Pratap was born in 1908 in Hyderabad into the Sindhworki family of M. Dialdas. At 19, when his father, and soon after that his elder brother also, died, he inherited a declining business empire and had to discontinue his education to look after the family and build it back with footholds around the globe.
M. Dialdas was one of the big supporters of the freedom movement, and Pratap came under the influence of Gandhi at a very young age. He was one of few citizens who were granted permission to visit Gandhi in Yerwada Jail, Pune, in 1933. This became a personal relationship which grew over the years.
A major financier of the Indian National Congress, Bhai Pratap hosted Gandhi in his home as well as many other INC leaders including Jawaharlal Nehru, Rajendra Prasad, Vallabhbhai Patel, Lal Bahadur Shastri, and others. He arranged to drive them to public meetings where patriotic speeches were given, and bonfires made of foreign-made cloth to promote the Swadeshi Movement.
Bhai Pratap hosted many other members of the INC who visited Sindh too, and through this association, his eldest daughter Nirmala met Wasudev ‘Balu’ Patwardhan, her future husband. At a time when marriages in India were arranged by families strictly within their communities, this ‘love marriage’ was a strong statement of national integration and patriotism.
When Manjiri, Bhai Pratap’s second daughter was in school, she noticed one day that a portrait of King Edward had been freshly garlanded. Enraged, she ran to it and pulled off the garland and flung it away. This got her into serious trouble at school! But when Bhai Pratap was informed he expressed his delight and appreciation for what she had done.
When freedom fighters Aruna Asaf Ali and Jayaprakash Narayan were charged with sedition, Bhai Pratap sheltered them in his home. Bhai Pratap named his fourth and youngest daughter Aruna after the former.
Members of Bhai Pratap’s family also remember hearing of how the basement of the family home was used during the 1942 Quit India movement when the leaders of the movement were in jail. Pamphlets were printed to create awareness and inflame nationalistic feelings. Currency notes were stamped with the slogan ‘Quit India’ and quietly put back in circulation to create awareness and inspire every Indian who used them, to the helpless fury of the colonial government.
The All India Congress office continued to function in secret in Bombay and Bhai Pratap continued to donate and got his friends to participate too. Young, fashionable, and seen as wealthy playboys who had never known the need to work or shown any interest in politics, they were considered above suspicion by the police, and were able to circulate the ‘seditious’ literature and messages to the various state units.
After Partition, Bhai Pratap moved his base to Bombay and London where he already had homes and business interests. But he left the business to his brother and focussed his energies on rehabilitating the refugees from Sindh. He took care of his many friends and relatives, even sending them food cooked in his home for some days until they had made other arrangements.
Bhai Pratap supplemented the efforts of the new Indian government with lavish donations. He also contributed to the new educational institutions and newspapers the displaced Sindhis built in Bombay.
One of Bhai Pratap’s most spectacular contributions to modern India was the development of the towns of Gandhidham and Adipur. With Gandhi’s help, he acquired land from the Maharao of Kachchh to build a new homeland for the Sindhis. He lived in a tent in Gandhidham to supervise construction, involving himself in the smallest of details, and later built a house for himself and spent a lot of time there.
A global businessman, Bhai Pratap understood the value of a port and convinced the new Government of India to invest in developing a modern port at Kandla, where the trade which had been affected by the loss of Karachi port could resume. It was Bhai Pratap’s efforts that made Kandla a free trade zone, Asia’s first, in 1965.
Bhai Pratap died in London when he was 59 years old. He was known for his wealth, his appreciation of arts and culture, his philanthropy and his generous support for the INC and the freedom movement. Hyderabad, Sindh, still has traces of Bhai Pratap’s philanthropy. This includes donations made to National College in 1936 when he was 28, which enabled the construction of Bhai Dialdas Moolchand Library Hall, and Narain Dialdas Hall, which continues to house the Physics Department of the college.
