Mr. Ajay Piramal: Grand Philanthropism or Profiteering Facade?

Mr. Ajay Piramal: Grand Philanthropism or Profiteering Facade?

Posted on 3rd May, 2025 (GMT 21:20 hrs)

ABSTRACT

The article critically examines the philanthropic image of Ajay Piramal, chairman of the Piramal Group. While reflecting on his supposedly projected contributions through the Piramal Foundation in areas like healthcare, education, and clean water initiatives, the article raises concerns about alleged financial misconduct and environmental extortion issues associated with his business practices over the years that seem to posit a crony collusion. It questions whether his philanthropic endeavours serve as a genuine commitment to social welfare or as a means to obscure less ethical corporate activities. The piece encourages readers to scrutinize the alignment between Piramal’s professed values and his business operations, suggesting a need for greater genunity in viewing a philanthro-capitalist!

I. Introductory Skeletons: From the Cupboard of India’s Economic Wreckage

What Makes Someone a Good Philanthropist (within the current paradigms)?

Serving people’s interests, right? Standing by them in times of both misery and joy. A good philanthropist seeks to offer alms to the needy, the deprived, the marginalized. In doing so, the philanthropist fulfils a moral duty: the pursuit of happiness for the greatest number.

And what does this assurance of happiness depend on? On being able to secure a life, a livelihood, meaningful work, and a sustainable future. A philanthropist contributes his/her/their due towards exactly this end.

Now, our much-discussed corporate tycoon, Mr. Ajay Piramal, is widely known—perhaps even celebrated—as one such philanthropist. However, many of his recent (alleged) actions cast a long shadow over that designation. Hence, this post is written to address a disjunctive proposition that has recently emerged in this connection:

Is Mr. Piramal a Philanthropist or… something else?

This “else” could be anything, one might suppose. Yes, indeed. This constitutive “else” lies entirely outside (or in exclusion thereof) the set of genuine philanthropists. With that premise established, we shall now examine whether Mr. Piramal truly fulfills the criteria of being a philanthropist—or whether he repeatedly strays from that carefully cultivated, advertised image. Let us try to find out.

It must be clearly stated at the outset: this article does not, in any way, seek to belittle philanthropy or genuine philanthropists. The intention here is to carry out yet another sarcastic act of subversion—while remaining faithful to the logical progression of events, sequences, and linkages as they have unfolded to us as per the media reports, our investigative trajectories into secondary data-sources and so on.

II. What We Are Made Known: Piramal as the “Great” Philanthropist

As a philanthropist (a Great Gatsby, I wonder?!), Mr. Ajay Piramal reportedly established the Piramal Foundation to address India’s challenges through scalable solutions. In healthcare, Piramal Swasthya allegedly provides maternal care and 24/7 health helplines across 27 states. In education, the Piramal School of Leadership supposedly trains headmasters to improve government schools. The Piramal Sarvajal initiative reportedly supports rural entrepreneurs in delivering affordable, clean drinking water. Through programs like the Piramal Fellowship, he supposedly promotes youth empowerment and social entrepreneurship. Collaborating with governments and NITI Aayog, his approach has projectedly reached over 112 million people in aspirational districts.

For his supposed services, he has earned accolades like
the Corporate Citizen of the Year award in 2016 and an Honorary
Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2022 for
fostering UK-India trade relations.

Is that all there is? Or do we move else-where?

III. Counter-Instances (Alleged): Mr. Piramal as “Something Else”?!

That else-“where” seems to be “here” already, given what we already know instead of what we are made known.

We arrive at the doorsteps of weaponization of image management as such.

Ajay Piramal, chairman of the Piramal Group, projects a philanthropic image through the Piramal Foundation, reportedly aiding healthcare, education, and water accessibility across India, as noted earlier. Yet, this persona is overshadowed by allegations of financial misconduct and political ties that seem to paint him as a controversial middleman in India’s crony capitalist landscape.

Some of the primary allegations and possible misconducts attributed to various subdivisions of Mr. Piramal’s corporate empire include the following:

• DHFL Scam: Piramal allegedly acquired Dewan Housing Finance Corporation Limited (DHFL) for ₹14,700 crore against its ₹95,000 crore valuation, with claims of forcible acquisition and contempt of court. SEBI has been probing Whistleblowers’ report that discounted loan assignments to entities like Encore Natural Polymers, harming public shareholders, amid a CBI probe into ₹14,000 crore mismanagement.
• SEBI’s Rebuttals & Insider Trading: SEBI has reportedly flagged Piramal thrice—twice for alleged insider trading (2016, 2019) and once for irregularities in a 2024 Shriram Finance stake sale. Despite fines, critics claim regulatory leniency due to political connections.
• Electoral Bonds: Firms linked to Piramal allegedly donated ₹85 crore to the BJP via electoral bonds, fueling speculation of political shielding by the ruling party.
• Flashnet Scam: Piramal is tied to a ₹48 crore Flashnet scam involving deceit and conflict of interest, further tarnishing his ethical standing.
• Digwal Affair: Environmental violations at Piramal’s facilities, including water-land-air pollution, led to National Green Tribunal penalties, contradicting his sustainability claims.
• Other Allegations: Piramal Realty faces accusations of exploitative real estate practices, including one-sided agreements and skewed exit clauses. A ₹2,000 crore loan probe involving Omkar Developers and asset protection by the Delhi High Court add to the controversies.

For more information, view the following:

For more information, view the following:

This section is familiar to our regular readers, as it pertains to Mr. Piramal’s alleged role as a middleman within the current political regime in India, led by the BJP. But how does this connect?

Throughout the aforementioned list of accusations, allegations have emerged suggesting that Mr. Piramal’s business dealings align with the interests of the ruling party. His corporate motto, “buy imperfect, sell perfect,” is said to reflect a middleman’s role in acquiring undervalued assets and reselling them at substantial profits, even though Mr. Piramal has control over the means of production, differentiating him from a typical middleman. He appears to serve a mediating role in legitimizing questionable transactions, including those related to the DHFL “acquisition” and the Flashnet dealings. This behaviour seemingly mirrors that of the current Prime Minister of India, known for promoting deals for Adani, Ambani, and similar entities!

This brings us to…. a bit of an analysis.

IV. Making Sense of Mr. Piramal: Capitalism’s Last Cry?

What does a Marxist perspective typically suggest about philanthropy? It prompts us to view welfare and charity as the “last gasp” of capitalism, where manipulated production conditions create a facade of “feel-good” initiatives. These initiatives lead workers to perceive their exploitation as a normalized reality rather than an oppressive situation. In this way, capitalism seeks to redirect the alienation of workers, convincing them that the capitalist system provides a curated sense of freedom or liberation.

The emergence of a class-for-itself is consequently stifled, allowing capitalists to continue their profiteering schemes, transforming all into exchange-valued commodities under the guise of “corporate social responsibility” (CSR). This serves as a strategy to evade taxes while simultaneously projecting a socially elevated image of piety and virtue. This phenomenon also translates into what is referred to as the “dole economy”, viz., the phase of governmentality wherein the state apparatus serves its subject-ed citizens with freebies to contain all commotion or revolution.

This scenario perhaps reflects the situation of Mr. Piramal and other corporate magnates, both in India and globally, who seem to operate within a paradoxical stance of capitalism that professes to promote welfare and charitable conditions while simultaneously creating crises, all of which serve as mindless profit generators.

Beware: Fragmented Identities Ahead

Ajay Piramal, Chairman of the Piramal Group, navigates multiple roles that reflect fragmented identities shaped by competing priorities. As a business leader, he drives major deals, like (adversely) acquiring DHFL or selling his pharma business to Abbott for $3.8 billion, while his Piramal Foundation supposedly impacts 112 million lives through healthcare, education, and livelihood programs across 25 Indian states. His $4.3 billion net worth and Rs 450 crore mansion contrast with his advocacy of “trusteeship,” rooted in the Bhagavad Gita, which views wealth as a societal trust, while foreclosing the covetous aspects of accumulating such huge amounts of wealth by way of stealing the surplus labour of the other 98%. His global roles—on Harvard’s Board of Dean’s Advisors and the UK-India CEO Forum—coexist allegedly with grassroots efforts in India’s aspirational districts. These identities—corporate lord, philanthropist, and advocate—highlight the complexity of balancing (perhaps futilely) profit motives with social impact, raising serious questions about alignment, coordination and authenticity. These contradictions aren’t incidental—they form the very scaffolding of a new global capitalist morality, dressed in the robes of a capitalism that makes all the efforts to sustain the pitting of its inner contradictions.

And yet, while Mr. Piramal often presents himself as the ideal “paramavaishnava” philanthropist, the Gita (9:32), Mr. Piramal’s guidebook to a certain notion of “success”, categorically states that all merchants and capitalists—along with the working class and women—are born of a sinful nature (papayonayah). In vehemently criticizing this degrading assertion, we must weigh its implications on the spectrum of Mr. Piramal’s actions.

Mr. Piramal also acts as a middleman across various domains. In business, his M&A expertise facilitates high-value transactions, while his foundation connects government bodies like NITI Aayog with underserved communities, training 50,000 officials and supporting scalable initiatives. His policy influence, through boards like Tata Sons and global forums, reportedly bridges Indian and international interests, and his so-called “Conscious Capitalism” blends traditional values with modern business. However, this intermediary role invites intense scrutiny: business interests may somehow overlap with philanthropic goals, and large-scale efforts could prioritize breadth over depth, potentially sidelining grassroots voices in defence of a disastrous mode of capitalist practice through what is called as the “shock doctrine”.

Although ECT is prohibited in modern psychiatric and anti-psychiatric practices, it persists as a survival mechanism for capitalism, which manufactures shocks, manipulates the dynamics surrounding those shocks, and reconciles with them to serve its own interests!

Moving on and away from the Marxist ramblings, it is time we take recourse to an even more nonchalant tendency: anarchism.

In the shadow of towering corporate spires, where philanthropists’ names adorn charity halls, the anarchist iconoclast spits at the ground, seeing philanthropy as a hollow gesture that props up the very systems—capitalism, state power, and centralized control—that grind workers into vicious poverty. Charity, they argue, is a paternalistic trap, chaining recipients to the whims of the wealthy while masking the root of inequality: exploitative labour and stolen wealth through the illicit extraction of surplus labour. Instead, they champion horizontal mutual aid, rooted in anarcho-syndicalist principles of workers’/producers’ solidarity and mutual cooperation, where decentralized communities and unions collectively share resources, from food to tools, building self-managed systems free from bosses or benefactors. A community workshop, run by a local bottom-up initiations, hums with shared labour, each tool a testament to rejecting the elite’s band-aid alms.

The anarchist expresses a clear perspective on this issue, arguing that reallocating a tiny fraction of funds from the capitalists’ stolen property by the capitalists themselves is futile, as it fails to address the fundamental problem: the idea that property itself is inherently theft.

Philanthropy’s alluring sheen, the anarchist warns, is a distraction—a billionaire’s donation comes to legitimize their plunder while foundations like Rockefeller or Gates selectively co-opt movements, steering them to serve capitalist ends. Charity may offer a fleeting reprieve, but it’s no solution; it entrenches dependency on status quo frameworks and class divides. The “other-ed” path lies in evolving egalitarian networks, like the Black Panther Party’s breakfast programs or COVID-era mutual aid, where workers’ syndicates and communities forge a federated solidarity, not supplication. On village communes, factory floors and in neighborhood assemblies, they scrawl their creed: No masters, No overlords only comrades. Through anarchist collectives, they dismantle hierarchical power-relations, weaving a world where mutual aid triumphs over charity’s breadcrumbs.

This is where Mr. Piramal’s (or, in that connection, virtually any other capitalist) apparent masquerade, presenting charity as a facade to conceal his relentless pursuit of profit, is laid bare for all to see.

~ REMAINS… ~

A (Non-)Gandhian Recalcitrance of Mr. Piramal the “paramavaisnava”

Q.E.D.: “Paramavaisnava is a follower of Gandhi’s ideology.”

Let us examine this proposition by deploying M.K. Gandhi’s three foundational concepts—Trusteeship, Satyagraha (Truth), and Ahimsa (Non-violence)—in light of the publicly available persona and actions of the industrialist often identified as Paramavaisnava, viz., Ajay Piramal.

1. Trusteeship

Gandhi’s idea of trusteeship proposed that the ultra-wealthy—those he often described as bloodsuckers—ought to consider their wealth as held in trust for the welfare of the poor, under divine injunction. Now, who is this “God”? (A deliberately gendered question, though we remain unsure of His [sic] genital configuration).

In Piramal’s case, his affiliations with spiritual middlemen such as Radhanath Swami (ISKCON) and the controversial Sadguru point toward a kind of theocratic trusteeship. These modern gurus are entrusted to sanctify capital’s role in society—effectively providing divine legitimization to otherwise secular concentrations of wealth. Trusteeship here becomes a spiritual alibi for capitalist accumulation.

However, far from dismantling surplus labour extraction, this trusteeship only greases its machinery. The Piramal Foundation, while advertised as a philanthropic wing, can also be viewed as a CSR façade—a public-relations strategy embedded within an Orwellian newspeak of “Corporate Social Responsibility.” In fact, as Herbert Marcuse warned, such euphemisms foreclose meaningful discourse and mask systemic violence under progressive labels (cf. Marcuse’s closing of the universe of discourse; also, Academia.edu).

Even more telling, as India Today reports:

“Individual taxpayers are paying more in taxes than corporates after taxes for companies were lowered in 2019. Experts say it is untenable… that a middle-income country like India is funded by personal tax.”
– India Today, July 2024

In such a scenario, is Piramal a theocratic agent or merely a skilled actor in the trusteeship spectacle?

Verdict: The answer remains pending.

2. Satyagraha (Truth)

In a post-truth age, what indeed is satya? As a self-declared “-postist,” I confess my inability to locate truth with certainty. Still, let us entertain a vyavahārika (pragmatic) analysis of Piramal as a potential satyagrahi—a seeker and sustainer of truth.

Let us consider a few hypothetical tests:

A. If Piramal were truly a satyagrahi, he could not have denied the “truths” acknowledged by the NCLT’s first order.

B. Nor could he have dismissed the determinations of the NCLAT’s second order.

C. Moreover, a true satyagrahi would not be entangled in allegations of insider trading or short selling (here we may insert SEBI’s latest orders once recalled). Thanks to high-level political and corporate connections, such allegations have conveniently disappeared. The SAT, perhaps unknowingly, validated his satyagrahi credentials—through selective amnesia.

Conclusion (with irony): Therefore, by the logic of systemic exoneration, Piramal is evidently a “true” satyagrahi.

3. Ahimsa (Non-Violence)

As Slavoj Žižek provocatively argued, Gandhi’s ahimsa often masks a subtler form of violence—slow, systemic, and invisible. Let us examine Piramal’s non-violence through this lens (cf. Satyagraha in the Age of Post-Truth Society):

A. If Paramavaisnava Piramal were truly non-violent, he would not be complicit in environmental violence—as alleged in the Digwal pharmaceutical pollution case.

B. If he upheld ahimsa, he would refrain from manufacturing I-Pills, which—depending on one’s ethical standpoint—may constitute a form of embryonic annihilation. Gandhi himself, along with Ivan Illich and Kothari, criticized the medical-industrial complex and advocated for minimalist living and indigenous healing. (See Hind Swaraj and Medical Nemesis for relevant fragments.)

More ironically, Piramal himself appears to lack faith in his healthcare empire: he reportedly arranged for his daughter-in-law to give birth to twins in the U.S., far from the reach of his own products and hospitals.

C. A non-violent man would not have been linked to the DHFL scam, one of India’s largest cases of financial violence against the common citizenry.

Finally, Piramal often invokes the Bhagavad Gita as a management manual. But his bhāṣya (interpretation) appears deeply impoverished. It is less a spiritual reading than a corporate strategy, a rhetorical shield to justify nepotism (as a kin of Ambani) and crony capitalism.

Final Reflections

So, is Paramavaisnava truly a Gandhian?

If Gandhi’s legacy is read not through the prism of ideals but through their corporate appropriations, then yes—Piramal is the perfect post-Gandhian satyagrahi, trustee, and ahimsak. But if we take Gandhi seriously—as a thinker critical of industrial modernity, medical violence, capitalist greed, and spiritual hypocrisy—then Piramal’s invocation of Gandhi is a strategic misappropriation.

Q.E.D. Revisited: Paramavaisnava does not appear to be a follower of Gandhi’s ideology, but a skillful ventriloquist of its hollowed-out avatar.

Thus, all of this persists in a dynamic interplay between what is typically perceived, what we are capable of seeing, and what has already been witnessed….

Call it what you will—philanthropy, philanthropy as excuse, the malingering of profiteers, a capitalist’s defence mechanism, or a compensatory gesture to save face—but genuine it is not. Behind it lurks, masked in pretence, the quiet yet troubling face of deceit—playing its part in a theatre of foreshadowed intent.

Philanthrocapitalism it is…. perhaps.