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The outcome of the elections to the Karnataka legislative assembly has predictably led to euphoria in the Congress and other political parties opposed to the Bharatiya Janata Party. Some have gone to the extent of arguing that Saturday’s results signify the beginning of the end of the authoritarian rule of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. It would be premature to jump to such a conclusion. The next Lok Sabha elections are ten months away. Much could happen in this period. Still, Karnataka is...

During a heat wave in the Indian state of Haryana in 2022, the Adani Group supplied less power than it was contracted to and also diverted power away from Haryana to the state of Gujarat. This summer, Adani Power can officially supply less power to Haryana and get paid more for each unit, despite a Supreme Court judgment which said there is no justification for hiking tariffs. Here, we report on how Haryana’s chief minister has overridden a long-term, binding power contract with Adani, even...

Gurugram/London/Bengaluru: In 2018, the Congress party had alleged that the Narendra Modi government had turned a blind eye to Jatin Mehta’s alleged misdemeanours, allowing him to leave India and delaying the filing of cases against him. It had asked whether the “protection” for him had anything to do with his “close relationship with an industrial house closest to Narendra Modi through marriage of his son”. This industrial house is, of course, the Adani Group. In Part 1 of this two-part series...

Long before allegations of fraud levelled by banks against Nirav Modi and Mehul Choksi made headlines in the media in India and the world, another diamantaire from Gujarat, Jatin Mehta, and his group of companies had caused a major loss to Indian and international banks and became the one of the largest wilful defaulters of loans, together with Kingfisher Airlines headed by Vijay Mallya – all four of them are currently outside India. Unlike the cases of Nirav Modi, Mehul Choksi and Vijay Mallya...

Book: Guru to the World: The Life and Legacy of Vivekananda Author: Ruth Harris Publisher: Belknap Price: ₹799 This nuanced and detailed account of the life and times of Narendranath Datta (1863-1902), better known as Swami Vivekananda, by a professor of European history at the University of Oxford has come at a time when the century-long target of achieving a Hindu rashtra by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh is arguably at its closest. Ruth Harris’ book on the saffron-robed ascetic, who inspired...

criminal investigation against Adani Enterprises Limited and others registered in India’s capital New Delhi by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has been pending for three years. The filing of a first information report (FIR) by the CBI in the designated CBI court in New Delhi relates to allegations about rigging of tenders for procurement of coal for power stations owned by the Andhra Pradesh Power Generation Corporation that involve a 'proxy' company named Vyom Tradelinks, which has a...

There is evidence indicating that an entity linked to the Adani Group financially supported a company that violated sanctions imposed by the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) on trade with North Korea. The sanctioned company was owned by sons of Chang Chung-Ling, an Adani Group associate who appeared in the Hindenburg report due to his directorship of Adani entities under scrutiny in that report. At the heart of this issue is a tanker that transferred oil products to a North Korean ship in...

Book: Imprints Of The Populist Time Author: Ranabir Samaddar Publisher: Orient BlackSwan Price: ₹1,105 One dictionary definition of the word, ‘populism’, is that it is a political approach that strives to appeal to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by elitist groups. In other words, the word signifies the quality of appealing to, or being aimed at, the proverbial aam admi. The political thinker, Ranabir Samaddar, writes several thousand words in his elaborate attempts...

Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, the journalist who found prominent mention in the Hindenburg Research report that triggered turmoil in the share prices of the Adani Group and cast international glare on Indian probity in corporate governance, breaks his silence two-and-a-half years after a court in Ahmedabad issued a gag order asking him not to speak or write anything that may go against the interests of the Adani Group. Guha Thakurta said he was not willing to hazard a guess on the future of the Adani...

The very first paragraph of Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s relatively short speech presenting the Budget for 2023-24 made it amply clear that this was her last full-fledged budget before the next general elections. She talked of envisioning a “prosperous and inclusive India, in which the fruits of development reach all regions and citizens”, especially the youth, women, farmers and those belonging to the other backward classes (OBCs), Scheduled Castes (Scs), and Scheduled Tribes...

On December 9, the Defence Ministry suspended Defsys Solutions Private Limited from its list of vendors preventing it from doing business with the Indian military. The blacklisted firm, owned by infamous arms dealer Sushen Mohan Gupta, was involved in the alleged scandal relating to the purchase of AgustaWestland helicopters by the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government. The Narendra Modi government hopes to embarrass the Congress-led UPA with its investigation into the so-called...

Book: Ideology and Organization in Indian Politics: Polarization and The Growing Crisis Of The Congress Party (2009-19) Author: Zoya Hasan Publisher: Oxford Price: ₹1,495 Can the Indian National Congress sink to lower depths? Will the Bharat Jodo Yatra led by Rahul Gandhi revive the electoral fortunes of India’s Grand Old Party? Will 2024 witness something unexpected to keep Narendra Modi’s government in power in the way the Pulwama-Balakot episode did in 2019 by successfully diverting attention...

Gurugram, New Delhi and Bengaluru: The government of India is seeking the extradition of arms dealer Sanjay Bhandari on grounds of his alleged failure to declare his foreign assets under the Black Money (Undisclosed Foreign Income and Assets) and Imposition of Tax Act, 2015, and for alleged money laundering. Andrew Peretti reported from London for NewsClick that closing arguments in the extradition case were heard at the Westminster Magistrates’ Court, London, on October 4 and a final decision...

Antilia, the 27-storey house of Reliance Group chairman and the country’s second-richest man Mukesh Ambani and his family—built at a cost of Rs 15,000 crore—is one of the most recognisable buildings in the South Mumbai skyline and reportedly the most expensive private residence in the world. Since its construction in the mid-2000s, Antilia has also been the subject of a long-running dispute over the legal validity of the sale of the land on which it stands, which earlier belonged to an orphanage...

In a major move, the Ministry of Finance has introduced new guiding principles for the government of India’s disinvestment deals. The Probe has accessed an office memorandum signed by Aseem K Jha, the Under Secretary to the Government of India, which elaborates on the “guiding principles” to be followed during the disinvestment process to bring in the “highest degree of integrity and probity” in the transactions. Amongst the other principles, the most significant decision of the government has...

After coming into existence in June 1966, the Shiv Sena, set up by cartoonist Balasaheb Thackeray, experienced electoral success for the first time when its candidates won a majority of seats in the Bombay (now Mumbai) Municipal Corporation, the wealthiest civic body of its kind in the country. The party's victory was aided by factionalism within the Congress on the issue of the creation of the new state of Maharashtra from the erstwhile Bombay Presidency province. It played an active role in...

On 6 June, The Probe published an interview by these reporters with Amardeep Sharma, former Managing Director of Almas Global Opportunity Fund (AGOF), a Cayman Islands-registered entity. While Sharma claimed that everything about the “winning” bid by Star9 Mobility Solutions Private Limited – of which AGOF is an important part – to acquire a majority stake in the public sector undertaking Pawan Hans Limited (formerly Helicopter Corporation of India) is above board, several doubts and unanswered...

On 16 May, it was reported that the privatisation of the government-owned helicopter service provider Pawan Hans Limited had been “put on hold.” Just 17 days earlier, on April 29, the government had declared Star9 Mobility Solutions Private Limited’s Rs 211 crore bid as the winning bid for the government’s 51% stake in the helicopter company. On the day reports that the deal had been put on hold appeared, these reporters had published in The Wire and NewsClick an article investigating the...

On 16 May, these reporters published in The Wire and NewsClick an article investigating the antecedents of a consortium of three companies that came together to set up Star9 Mobility Solutions Private Limited, which was announced as the winner of the auction to acquire Pawan Hans Limited, the public-sector helicopter service provider. The article pointed out that little information was available in the public domain about the Cayman Islands registered Almas Global Opportunity Fund (AGOF), the...

New Delhi: On April 29, 2022, the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs approved Star9 Mobility Private Limited’s bid to buy the government’s 51% stake in public sector helicopter service provider Pawan Hans Limited for Rs 211 crore. Two weeks later, several questions about the privatisation of this once-iconic public sector company remain unanswered and there are questions about the identity of its new owner. Star9 Mobility is a consortium of three different entities – Maharaja Aviation Private...

Shivnath Thukral, a public policy director, India, at WhatsApp Inc (owned by Facebook, now known as Meta) since March 2020, had once owned a stake in Opalina Technologies – a company that has provided software solutions for India’s prime minister Narendra Modi, the prime minister’s office, the Bharatiya Janata Party, and the ministry of textiles in the union government. Thukral, who remains one of Meta’s top lobbyists in India, gave up his stakes in Opalina before joining Facebook on October 24...

Book: Tryst With Strong Leader Populism Author: P. Raman Publisher, price: Aakar, Rs 695 Why was February 19, 2013 a crucial day in the political life of Narendra Modi? That was the day when the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh decided to place the might of the ‘social organization’ behind its pracharak, the then chief minister of Gujarat, as the party’s prime ministerial candidate for the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. The head of the RSS set two conditions for Modi, who reportedly had had a ‘love-hate...

It’s a cliché to say that the road to Delhi starts from Lucknow. There can be various views on what the outcome of the ongoing assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh will be. While we will know on March 10 whether the Bharatiya Janata Party will return to power in India’s most-populous state, what is indisputable is that the results of the elections will have a far-reaching impact on the future of the country’s politics and the contours of Indian democracy. One out of six Indians live in UP. Its...

Book: Nabokov and the Real World: Between Appreciation and Defense Author: Robert Alter Publisher, price: Princeton, £14.99 Vladimir Nabokov has been, and remains, one of the most controversial and polarizing writers. His critics describe him as a self-indulgent stylist, who was deliberately elitist, obscure and, worse, a purveyor of sophisticated pornography. His admirers — this reviewer is among them — consider his large body of work as brilliant and visionary. As Robert Alter puts it, “The...

New Delhi: India’s premier investigating agency, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has, for over five years now, been probing the alleged complicity of certain senior officials of the New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC) –– that oversees the administration of the small but important part of the National Capital Territory (NCT) in which India’s most influential individuals reside ––with the owners of the fancy, five-star Hotel Le Meridien, to evade statutory dues. The CBI seems to have...

Senior advocate and member of the Rajya Sabha Abhishek Manu Singhvi has found himself in the midst of a controversy for raising a question in Parliament allegedly on behalf of a private firm he has represented as a legal counsel in the Karnataka High Court. Singhvi’s question on government rules and regulations about online “gambling” games had been listed for an answer on December 16. But he withdrew the question after the controversy. The Congress MP has represented Gameskraft Technology, a...

Book: The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can’t Think the Way We Do Author: Erik J. Larson, Publisher: Bellknap Price: £23.95 When the Industrial Revolution spread from Europe to North America and then across many parts of the planet in the last decades of the 18th century, it spurred colonial rule and, with it, the rush for cheap raw materials from the Global South. Many argued then that humanity had progressed by leaps and bounds as machines were replacing animal power and human...

So, what’s new about whistleblower Frances Haugen’s revelations about how the top brass of the now-renamed Facebook turned a blind eye to the proliferation of incendiary, hateful and false information on its social media platform, how the digital monopoly chose profits over safety, how it actively aided Right-wing demagogues, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and contributed to the rapid spread of Islamophobia in India? Answer: not very much, really. Yet Haugen’s decision to leak troves of...

Chandan Saurav Mitra, or CS as some of his old friends called him, would have turned 67 on 12 December had he not left us. From academics he turned to journalism and then, politics. He had an amazingly-wide range of interests: from Bollywood film songs to international politics. He was incredibly bright and intelligent, had a sharp wit and sense of repartee. He was exceptionally alert till the last few months of his life when his memory started failing. He enjoyed all the best things of life...

It was on March 17 that I received an unexpected call from Chennai-based investigative journalist Sandhya Ravishankar. She said she was flying into Delhi that evening and had to meet me most urgently the following day. I told her I was travelling and the only time I could possibly keep aside for her would be early in the morning at 6am. Why the urgency, I asked. After all, we had not been in touch for a while since a meeting of the Foundation for Media Professionals. “I’ll tell you when we meet...

It is 46 years since Indira Gandhi declared an ‘internal’ Emergency in the country on June 25, 1975. There are obvious dissimilarities between that 21-month period and the last seven years — but the similarities are so stark as to warrant repeated reiteration. How did we reach this particular point in our political life that we had so unequivocally rejected less than half-a-century ago? The Emergency certainly taught Indira Gandhi that she had completely misread the democratic commitment of the...

In his complaint, Peter Kerkar also highlighted the links that exist between SSG Capital and Redkite Capital. He denies involvement in any fraudulent activity and claims that Ezeego’s management began an internal investigation into its operations and finances by appointing the firm of chartered accountants, Desai Saxena and Associates, to carry out an audit of the company’s finances. According to his complaint, he and his sister Urrshila own 41.26% of the shares in the company, Coad Management...

The Tourism Finance Corporation of India (TFCI) is a financial institution set up in 1989 by a group of financial institutions and public sector banks, including the Industrial Finance Corporation of India (IFCI), the Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC), the Oriental Insurance Corporation (OIC), State Bank of India, Bank of India and Canara Bank. According to TFCI’s website, it has assisted in the establishment of “one third of the total capacity of branded hotels in India.” The stake of...

He used to have a prominent profile, a flamboyant lifestyle. He was a frequent flier between Mumbai and London. His father once headed the hotels division of the Tata group before he fell out with Ratan Tata in 1997. He graduated from Stanford University in the United States. He used to run a travel agency that was supposed to be the oldest of its kind in the world, set up in 1758, a year after the British established control over large parts of India following their victory in the Battle of...

Did the businessman in Bob Dylan supersede the poet Did he demur before writing down an essay (instead of delivering the mandatory speech) before pocketing the equivalent of $900,000 or nearly ₹7 crore from the Nobel Academy We will never know the answers simply because he never will tell Dylan will continue to refuse to be classified **** A troubadour with a twang; an Amriki baul; an icon of his generation; a bundle of contradictions who steadfastly refused to be stereotyped; who relentlessly...

The outcome of the ongoing elections to the West Bengal legislative assembly will have important implications for the working of not just the state’s polity but on the future of democracy in India. If the Bharatiya Janata Party is able to come to power for the first time in Bengal, there will be no stopping Narendra Modi’s relentless drive to create an Opposition- mukt Bharat and his unabashed endeavour to establish what can best be described as an ‘electoral autocracy’ in the country. Even if...

Half a century ago, long before artificial intelligence became a commonly-used phrase, well before computers were used not just to predict electoral outcomes but human behaviour as well, decades before Google, Facebook, Amazon and Cambridge Analytica became household names and giant conglomerates started exercising an overweening influence on what more than half the population of the planet read, heard and watched, there used to exist a corporation called Simulmatics in the United States of...

Gurugram: Less than a month after Suvendu Adhikari, former Trinamool Congress (TMC) Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) of West Bengal from Nandigram, joined the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the presence of Union Home Minister Amit Shah, other TMC leaders have become increasingly vocal in expressing their unhappiness and frustrations with the functioning of the ruling party in the state led by Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, and are apparently preparing the ground to join BJP in the run...

Gurugram: On Friday, the Centre for Justice and Accountability, a non-profit organisation based in San Francisco, California, the US, filed a complaint with the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Committee on behalf of Ahimsa Wickrematunge, daughter of slain Sri Lankan journalist Lasantha Wickrematunge, who was murdered on January 8, 2009, the international news agency Associated Press reported. The committee is a body of experts established by the International Covenant on Civil and Political...

IN recent weeks, a series of attempts have been made by governments in different countries, notably Australia and the United States, to curb the overweening dominance of two of the biggest digital monopolies on the planet. Unlike many parts of the world where a consensus has emerged that the unrestrained dominance of Alphabet (the parent company of Google, YouTube and the Android operating system on mobile phones) and Facebook (including WhatsApp and Instagram) is terrible for humankind, the...

Bengaluru/Gurugram: On September 23, Annapurna Devi, member of the Lok Sabha from Koderma, Jharkhand, and R K Singh Patel, MP from Banda, Uttar Pradesh, both belonging to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), wrote letters to the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Board of India, levelling allegations of financial malpractices against Sanjay Gupta, the resolution professional appointed by the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) to manage the corporate insolvency resolution proceedings for the ailing...

Gurugram: In a regulatory filing for the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) and the National Stock Exchange (NSE) on November 26, CG Power and Industrial Solutions Limited (earlier Crompton Greaves Limited) announced that all its existing directors––Ashish Guha, Sudhir Mathur, Ramni Nirula, Jitender Balakrishnan, Narayan Seshadri, Pradeep Mathur, Aditi Raja and Rathin Roy––had resigned from the company and its subsidiaries. In their place, six new directors were appointed, signalling the change in...

Gurugram: On November 20, banks that had loaned money to CG Power and Industrial Solutions Limited (formerly Crompton Greaves Limited), which used to be headed by Gautam Thapar, agreed to a one-time loan restructuring programme paving the way for the Murugappa group to take over the well-known power equipment manufacturer. Once among India’s high-profile, jet-setting corporate captains, why is Thapar a beleaguered man today? He has been ousted from the company he once headed. He cannot leave the...

Bengaluru/Gurugram: In a letter dated September 20 to Union Communications Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, Congress member of the Rajya Sabha, Kumar Ketkar, has claimed that the government’s Department of Telecommunications (DoT) is failing to collect huge amounts running into lakhs of crore rupees in back payments of Adjusted Gross Revenue (AGR) dues that it is entitled to claim from Mukesh Ambani-headed Reliance Industries Limited (RIL). Ambani is India’s and Asia’s richest man and also one of...

Gurugram/Bengaluru: The September 3 decision of the Supreme Court in the so-called Adjusted Gross Revenue (AGR) case has left wide open the question of whether the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) in the Union Ministry of Communications must be paid past dues by telecommunications companies (telcos) that have undergone or are undergoing insolvency proceedings. At stake is Rs 38,959 crore that the DoT is owed by three companies – Aircel, Reliance Communications (RCom), and Videocon...

On October 16, the Department for Promotion of Industry & Internal Trade, Ministry of Commerce & Industry, issued a clarification to the note it had issued on September 18, 2019 “liberalising” the foreign direct investment (FDI) regime for digital news media entities by specifying that those “engaged in uploading/streaming of news and current affairs…have been permitted FDI up to 26% through the Government approval route.” The following categories of entities, registered or located in India...

On October 8, Union Minister for Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution Ram Vilas Paswan died at the age of 74. This was less than a week after he went through a heart surgery. Tributes started pouring in from all ends of the political spectrum. Prime Minister Narendra Modi tweeted: “I am saddened beyond words. There is a void in our nation that will perhaps never be filled. Shri Ram Vilas Paswan Ji’s demise is a personal loss. I have lost a friend, valued colleague and someone who was...

Bengaluru/Gurugram: In April 2017, one of the authors of this article met the then President of India, Pranab Mukherjee, in Rashtrapati Bhavan in New Delhi. The purpose of the meeting was to ask him a question for a book that was published by Penguin Random House later that year titled, Thin Dividing Line: India, Mauritius and Global Illicit Financial Flows, authored by Paranjoy Guha Thakurta with Shinzani Jain. At the meeting over tea and snacks in ornate cutlery, the discussion moved to a...

India’s mediascape has changed dramatically in less than a decade. The pace of these changes has accelerated since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic and the accompanying economic recession. Across the world and in this country as well, daily newspapers and periodicals on paper are closing down faster than ever before; advertising flows from private corporate entities have reduced drastically; journalists are being thrown out of their jobs or being asked to accept deep salary cuts, and...

Gurugram: The assets of two bankrupt companies in the Mumbai-headquartered, Nagpur-based Uttam group of companies, promoted by members of the Miglani family, are being sought to be purchased by firms owned by non-resident Indians under the statutory Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC). The processes are, however, being questioned, past complaints to tribunals as well as a recent affidavit filed on September 26 in the Supreme Court, reveal. The two companies are Uttam Value Steels Limited (UVSL)...