Wipro chairman Azim Premji turned 80 on Thursday with tributes pouring in on social media. Premji was born into a Gujarati Ismaili Muslim family in 1945 — the same year that his father founded a vegetable oil company known as Western India Products Ltd. The partition took place three years later, with the family opting to remain in India. Multiple accounts suggest that Muhammad Ali Jinnah (the founding father of Pakistan — had been keen to have Muhammed Hashem as a cabinet minister in the new country.
First Finance Minister of Pakistan
According to multiple reports, Jinnah had personally approached Muhammed Hashem to take up a cabinet post in Pakistan following the partition. A book by journalist Dinesh C Sharma adds credence to this claim and provides additional insight — explaining that Mohamed Hasham Premji had been offered a chance to be the first Finance Minister of Pakistan. The ‘Rice King of Burma’ — as he was also known — had moved to Bombay with his family to start trading and eventually founded Western Indian Vegetable Products Ltd.
“The company was established by Mohamed Hasham Premji in 1945. He was a leading rice merchant and commission agent in Bombay. When Mohammed Ali Jinnah set up the planning committee of the Muslim League (on the lines of the national planning committee of the Indian National Congress) in September 1944, he invited Hasham Premji to be a part of it. But Premji did not want to join the League formally for ‘personal and business reasons’. He was then assured by Jinnah that he could serve without publicly signing the Muslim League pledge,” reports quoted the book as saying.
The origin of Wipro
Western Indian Vegetable Products would eventually go on to become Wipro a few years after his son took over the reins of the company. Azim Premji had to cut his studies at Stanford University short in 1966 after his father passed away — helming the vegetable oil company at the age of 21 and gradually steering it towards the tech industry. The company was eventually renamed Wipro Products Limited in 1977 and abbreviated to Wipro Limited in 1982.
Over the decades, Wipro has become a multi-billion-dollar empire providing a wide array of IT services. Premji is currently worth $11.9 billion according to the Forbes Real-Time Billionaires List.