Cat and mouse

 

On return from Central deputation, I was posted as Director of Economic Offences (DEO) in the cadre. Since I had headed a central organization for almost four years, I felt the posting was a little lacklustre as the remit was to investigate offences under one single non-IPC Act, viz., Protection of Interest of Depositors in Financial Establishments (PIDFE) Act. However, mine was not to question why and I deep-dived into my new assignment in all earnestness. 

The Act had come into being in the wake of a series of financial scandals in West Bengal, the most spectacular one being the Sarada scam. These scams were erroneously called chit fund scams. They were actually multi-level marketing schemes where essentially money from new depositors are used to pay huge returns to old depositors. Seeing the returns, more and more new depositors come in and the treadmill goes on until one day, the balloon bursts because no goods or services are getting produced and a few guys at the top of the pyramid vanish with all the money. Many people lose their entire life savings in the bargain. The Sarada scam alone was estimated to have involved Rs. 20,000 cr. of such deposits. Out of desperation and misery, more than 200 people had committed suicide in the aftermath of that one scam.

 

Even though many cases were registered with DEO, only one case had seen some action in terms of arrests and seizures. One of the big cases which had not seen any action involved the Pincon group of industries. My colleagues advised me not to touch it with a barge pole because very big people were involved. The scam amounted to around Rs. 1,100 crores of deposits they had mopped up and not fulfilled their obligations. During the Durga Puja, I found saturation Pincon hoardings all over Kolkata at most Puja pandals. It was an affront.

 

Since I was back in the cadre after a long time, I thought I’d feel my way. What I did was non-invasive forensics. Lots of details are available in the public domain, balance sheets, assets, shareholding, list of directors, SEBI rulings, etc.. We compiled all the details of the scam and the assets and function of all the companies in the group. Pincon group boasted some of the leading IMFL brands and the market leader of country liquor, Bangla no. 1. All the details were in hand. When we swung into action, in one single night, we managed to arrest most of the accused and seize the relevant documents.

 

Most of the documents were seized from one particular building close to my office. After seizing the documents, the office was sealed. The Chairman and the main accused, Monoranjan Roy, audaciously tried a burglary into the premises through a back entrance. He was unsuccessful but even if he had succeeded, it was too late for him.

 

Several assets spread all over the state were seized/ sealed. All the bank accounts were frozen. One of these assets was a school. The Principal and teachers of the school met me and explained that the students would be adversely affected because it was happening in a mid term. Since students were involved and since the school was not directly involved in the mainstream operations of the company, I was sympathetic and decided not to freeze the school account. The next thing I knew, Monoranjan Roy wiped out the entire account at lightning speed.

 

When Monoranjan Roy was arrested and brought on Police remand, he walked into my office chamber as though he owned the place. I asked him why he was speaking so loudly and he replied that he speaks that way only. It took some doing to bring him down a peg or two. The next day he obtained a court order mandating his lawyer’s presence during interrogation. However, I pointed out that I was not interrogating him but was merely asking after his welfare at that point. Bit by painful bit, sheet by voluminous balance sheet, the entire layering of the accounts spread over six companies, 39 verticals and branches all over India was uncovered. I mentally thanked all the teachers at IIMB and Harvard who had taught me all those courses in Finance and Accounts so that I could navigate through all the documents. What I found was that Monoranjan Roy was nothing short of a financial genius. Unfortunately, he applied that brain for wrong things.

 

After the Police remand was over, he was sent back to judicial custody. A few days later, I learnt that he had manged to get himself admitted into a hospital on health grounds and was happily operating his business empire from there. When my officers went there, they found him surrounded by his cronies and staff and it was business as usual for him. Seeing my officers, they all ran away. I took up the matter with then DG, Prisons and Monoranjan was shifted to another jail. A few days later, I learnt that he was still operating from the jail with the help of a cell phone. The cell phone was seized and another case was lodged in this regard. That case, being open-and-shut, was chargesheeted in quick time.

 

A total of 20 persons were arrested. The only requirement I set for myself and my colleagues was not to arrest anyone without enough evidence which would stand up in a court of law. The arrested persons included chartered accountants – what I found was these scams can never happen without the active connivance of chartered accountants and auditors who sign on the dotted lines, no questions asked. Even though they were not getting bail quickly, they were confident that at the end of 90 days, pending investigation, they would all get the bail.

 

Close to the 90-day limit, I ceased all overt activities such as raids, sealing, etc. and the accused persons thought that the investigation was going slow. However, with the help of a chartered accountant and an official of RBI, we built up a watertight case based primarily on documents. I went through a lot of chargesheets by sister agencies. These chargesheets were too long, some of them exceeding 1000 pages. They covered a lot of ground and were good for optics and media reports but were counter-productive because they tended to test judicial patience and clouded rather than clarified the main crime. In my opinion, a chargesheet is supposed to assist in proving the charges, that’s all; it’s not supposed to be an encyclopaedia. Or a display of the investigator’s erudition. I set myself and my officers an upper limit of 30 pages for the chargesheets in all cases. We also shunned all peripherals which would have been lapped up by the press – the involvement of very big names, certain actresses, etc., etc.. After giving final instructions, I left for Mumbai for my health issues.

 

The draft chargesheet that I received at Bombay on the 88^th day was extremely defective and sub-standard. That day I had undergone a complicated biopsy and was bleeding heavily. However, the 90-day deadline was also a matter of life and death so I sat up all night with my laptop to work on the chargesheet. When I reported to my doctor for some complications of the biopsy, he was furious at my having exerted so much the previous night. Anyway, we managed to submit the chargesheet on the 89^th day. It exceeded that 30-page limit but not by much, barring the annexures. My officers told me later that the submission of the chargesheet in quick-time left the accused and their lawyers stunned. The magistrate committed them to trial and rejected their bail application through a detailed order.

 

The real game started thereafter.

 

Almost every day, there were notices from either Calcutta High Court or the Supreme Court. These guys are extremely rich and connected and hire the best and most reputed lawyers. Meanwhile, junior lawyers represent the government. Engaging more senior lawyers takes time because a lot of processing is required and a lot of officials need to be convinced. Our government processing couldn’t keep up with the speed at which Monoranjan Roy was filing his petitions. However, the detailed trial court order rejecting the bail was a very strong weapon we had. Plus, in the teeth of virulent opposition from my officers and the government lawyers, I insisted on filing a counter-affidavit for each single petition by each of the accused persons. I was regularly attending the trial courts for the cases which were being heard in Kolkata and that experience improved the quality and comprehensiveness of the counter-affidavits. Once a counter-affidavit was filed, neither the investigating officer nor the government lawyer had any discretion and that could have been the reason they were opposing it so vehemently. One by one, each of the scores of petitions by the accused persons for bail was rejected by the various courts.

 

A few months later, the court pronounced its judgement. In a first of its kind in Ponzi scams (including cases investigated by the CBI, other states, etc.), eight of the accused persons were awarded life imprisonment. I considered that as the finest hour in my entire Policing career. Bigger than the Purulia arms drop case detection.

Who runs the country?

 

There is a lot of debate in the social media, often polarized, as to how good or bad the Prime Minister or a Chief Minister or particular politician or political party is. All this is under the notion that politicians run the country. However, the Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister series had a different take on it regarding the Westminster system that we inherited/adopted. In those classics, Sir Humphrey, the great philosopher cleverly disguised as a civil servant opined that periodic elections were just a minor inconvenience to decide which bunch would try (unsuccessfully) to interfere with the business of government actually carried out by the bureaucrats. He also felt all government policies were nonsense, but frightfully well carried out. 

His Prime Minister had an even more scathing opinion about the opinion makers, i.e., the newspaper readers:

“I know exactly who reads the papers. The Daily Mirror is read by people who think they run the country; The Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country; The Times is read by the people who actually do run the country; The Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country; The Financial Times is read by people who own the country; The Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by another country; and The Daily Telegraph is read by people who think it is. Sun readers don't care who runs the country as long as (the rest deleted).”

 

Replace the newspapers with the raucous TV channels and the description can well fit today’s scenario. 

If Sir Humphrey was right, it’s amazing to see that our country has actually been run by an IPS officer for most of its post-Independence history. 

I don’t think many people outside Police circles would’ve heard of a person called B.N. Mullik. Yet, a foreign head of state visiting India at the time had remarked, “The two most powerful men in India are Nehru and B.N. Mullik ... not necessarily in that order.” He was an I.P. officer (I.P., first called Indian Imperial Police and later, Imperial Police) who ruled the roost from 1950 to 1964 as Director of Intelligence Bureau. While there may be debates about the rights and wrongs of what he did and didn’t do, there is no gainsaying the fact that almost all major events of India during that period, political and non-political were referred to him for substantive decision-making inputs. Like all powerful civil servants, he maintained an extremely low profile and, unlike them, disappeared into the Himalayas after his retirement. He was occasionally sighted in his later life as Kinkar Vishwananda pursuing a spiritual path. Review of a book on him was being published in the Illustrated Weekly of India. Try as he might, the editor, Khushwant Singh couldn’t lay his hands on a suitable photograph of his so he collected a photo of a young B.N. Mullik and asked his photographer to age the photograph about 30 years so that it could be published along with the review.

 

A post of National Security Advisor (NSA) was created in 1998 by the government headed by Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Brajesh Mishra was the first incumbent. He used to boast to even very senior Ministers, “You can tell and persuade the PM about anything for any amount of time, I just have to whisper in his ears just before he goes into the critical meeting for the same and carry the day.” That was no empty boast.

 

In the UPA era, this very (actually, most) powerful post was split into two. The foreign aspects were handled by former Foreign Secretary, Mr. J.N. Dixit and the internal aspects were handled by Mr. M.K. Narayanan. After the demise of the former in 2005, the offices were again merged and Mr. Narayanan became the single NSA. With great responsibility came great power and he was the real power for a long five years, until 2010. The Indo-US civil nuclear cooperation agreement was only one of the big-ticket events which carried his substantive footprints.

 

Since 2014, Mr. Ajit Doval, former Director, IB and superannuated from the IPS has been the NSA. Many of the spectacular actions in recent years, surgical strike, cross-border Balakot airstrike, the Doklam standoff resolution, etc. have been attributed to him. True to his self-effacing ethos, Mr. Doval hasn’t said a word about them. However, a few things have been visible to all through the electronic media. In the thick of the Delhi riots, his visit to the affected areas rapidly cooled down the panic and the tensions. It was widely reported that his intervention brought the serious faultlines around a COVID-19 superspreader problem to a resolution. In Pakistani channels, there are very loud and heated arguments by the panelists regarding many India-centric things but, invariably, all panelists agree on one thing. If there is one person whose professional capabilities the Pakistani establishment is scared of, it’s Mr. Doval and they don’t have anyone to match him. He has been at the helm for eight years now, and counting.

 

So, at least 27 years out of a post-Independence history of 75 years. Not bad for a service which is only one out of 30-odd Group A civil services of India!

It nearly happened one night

 

While we talk a lot about the valour of the Army personnel in the context of the supreme sacrifice, we do not realise how many cops die every year in the line of duty and how frequently they “look death in the eye.” To put things in perspective, 26,000 Army officers and personnel have laid down their lives in the line of duty since Independence. The figure for the Police was 35,780 till 2021. At the onset of COVID-19 when the world shut down, some services all over the world needed to be continued with added vigour. Policing was one of them. Over 3.54 lakh police officers and personnel in India were infected with COVID-19 till October 2021 and 2,548 died of the infection. This, not counting their family members who were exposed to COVID-19 due to the duty contingency of the cops. The long and short of it is that in the field policing phase (for some cops, the whole career), every day that a cop sets out for the day’s duty, he has a certain chance of not coming back alive or unhurt. 

For some reason, I was associated with a lot of firing incidents during that phase of my career. It started right when I was under training and attached to a Police station, Malbazar in Jalpaiguri district. Ours was a team of six accompanying forest personnel for seizing stolen timber. No one was arrested. The forest personnel found a lot of stolen timber in a labour colony in Damdim tea garden and were loading them on their vehicle when we were surrounded by a huge mob carrying bows and arrows (poisoned). Suddenly, there was a hail of stones, brickbats and arrows.  The guy standing next to me was hit on the head by a huge boulder and fell. Our training tells us to charge towards the source of attack. However, an arrow is a silent weapon and these criminals were such experts that they also could shoot the arrows with a curved trajectory making it difficult to gauge direction. Anyway, we opened fire and two of the miscreants fell to the firing.

 

At that time, I didn’t know that while the decision to open fire is taken in micro-seconds, the enquiry into it lasts years. At the close of the subsequent enquiry, after everything was discussed and enquired into threadbare, the final question was:

 

“So, was it not possible not to open fire?”

 

To which, I replied, “Yes Sir, it was possible, but then none of the Police team would’ve come back alive.” That enquiry was my real “baptism by fire.”

 

The luckiest thing happened to me during the post-Babri Masjid-incident riots. At that time, I was posted as Additional SP in South 24 Parganas which comprised certain areas in Calcutta which were badly affected. This was hair-raising duty day after day, night after night, seemingly without an end in sight. Several incidents of Police firing happened in the district but the violence and panic continued relentlessly. I think, around the third day, I was deployed to Tiljala Police Station and spent the whole day there dousing small and big fires, literally and figuratively. I returned home at around 10 PM and was having dinner when I received a call from the wife of one of my Dy SPs who was staying in the same colony. The Dy SP was deployed at another Police station area and had come back badly injured. His wife had called up in raw panic because he was having profuse, non-stop nose-bleed and she didn’t know what to do. We managed some doctors and treatment. The Dy SP apologised to me for getting out of action. Apologised!!

 

Just when I returned home after attending to the Dy SP, the phone rang to inform that Tiljala area was up in flames again. I rushed out with my driver and security guard. There is a train track at Gariahat, Calcutta which used to be the demarcating line between Calcutta Police and West Bengal Police jurisdiction. Just as I approached the railway line, I was stopped by some Calcutta Police personnel who told my driver not to proceed. As I have mentioned in an earlier blog, West Bengal Police and Calcutta Police are (sometimes adversarial) worlds apart. I got down from my vehicle, very annoyed and absolutely furious that they had dared to stop my vehicle. Then I realised it was under the orders of their Dy Commissioner who was standing close by. He had been my SP in South 24 Parganas and I was suddenly all deference. He fair shouted at me saying he himself was not able to go in there despite having a full platoon of force and how come I was rushing in with just two revolvers. He also showed me his cane shield which was completely tattered with only the frame left due to the attacks he faced when he made an attempt. As he was berating me, he received a message on his wireless that New Market area was burning so he had to rush off. Sensing that I might take off in my intended direction as soon as his back was turned, he instructed the SHO to surround me and not let me out until the Army column that he had requisitioned for arrived. I went in with the Army column when it came and saw that the situation was not as bad as my senior officer had portrayed; it was far worse.

 

A few days back, at a get-together of retired IPS officers in Kolkata, a very youthful looking person came and sat next to me. When we exchanged our names, I realised he was the same senior officer of that Gariahat night. He had forgotten the incident but I nudged his memory to tell him how I owed my life to him. Had it not been for him and had I proceeded six feet further, I would’ve been six feet under.

 

Somebody up there likes me.

 

Gulliver among the giants

 

We were the lords and ladies of all we surveyed. A campus emerging, Sphinx like, from the ruminating remnants of prehistoric stones, an open-air mess with cloistered smoke inside and a green nursery without, hundred percent compulsory attendance, a fragmented library providing excuses for bus journeys to the city, all this presaged a two year sojourn that ends with quadrangled card games and bucket-bashes. It was a time for venturesome dreams, gigantic castles in the air, generous undercurrents of apprehension and excitement, for exchanging names and qualifications and identification details with a hundred others, remembering some, forgetting some, and then trying to remember some more. A time for forays into skits and songs. Talks about the Inter-IIM. And first, tentative attempts at beating the system.

 

Thus begins our yearbook for the 1982-84 batch of MBA students at IIM, Bangalore. There were only three IIMs then. What the pass-outs lacked in numbers, they made up in arrogance. However, not all were arrogant. It’s fascinating to see what happened to the least arrogant or the meekest of them all. Did they inherit the earth?

 

Possibly the most vela guy was Das Narayan Das. Any kind of serious endeavour like studies, projects, etc. and he were as remote from each other as possible. Last time I saw him in India before he went to US was him doing some mysterious things in a swimming pool in Bombay. He was so energetic and vigorous that there was less water in the pool than outside when he finally came out. Out of curiosity I asked him what that was all about and he said, “Didn’t you know, I was swimming?” But before that, we were both in Bombay for our summer training. I was with McDowell and Co. and he was with TCS. One afternoon, the receptionist buzzed me to tell me that Narayan Das was waiting for me at the reception. However, when I went there, Narayan was nowhere to be seen. I was intrigued. Later when I rang him up to ask what happened, he said, “Actually, the receptionist was very good-looking so I thought I would come back and go tomorrow in a better (i.e., less crumpled) dress and after a shave. We used to play the word games where there were gradings like if you make 20-25 words, you get Excellent, 15-19 words, very good and so on. He would make a few words and then change the grading scales. He also invented something called anti-chess to counter a serious and seriously arrogant guy who used to lose a match and proclaim, “Uff, I calculated up to the 8^th move; I should’ve calculated up to the 9^th move …” What did he do in life? Can you believe it, he is an acclaimed Professor of Marketing and Dean at Harvard Business School? So popular is his course that students have to apply and bid for his course two years in advance to get a look-in.

 

A guy called Freddie (Frederic Fougea) happened to us in the second year. Inter-IIM competition was a fiercely fought affair those days. We won the inter-IIM thanks to this one guy. He would go and ace all the sports competitions like Tennis in the morning, then turn up for the Western music with a saxophone and win all these hands down. We had invented a game called Frisby Footer, playing with a Frisby with some football rules. It became so popular that there was an all-Bangalore championship amongst the colleges. We won the final 60-10 or so and out of that, Freddie score 50 odd “goals.” Well, after passing out, the guy directed 10 films and was associated with 30 odd films and television serials as producer and screenwriter. His films have won scores of awards including an Emmy and his serials have been telecast in hundreds of channels. 

We used to call him Hassled. Even now, in our group, he signs his posts as H. The name is Ramesh Srinivasan. The two things which truly excited him at the campus were winning at Carrom and perfecting his square drive. Well, he went on to play active competitive carrom for 11 years winning a lot of tournaments abroad. He also played active competitive amateur cricket in Los Angeles for nine years for which he would drive 275 miles each way. He has run two full marathons and has clocked 15,000 miles of running when last checked. Meanwhile, he headed Bally Technologies (turnover $ 1 billion) and is currently President and CEO, Agylisis, US. Last year he casually donated $1.3 million from his personal funds to his alma mater, IIT (BHU) for building a state-of-the-art student activity centre (sports).

In the yearbook, we gave taglines to most of the students. Her tagline was, “This miss is a hit.” Again a serious veli or so we thought. Life and soul of any gathering and truly easy to talk to. Those days, getting to the US was not easy and academics was one of the routes. (On her own admission) she applied for a Ph D just to get to the US to be together with her then-significant-other and later-husband. The same Tennis-anyone girl became a renowned academic. The citations of her books and papers run into tens of thousands. However, one thing has remained constant. She continues to be extremely popular, amongst students, amongst peers and, of course, amongst serious academics. I think, year after year, students at Tuck School of Business vote her the most popular teacher. She is Kusum Lata Ailawadi. 

These and many other giants trod the earth at IIMB back in 1982-1984. And then, there was little old me, almost certainly there through a monumental clerical mistake or something. A veritable tiny, puny Gulliver (a Lilliputian, actually) …