Loose Pages: Court Cases That Could Have Shaken India by Guha Thakurta Paranjoy & Majumder Sourya

Author:Guha Thakurta, Paranjoy & Majumder, Sourya [Guha Thakurta, Paranjoy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Paranjoy Guha Thakurta
Published: 2018-11-23T00:00:00+00:00

12. Collective Materialism

In December 1996, the income tax department approached the Sahara India Pariwar to furnish details of deposits made in group companies by mayors, corporators and elected representatives at various levels: municipal bodies, state governments and the Union government. Its list included names of three former prime ministers and some of the best-known political personalities in the country.

A representative of the Sahara group wrote back saying that ‘in spite of its best efforts’ it could not ‘link’ the names given to its depositors, a response that the department rejected as ‘vague.’ It pointed out that Sahara had not denied that politicians had parked their black money with the group under various schemes. The group responded with full-page advertisements in newspapers the following year. Asking to be ‘hanged at once’ if found guilty of any wrongdoing, Sahara made public the list of politicians sent by the IT department through public advertisements. 389

Media reports of the time claimed that a flurry of phone calls ensued, including one from the finance minister himself, (P Chidambaram) with the tax official responsible for the order and his superior being sent on two months’ ‘leave’ shortly afterwards. Close to forty other ongoing investigations by the IT department against Sahara were stalled. 390 ‘Is Sahara the Swiss Bank of India where the high and mighty keep their unaccounted money and millions of investors have only lent their names?’ asked journalist Tamal Bandyopadhyay after the Supreme Court moved to arrest Subrata Roy, the chairperson of the Sahara India Pariwar. 391 His book Sahara: The Untold Story —served a defamation notice by the conglomerate seeking damages of ₹200 crore from the author—documented how Roy’s empire was fuelled by various deposit schemes that skirted regulatory oversight, changing regulators every time after a major bust:

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