Reasons to remember Subrata Roy, Sahara group founder

Subrata Roy's Sahara group once had millions of investors, some of them making deposits as small as Rs 10 a day or Rs 100 a month. (Photos via Wikimedia Commons & File)

Subrata Roy “Saharashri” is gone. Was he one of the biggest crooks of Indian business or was he a messiah of the poor, as he claimed? Well, he was certainly an extraordinary man.

Starting off with a chit fund in a small town in Uttar Pradesh, he built a huge diversified empire, the Sahara group, with interests in finance, real estate, airlines, hotels, media and entertainment. There were a few years in the late 1990s and early 2000s when he was possibly the highest profile Indian businessman and also the most mysterious. No one seemed to be sure where his money was coming from, but politicians and film stars wooed him and his smiling face was all over the place.

And then came his fall—two years in Tihar jail and then a media blackout. It became clear that he had been running a pyramid scheme on a scale that the world had never witnessed. At its peak, he said that he had 70 million investors, the highest number in human history. The details that came out after his bust were gory. But as long as the going was good, he was seen as a sort of Robin Hood by many people who had trusted him with their money.

Also read: A sad end to Subrata Roy’s rags-to-riches-to-rags story

The business was based on getting ultra-small amounts of regular savings from poor Indians and offering them spectacular returns. Sahara’s investors paid as little as Rs 10 a day and expected to double their money in three years. Roy also served up a unique cocktail of nationalism and spirituality. Sahara was a “parivaar”—a gigantic family with Roy as the benign patriarch, the “managing worker”. There was no profit motive at all; it was all about serving India.

Like any standard megalomaniac, he spent a lot of money advertising his humility and self-sacrifice.

All Sahara employees were mandated to greet each other with “Jai Sahara!” with hands placed on the left side of their chests. This was not a business or a workplace; it was a movement, a journey, a path to some sort of enlightenment, even a higher form of life itself. Of course it was crazy, but Roy managed to pull it off for years. He flew around in his personal plane, married off his two sons in the most expensive and most widely covered Indian wedding since the Mughals and appeared in the music video of a song sung by his wife, climbing down from a helicopter and walking towards the camera in a black overcoat with a demure smile on his face.

He bought heritage properties in London and New York and tried to build a whole new town outside Pune. He constructed a swanky cricket stadium, owned an Indian Premier League team and partied with the hottest people on earth. Not bad for a boy from Gorakhpur who started his business with only one asset—a Lambretta scooter.

Also read: When Sahara's Subrata Roy realised that 'life in jail can be painful and lonely'

Then it all began crumbling. The financial empire had been built on two key strategies. One, when the investment matured, Sahara would be able to convince the investor to not take her money out, but to reinvest it in another Sahara scheme. Two, if the investor failed to make her regular payments, Rs 10 a day or Rs 100 a month, she would lose her benefits and Sahara would never have to pay her back. It is obvious to any fool that a poor rickshaw-puller in Bulandsheher would miss a few payments and Sahara appears to have banked on that.

Originally, its agents would come to the rickshaw-puller on the given date and collect the money. Then Sahara changed the rules; the investor would have to come to the designated Sahara office and pay. Very few of us read the fine print when we sign a contract, and many of these people were barely literate. Hundreds of thousands of Indians would suddenly discover that not only would they not earn any interest, they had even lost their principal.

To be fair, Roy was not convicted of any crime, though this may have more to do with court delays than anything else.

Subrata Roy was arrested on March 4, 2014. He stayed in jail till May 2016.

I never met him, but I did have two run-ins with Saharashri. Many years ago, we carried a story on the Sahara group, including an interview with him, in Outlook magazine where I was an editor. A few days later, all of us got a legal notice from one of the country’s leading law firms. Subrata Roy was suing the company, the magazine and every single person whose name appeared on the magazine’s masthead individually, including marketing and finance executives who obviously had nothing to do with what had been printed. It was carpet bombing on an epic scale.

Our correspondent had told him that there were many rumours about the source of his wealth, and Roy had laughed and said that he had even heard stories that he was laundering Dawood Ibrahim’s money. But he had a problem when we quoted him on this.

It all ended well. I wrote to Roy, saying that we had carried his quote in the right spirit—as a joke, and we had him on tape. I pointed out that we had mentioned all his good deeds. I never got a reply and he did not pursue the case. Obviously, he had better fish to fry.

Also read: SEBI to banks: Attach accounts and lockers of Sahara group firms, chief Subrata Roy

A few years later, he suddenly dropped out of sight for several months. He was nowhere to be seen; no one seemed to know where he was. All sorts of rumours were floating around. I commissioned a cover story with the headline (as far as I remember): “Have you seen this man recently?” splashed over his aviator-sunglassed face. A week later, he appeared on Sahara TV, seated on a garish gold-coloured throne with two lion heads as its arms (you can’t make this up) with a giant painting of Bharat Mata behind him. He told the world that he was perfectly hale and hearty. I admit that I felt a bit of wicked gratification as I watched him.

Some years ago, I met Vijay Mallya a few times, in connection with his interest in setting up a media company. On a Delhi-Bengaluru flight on his private jet, as he sipped Kingfisher beer and smoked a cigarillo, he said: “They put this guy Subrata Roy in prison! Can you believe it? I can’t imagine what he’s going through!”

A year later, Mallya fled India to avoid going to jail. As a former business journalist, these are memories I cherish.

Also read: Sahara matter regarding conduct of an entity, will continue even after Subrata Roy's death: SEBI chief