fight between Suzuki and the Government of India (then Suzuki’s equal joint-venture partner) had been resolved in 1998, but the three-year impasse between the warring partners had resulted in a freeze on new products and capacity expans