Legally aided tycoon

Arguably no denouement in recent times has given as much satisfaction to the country’s smug and risk-averse Indian middle class as the comeuppance of Subrata Roy, the self-styled managing worker of the reportedly one-million strong Sahara Pariwar (family) which is actually a clutch of para banking companies, with claimed 30 million depositors spread across the badlands of Uttar Pradesh (pop.200 million). On March 15, the Mumbai-based Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) petitioned the Supreme Court to detain Roy and several directors of two Sahara group companies for failing to comply with a Supreme Court order to repay Rs.24,000 crore to debenture owners of unauthorised investment funds started by two Sahara companies. Even if SEBI’s latest petition asking for Roy’s arrest is rejected by the apex court, the demand signals perhaps the beginning of the end of Roy’s meteoric rise to fame and fortune, after starting his para banking business in 1978 with a reported capital of Rs.1,500. Currently the Sahara India Pariwar owns the plush Grosvenor House Hotel, London; the New York Plaza Hotel; Amby Valley City spread over 10,000 acres between Mumbai and Pune, apart from the estimated Rs.24,000 crore collected as deposits in the Hindi belt of north India. There’s obviously something fishy about Roy’s famous rags-to-riches story. But Sahara’s formidable counsel in the Supreme Court, Ram Jethmalani, has informed the learned judges that he is prepared to submit debentures issued by Sahara to 30 million investors which have been packed into 31,000 cartons, and are all set to be transported to the Supreme Court and/or SEBI for examination. Although middle class India believes the Sahara Group has accumulated this fortune by fronting for India’s most corrupt and Croesus-rich politicians, and that SEBI and the Supreme Court are heroic institutions, your editor has another explanation. Sahara has actually collected small savings from many millions of ignorant peasants and villagers who are either roughed up by politically-connected goons and/or dissuaded by the country’s choked-to-the-gills and rapacious legal system from demanding their money back. Therefore the Supreme Court whose learned justices nonchalantly preside over the world’s slowest and most archaic legal system are to be blamed rather than praised.   Anti-dynasty groundswell Since it was first promoted in 1885 — ironically by an Englishman — as the first association of the indigenous upper middle class to engage in dialogue with our erstwhile British masters to extract a few political concessions, the Congress party has dominated the political landscape of India like a colossus. After developing a spine under great leaders such as Gokhale and Tilak in the early 20th century, it acquired traction and legitimacy under Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, to emerge as India’s most powerful political party. But rot seized the Congress after the sudden and mysterious death of prime minister Lal Bahadur Shastri in Russia, and the ascent to power of Nehru’s daughter Indira Gandhi in 1965. The sins of omission and commission of Mrs. Gandhi — splitting the Congress, bank and foodgrains nationalisation, institutionalisation of…