DHFL Scam and the Piramal Empire: Chaosophies of the Share Market

Posted on 19th November, 2025 (GMT 03:15 hrs)

Composed and Compiled by Occupy Dalal Street⤡

ABSTRACT

This analysis examines the Piramal Group’s post-DHFL restructuring across Finance, Pharma, and Realty, situating it alongside the DHFL insolvency to reveal a systemic logic of corporate immunity in India. Through demergers, reverse mergers, and strategic rebrandings, the group consolidated promoter control, quarantined legacy risks, and leveraged regulatory timing while dispersing accountability. Piramal Finance Ltd.’s premium listing, despite DHFL-linked liabilities and opaque asset valuations, exemplifies how market narratives, algorithmic momentum, and legal finality privilege investor perception over depositor justice. Piramal Pharma’s operational stress contrasts with narrative-driven valuation, highlighting structural fragility masked by forward-looking communications. The study demonstrates that restructuring has evolved into a mechanism of reputational cleansing and social erasure, wherein financial architecture advances faster than justice, and ethical accountability is systematically sidelined. Moreover, the chaosophy of the share market—its inherent unpredictability, narrative-driven volatility, and speculative feedback loops—renders conventional risk assessment almost performative, showing how perception, hype, and algorithmic herding often dictate market outcomes more than fundamentals or depositor rights.

In Continuation With

Executive Summary

For Readers Who Cannot Go Through the Full Article

This synopsis distills the key arguments of our longer, detailed analysis on Piramal Group, DHFL, restructuring, and corporate immunity.

Piramal Group and DHFL: Restructuring as Corporate Immunity

The Piramal Group’s (Finance, Pharma and Realty) rapid sequence of demergers, reverse mergers, and rebrandings—publicly framed as routine restructuring—constitutes a deliberate corporate choreography: concentrating control, quarantining legacy risks, exploiting regulatory timing, and dispersing accountability. When placed against the backdrop of the DHFL insolvency, these moves expose profound structural weaknesses in India’s distressed-asset and corporate-governance architecture.

Corporate Transformation vs. Risk Quarantine

Piramal Enterprises Ltd (PEL) shifted from a diversified conglomerate to a pure-play NBFC after the 2022 Piramal Pharma demerger and the 2025 reverse merger that dissolved PEL into its subsidiary Piramal Finance Ltd (PFL). Although the market rewarded this as a revival, structural fragility persisted—volatile asset quality (GNPA ~2.8%), negative or opaque book-value indicators, and episodic recoveries. The reverse merger effectively served as reputation laundering, allowing the group to present a “clean slate” while quietly absorbing DHFL-linked liabilities.

Meanwhile, Piramal Pharma Ltd (PPL) continues to show operational stress: Q2 FY26 revenue fell 8.8%, EBITDA dropped 44%, and net loss stood at ₹99.2 crore. CDMO volatility, complex generics challenges, and high leverage further undermined investor confidence despite forward-looking communications.

DHFL Parallels

DHFL’s insolvency was characterised by opaque asset valuation, deep creditor haircuts (~23% recovery for retail FD-holders), and favourably structured benefits for the acquirer. Piramal’s subsequent restructuring mirrors this template: fragmentation → consolidation → reconstitution, enabling the group to maintain narrative control while circumventing moral and financial accountability through regulatory choreography.

Market Spectacle and Structural Logic

PFL’s November 2025 listing—premium debut, algorithmic momentum, and media-driven enthusiasm—demonstrated how markets reward narrative coherence over fundamentals. Simultaneously, the Supreme Court’s April 1, 2025 verdict foreclosed any possibility of restitution for FD-holders. The contrast is stark: retail losses of roughly ₹5,300–₹5,400 crore coexist with a freshly listed PFL valued at over ₹30,000 crore. This constitutes a “zone of capital” where corporate acceleration outpaces legal justice and social redress.

Entity	Status	Market/Financial Notes
PFL	Listed NBFC	Post-merger premium, narrative-driven valuation
PPL	Listed Pharma	Operational stress, near 52-week lows
PEL	Delisted	Consolidation, tax-loss utilization
Piramal Realty	Private, Unlisted	Brand-driven valuation stability

Conclusion

The Piramal Group (Finance, Pharma, Realty) illustrates how, in post-IBC India, restructuring has evolved into a mechanism of corporate immunity—a space where reputational risk is externalized, distressed assets sanitized, promoter control consolidated, and social losses rendered invisible. Financial markets reward narrative and regulatory compliance rather than substance, allowing structural injustice to be reframed as efficiency and injustice into investible opportunity while sidelining all kinds of ethical accountability.

The sections that follow unpack the above arguments in comprehensive detail, tracing the legal, financial, and political-economic architecture underlying the Piramal Group’s (Finance, Pharma and Realty) restructuring strategies and their implications for DHFL depositors, markets, and democratic accountability.

0. Introduction

The Piramal Group’s recent stock-market trajectory—punctuated by demergers, reverse mergers, valuation swings, and strategic rebrandings—is often presented as a routine exercise in corporate restructuring. A closer interpretive reading, however, discloses a more intricate financial choreography: one that dilutes unresolved legacy risks, leverages regulatory arbitrage, obscures the pathways of cash flows and asset transfers, and centralizes control even as it disperses legal accountability. When read in conjunction with the DHFL resolution process, this choreography unsettles conventional narratives of “market rationality” and raises sharper questions about transparency, ethical conduct, and the evolving political economy of distressed-asset capitalism in India.

All that is solid melts into air; all that is human melts into money.

1. Piramal Enterprises: A Transformation or a Strategic Escape?

Piramal Enterprises Ltd (PEL), once a diversified conglomerate, now stands as a pure-play NBFC after the 2022 demerger of Piramal Pharma and the 2025 reverse merger that created the newly listed Piramal Finance Ltd (PFL). The restructuring appears linear—but the timing and sequencing align uncomfortably with:

The volatile asset quality inherited from DHFL,
Judicial challenges to the DHFL resolution plan of PCHFL (the earlier avatar of PFL),
Market scrutiny of provisioning adequacy, and
A balance sheet weighed down by legacy wholesale exposures.

Stock analysts in late 2024 already flagged PEL as overvalued, with a high P/E surviving not because of core operational robustness but through optics of transformation: running down the riskier wholesale book, emphasizing secured retail growth, and leaning heavily on one-off recoveries (especially AIF-related provisioning reversals).

The “very expensive” valuation noticed by independent research firms masked the fact that PEL’s profitability was non-linear and dependent on episodic accounting adjustments, not stable credit performance.

Money equalizes unequals—only by erasing equality itself.

2. The Reverse Merger: Market Debut or Strategic Reincarnation?

The November 2025 listing of Piramal Finance (PFL) — via the reverse merger where PEL was dissolved into it — produced an impressive but tightly-compressed market show:

Debut at ₹ 1,260, ~12 % above the discovered price of ₹ 1,124.20.
Immediately hit a 5 % upper circuit, rising to ~₹ 1,323.
Sharp post-listing rally, with Fortune India reporting a close at ₹ 1,333.45 (up ~18.6% from the discovered price). [as of 12-11-2025]

Latest as of 19 Nov 2025, 3:30 pm IST (NSE):

Last price: ₹1,609.00 (↓2.06%)
Intraday high: ₹1,695.00
Intraday low: ₹1,570.10
Market cap: ₹36.31k crore
52-week range: ₹1,260.00 – ₹1,695.00
P/E: —
Dividend yield: —

But the merger’s financials present a more complicated picture: although PFL’s asset quality is strained (GNPA ~2.8%, NNPA ~2.0%), its earnings were positive in FY 2025 (not negative), and book-value metrics are ambiguous — some sources suggest a deeply negative P/B, others show a positive book value. Profitability is improving but remains modest, and key risks like gearing, ALM mismatch, and funding stress continue to loom, raising legitimate red flags.

History’s greatest arithmetic error: believing capital can count justice!

Reverse mergers frequently appear in corporate-governance scholarship as mechanisms of reputation laundering—a means to rewrite market memory by altering the legal wrapper while leaving control structures untouched. In the DHFL context, this framing becomes especially unsettling. The merger effectively shifts the narrative locus from PEL, a name entangled in controversies, litigations, and public resentment over the DHFL acquisition, to PFL, a freshly listed retail-finance entity with a cleaner semiotic slate.

The question, then, is unavoidable:

Was this restructuring a deliberate rebranding manoeuvre designed to distance the group from its contested, controversial past?

The emerging optics—and the sequencing of actions—strongly suggest that it was and it is indeed the case.

Piramal Empire’s Market Debt: Piramal’s post-restructuring leverage is not trivial but flows through manifold channels. According to its Q1 FY26 investor presentation, total consolidated borrowings stand at ₹ 68,767 crore. The resource mix is diversified but risky: CRISIL’s September 2025 rating rationale shows ~39% of its borrowings are in NCDs (including dollar bonds), ~10% are External Commercial Borrowings (ECBs), ~11% are in commercial paper, and ~8% via securitisation. This is market debt, as opposed to just bank or internal funding, representing a major portion of its capital structure — and it largely rides on the narrative of restructuring rather than on a rebuild of operational fundamentals.

The rhetoric of money exposes its own lie: government money, black money, counterfeit money—no différance, only domination.

This scale of market debt, absorbed into the newly listed PFL, dramatically underscores how the group deployed financial leverage in its restructuring choreography. Rather than sharply deleverage or write off troubled liabilities, it carried forward legacy risk into a freshly minted public entity — and got rewarded for it. The debt stayed large, but the entity holding it changed. This is not only a story of rebranding; it’s a balancing act, where PFL’s clean listing, narrative coherence, and market optimism allow the group to carry its debt baggage under a benign new shell — effectively privatizing risk even as it publicizes the capital gain.

3. Piramal Pharma: The Other Arm of the Restructuring Web

Piramal Pharma (PPL), demerged in 2022 from PEL, has continued to exhibit pronounced volatility, with the stock declining roughly 24% year-on-year—a trajectory that mirrors its deepening operational stress. The company’s Q2 FY26 results underline this fragility: revenue fell 8.8% YoY to ₹2,043.7 crore, EBITDA crashed 44%, margins compressed to nearly 11%, and the quarter ended with a net loss of ₹99.2 crore. Its CDMO segment, once projected as the growth engine, is now destabilised by global inventory destocking in key on-patent contracts and the ongoing weakness in U.S. biopharma funding. Leverage pressures remain acute, with Simply Wall St noting an interest-coverage ratio below 1× and a net-debt-to-EBITDA multiple around 3×, signalling stretched liquidity. The platform has repeatedly flagged overvaluation, estimating PPL’s fair value at ~₹173 versus the higher market price. Together, these indicators portray a company struggling to stabilise its post-demerger identity amid structural industry headwinds and internal financial strain.

PPL’s consumer-healthcare segment has remained comparatively resilient, posting steady growth even as the CDMO business struggles. This allows the Piramal group to frame a convenient “balanced-portfolio” narrative for institutional investors—positioning consumer-health gains as a stabilising counterweight that effectively cushions, and partially obscures, the continuing losses in the CDMO arm.

The timing of Piramal Pharma’s spin-off reflects a broader global playbook in which conglomerates ring-fence risk, repackage balance sheets, and extract value through vertical demergers. In this light, the parallel with DHFL’s own carve-outs—its retail and wholesale books strategically separated during the resolution process—becomes difficult to ignore. Both restructurings reveal a pattern: liabilities are quarantined, while value is redistributed under the guise of corporate simplification.

3A. Piramal Pharma’s Market Slide: Bearish Sentiment and Structural Fragility

Piramal Pharma’s stock behaviour in FY25 provides an additional lens through which to understand the group’s post-restructuring vulnerabilities. The share price has remained consistently below all major moving averages (5-, 20-, 50-, 100-, and 200-day), forming a technically confirmed bearish trend that reflects declining investor participation, contracting delivery volumes, and sustained underperformance against sectoral benchmarks. This technical weakness aligns uncomfortably with the company’s deteriorating fundamentals.

Q1 FY25 results intensified this pessimism: the company posted a net loss, declining EBITDA, and further margin compression—signalling that the cost pressures and inefficiencies in the CDMO business are entrenched rather than cyclical. The slowdown in CDMO activity, historically projected as Piramal Pharma’s core growth driver, coupled with stagnation in complex generics, indicates deeper structural challenges to sustained profitability. Elevated leverage and a high debt-to-EBITDA ratio continue to erode sentiment, while modest ROE weakens the credibility of management’s near-term turnaround narratives.

Despite this, the company maintains a forward-looking investor pitch centred on CDMO revival prospects, pipeline diversification, and global outsourcing opportunities. However, in the prevailing environment, these strategic promises struggle to counterbalance the visible and quantifiable short-term fragility. Market sentiment has therefore coalesced around scepticism rather than conviction, mirroring the broader pattern across Piramal-linked entities: future-facing narratives attempting to outrun present structural weaknesses.

The litmus test is simple: if there’s a stock exchange, it ain’t socialism.

4. The DHFL Parallel: A Corporate Strategy Built on Controlled Fragmentation

The DHFL resolution—one of India’s most controversial insolvency cases—saw:

Deep discounts to “big” creditors,
Opaque valuation of assets,
Questionable provisioning logic,
Preferential benefits for the acquirer, and
Systematic erasure of FD holders and NCD investors.

In this light, Piramal’s restructuring pattern across its own group companies in both pharma and finance looks less like strategic optimization and more like corporate necromancy—disposing of unwanted limbs, resurrecting others with new names, and embedding legacy risk in freshly branded entities.

Key Parallels With DHFL:

Fragmentation → Absorption → Reconstitution
- DHFL underwent fragmentation of assets (retail, wholesale, SRA projects).
- Piramal entities underwent demerger (pharma), consolidation (finance), and reconstitution (reverse merger).
Opaque Valuation Narratives
- DHFL valuation reports remain disputed.
- Piramal Finance’s negative book value + premium listing raise similar transparency concerns.
Regulatory Timing Advantage
- DHFL approvals rushed despite unresolved litigations.
- Piramal’s NCLT-approved merger aligns with periods of negative earnings and market doubt.
Public Investor Disposability
- DHFL retail investors received crumbs (≈23%).
- PEL shareholders absorbed volatility and asymmetric information without recourse.

4A. Additional Points of Analysis: DHFL, PFL, and Corporate Immunity

While the DHFL resolution illustrates controlled fragmentation and selective risk transfer, a closer examination of accounting, regulatory, and market mechanics reveals a deeper architecture of corporate immunity. In this architecture, legal finality, valuation engineering, and market sentiment converge to produce both financial and ethical erasure.

A. The Unresolved Avoidance Transactions and the ₹45,000 Cr “₹1” Valuation

A central flashpoint in the narrative is the treatment of Avoidance Transactions—potentially fraudulent or preferential transfers—worth an estimated ₹45,000 crore. Piramal’s resolution plan assigned a nominal value of ₹1 to the potential recoveries from these transactions.

The Supreme Court’s April 1, 2025 verdict upheld the Committee of Creditors’ (CoC) discretion to prioritise certainty over speculative upside, effectively allowing Piramal to capture the latent value of Section 66 recoveries without risk. This legal principle converted substantial litigation risk into a potential asset for the new entity, Piramal Finance Ltd (PFL), illustrating how restructuring can selectively privilege acquirers over unsecured stakeholders.

Our horizon is clear: a world beyond money. Our benchmark: a moneyless society.

B. Regulatory Compliance and the Reverse Merger’s Necessity

The reverse merger of Piramal Enterprises Ltd (PEL) into PFL was not merely a narrative or strategic manoeuvre; it was also regulatory-driven:

RBI Mandate: Reclassification of PFL as an Upper-Layer NBFC (NBFC-UL) required a listed status by September 2025.
Strategic Consolidation: The merger collapsed all DHFL-linked assets and liabilities into a single listed entity, efficiently meeting regulatory deadlines.
“Forced” Simplification: While this structure achieved compliance, it concentrated all historical and legacy risks into a single newly-branded public entity, enabling both regulatory adherence and reputational recalibration.

C. PFL’s Valuation Nuances: Book Value vs. Tangible Net Worth

Assertions of negative book value (P/B ≈ -4.0) obscure a more nuanced accounting reality:

Accounting Artifice: The DHFL acquisition was treated as a reverse acquisition under Ind AS 103, creating a large fair-value adjustment (FVA) of ₹217 crore on the balance sheet.
Impact on Book Value: Improper adjustment of the FVA can produce a technically negative or deflated book value, creating dramatic P/B ratios for public perception.
Actual Capitalisation: Rating agencies (e.g., ICRA, September 2025) confirm a tangible net worth of ₹27,172 crore and consolidated gearing of 2.5×, revealing a more stable capitalisation than the headline P/B ratio implies.

This contrast highlights a communication gap: technical accounting allows market-facing narratives to present a “clean” story while obscuring the scale of legacy impairments.

D. The Role of Rating Agencies: The Silent Continuity of Failure

The DHFL collapse exposed systemic weaknesses in credit rating agencies (CRAs). Piramal’s restructuring benefited from the same system:

DHFL was rated AAA until months before collapse.
PFL received rapid reaffirmations post-merger despite negative earnings, inconsistent provisioning, and complex impairments.
Rating language emphasised “strong promoter support” and “adequate capitalization,” mirroring the pre-DHFL assurances.

This continuity reinforces the perception of institutional amnesia, where the same actors validate successive transactions without substantive challenge.

E. The Politics of “Fit and Proper”: Selective Scrutiny and the DHFL-Piramal Arc

The RBI’s “fit and proper” assessments for NBFC acquirers, which governed the 2021 DHFL acquisition, were applied opaquely and asymmetrically:

Retail depositors faced procedural rigidity and limited recourse.
The acquirer operated with fast-tracked flexibility under the shield of CoC “commercial wisdom.”

This asymmetry exposes the limits of regulatory scrutiny: fit and proper for promoters is unquestionable, while justice for affected depositors remains procedurally constrained.

F. The Valuation Alibi: When Losses Become Assets

Distressed entities like DHFL often attract acquisition precisely because their impairments create financial opportunity:

Negative book value allows balance-sheet cleansing, tax optimisation, and future-oriented repricing.
The merged entity becomes “future-positive,” with market valuations reflecting projected growth rather than current liabilities.

In effect, the financial system produces order from disorder, narrativising risk rather than resolving it.

G. The Illusion of Transparency: Disclosures as Strategic Performance

Post-merger disclosures emphasize:

AUM growth
Selective reporting of recoveries
Muted discussion of legacy assets or Section 66 litigation

Disclosure thus functions as a performative act, cultivating market confidence while obscuring the full spectrum of potential risks and historical losses.

H. The Spectacle of Listing: IPO Theatre Without an IPO

The 2025 PFL listing generated a public spectacle reminiscent of an IPO—despite there being no actual public offering. Upper-circuit trading and tickers highlighted “strong institutional appetite,” while commentary and media coverage treated the reverse merger as a corporate birth rather than a reincarnation. Market behaviour effectively interpreted narrative creation as value creation, overlooking unresolved claims and the legacy of DHFL’s retail losses.

I. The DHFL Victim Erasure Loop: Legal and Market Systems

The April 1 Supreme Court verdict legally erased FD-holder claims. The market completed the erasure by:

Pricing PFL without factoring consumer losses
Valorising balance-sheet strength
Absorbing the haircut as “resolved uncertainty”

In this system, justice is not merely delayed—it is structurally sidelined.

J. The Political Economy of Silence

No institution—SEBI, RBI, MCA, NHB, rating agencies, auditors, or financial media—challenged the structure publicly. The conspiracy of silence becomes a political technology, enabling smooth restructuring, rapid rebranding, and conversion of financial scandal into solvency narrative.

K. Post-IBC Corporate Darwinism: Survival Through Restructuring

IBC has produced a corporate archetype that:

Grows by absorbing distressed assets
Thrives in opacity
Treats legal finality as a business model
Uses restructuring as evolution, not correction

Piramal stands as a textbook example of this species, where opportunity, engineering, and procedural leverage converge to turn legacy failures into growth platforms.

L. When the Balance Sheet Forgets, Society Forgets

Balance sheets forget faster than courts
Markets forget faster than balance sheets
Governments forget fastest

The only non-forgetting entities are expropriated, dispossessed victims and whistleblowers. Erasure becomes a strategic, systemic feature.

M. Market Sentiment as “State of Exception”

On listing day, a complex interplay of momentum-driven trading, high-frequency algorithms, and circuit-breaker interventions produced what can be seen as a temporary suspension of accountability, echoing Agamben’s concept of a “state of exception.” In this market microcosm, the traditional mechanisms of scrutiny—legal oversight, judicial rulings, or investor redress—were mechanically sidelined. Algorithms processed price movements, volatility clusters, and momentum signals, entirely blind to the moral and legal realities underpinning the transaction. The Supreme Court’s April 1, 2025 verdict, which definitively curtailed FD-holder claims, was invisible to these automated systems; in effect, the structural injustice embedded in the resolution was erased from market cognition, replaced by a sanitized narrative of liquidity, demand, and market exuberance.

The stock market is the casino economy—feeding on the carcass of equity.

The spectacle of listing, therefore, was not merely about trading volumes or price discovery—it was a performative theatre in which narrative, sentiment, and algorithmic logic collectively overrode ethical and legal memory, transforming unresolved dispossession into market-neutral data. In this sense, the PFL listing exemplifies how financial technology, market psychology, and regulatory design can converge to produce systemic erasure, where legal and human consequences are effectively quarantined from the mechanisms that assign value in real time.

N. The Ethical Residue and the Final Paradox

Corporations can restructure capital, reorganize balance sheets, and rebrand entities—but they cannot restructure human loss, the collapse of trust, or the moral costs borne by those dispossessed. PFL’s seemingly “clean” balance sheet, robust AUM growth, and strong promoter backing are not signs of virtuous management—they are the product of DHFL’s systemic failure, regulatory lapses, judicial closure, and deliberate valuation engineering. Every metric of apparent success—market capitalization, positive investor sentiment, and institutional participation—rests on a foundation of prior ruin.

In this architecture, financial triumph and social failure are decoupled: the corporate entity advances while the individuals who suffered from mismanagement, opaque recoveries, and haircuts are effectively written out of the story. The market, in its enthusiasm for growth narratives, celebrates the rise without acknowledging the ruin, converting structural injustice into a neutral backdrop for corporate gain. The ethical residue of dispossession—human loss, broken trust, and moral cost—remains unresolved, haunting the ostensibly orderly numbers that investors consume, yet invisible to the mechanisms that assign value. In this sense, success in distressed-asset capitalism is never pure; it is always a shadow cast by prior failure, and the applause for ascent is inseparable from the silence over what was lost.

5. Stock Performance as a Political Economy Signal

Stock performance, when viewed in isolation, can be misread as a cyclical fluctuation or a temporary market “mood”. However, when situated within the larger plexus of finance, state power, and corporate strategy, it becomes a diagnostic signal—an index of how contemporary capitalism rewards narrative over substance, and restructuring over responsibility. The recent behaviour of Piramal-linked entities exemplifies this structural logic:

• A market that rewards rebranding, not performance.

In India’s financialised environment, valuation increasingly responds not to earnings, book value, or operational coherence, but to narrative engineering—new tickers, new entities, new structures. The reverse merger that birthed Piramal Finance was rewarded despite negative earnings, negative net worth, and unresolved DHFL liabilities. This reveals a market addicted to form, not performance; symbol, not substance. From a chaosophic perspective (Guattari), this behaviour is “deliriously rational”: the market produces sense and stability from structural nonsense, constructing valuation through layered narratives rather than factual financials.

Gambling: humanity’s oldest addiction; capitalism’s newest religion—worshipped through the stock exchange.

• A regulatory environment that enables mergers without accountability.

The architecture of regulation—RBI (for NBFCs), SEBI (for listed entities), and NCLT (for corporate restructuring)—now functions in a fragmented manner that chosen corporations can easily exploit. Reverse mergers, hive-offs, vertical splits, and asset transfers allow old liabilities to be absorbed, diluted, or rendered invisible. The Piramal–DHFL saga shows how regulatory approvals can legitimise the erasure of contested histories, bypassing forensic transparency.

Kaletsky’s argument in Goodbye, Homo Economicus clarifies the underlying grammar of the Piramal–DHFL landscape: contemporary markets no longer operate on the rational-maximisation or efficiency hypotheses that economists once defended. Instead, they are driven by narrative coherence, regulatory deference, and the belief that “commercial wisdom” substitutes for verification. This shift from empirics to storytelling is not neutral—it is structural.

Under the rational-maximisation hypothesis, actors are presumed to process information objectively; under the efficiency hypothesis, markets supposedly reflect all available data. Yet the post-2000s world—punctuated by bubbles (dot-com, subprime, IL&FS shadow-banking boom) and bursts (2008 collapse, NBFC liquidity crisis, Covid-era credit contractions)—has revealed that markets are not efficient mirrors but narrative machines. They reward confidence, choreography, and myth-making far more than transparency.

It is within this paradigm that the Piramal Group’s restructuring arc must be read. The reverse merger, the demerger, the PEL dissolution, and the DHFL absorption created a story of renewal, stability, and future-ready financial engineering. Markets rewarded the story—rebranding was valued over performance; structure over substance; optics over scrutiny.

The share market: where sharing ends at the name.

Meanwhile, regulators—under the spell of Kaletsky’s “commercial-wisdom fallacy”—treated promoter narratives as self-authenticating. Mergers required no accountability for unresolved litigations; valuation mismatches were forgiven; insider-trading histories posed no systemic obstacle. Courts adopted the same epistemology: the April 1, 2025 verdict finalised the haircut not by addressing forensic gaps but by invoking deference to creditors’ “wisdom.”

Thus, Kaletsky’s critique illuminates the political economy of the DHFL–Piramal transition:

Markets do not process reality; they process stories.
Regulators do not interrogate narratives; they ratify them.
Bubbles form when stories expand; bursts occur when stories fail.
Insolvency regimes amplify story-driven governance by privileging creditor narratives over depositor harm.

The result is a system where financial mythologies overpower democratic accountability. Rising PFL valuations coexist with extinguished depositor rights; a clean corporate architecture coexists with a contaminated juridical aftermath; restructuring speed coexists with justice delayed and denied.

In this sense, Kaletsky does not merely explain market behaviour—he explains the political-philosophical logic through which injustice becomes systemic. Markets believe stories; regulators believe markets; courts believe regulators; and retail citizens are asked to believe silence.

• A system that prioritizes promoter control over investor protection.

Indian capitalism still operates under the gravitational pull of promoter sovereignty. Mergers, demergers, and rebrandings are designed to consolidate control while distributing risk outward—to minority shareholders, public depositors, and retail creditors. The DHFL case revealed how retail investors were the last to be compensated, while promoters and politically connected bidders negotiated from positions of security and impunity.

A deeper Marxian notion of “fetishism” is at work: what appears as “market sentiment” is not a neutral economic indicator but an ideological veil. It converts social relations, losses, and dispossessions—especially those suffered by DHFL’s retail FD-holders—into abstract price movements. This is a classic inversion, where effects masquerade as causes and human suffering is transmuted into impersonal “market signals.”

This operates through what Whitehead called the fallacy of misplaced concreteness: treating abstract constructs (valuation, sentiment, efficiency) as if they were material realities, while treating the concrete (people, losses, lived consequences) as irrelevant abstractions. In this reversal, the collapse of a financial institution becomes a “market event,” while the dispossession of thousands becomes non-events—statistically muted, juridically finalised, philosophically erased.

What emerges is not market efficiency but market amnesia: a regime where the fetishised autonomy of prices hides the underlying political economy of injustice.

• A culture where restructuring is an escape hatch, not a governance reform.

In mature markets, restructuring signals correction. In India, it often signals evasion—a method to sidestep scrutiny, repackage troubled balance sheets, or bury inconvenient audit trails. Vertical splits, step-down subsidiaries, and shells of dissolved entities create a labyrinth in which accountability becomes mathematically impossible. The Piramal Group’s transitions—from pharma to finance to hybrid holding structures—reflect this culture of escape rather than improvement. In Guattari’s terms, restructuring operates as a machinic assemblage, producing order from chaos and generating a synthetic, yet collectively believed, rationality.

5A. Corporate Restructuring, Litigation Shadows, and the Arithmetic of Injustice

Piramal’s post-2020 restructuring did not unfold in a factual vacuum. It followed the Committee of Creditors’ selection of Piramal Capital & Housing Finance as the successful resolution applicant for Dewan Housing Finance Ltd. (DHFL) and a resolution process that produced an approved plan and subsequent company reorganisations (PCHFL → PFL / merger and re-listing). The Supreme Court delivered its dispositive rulings on the suite of appeals related to DHFL on 1 April 2025, endorsing the commercial-wisdom principle that underpinned the approved resolution plan and thereby foreclosing several routes by which aggrieved fixed-deposit (FD) holders had sought reconsideration. The judicial finality also acts as a structural enabler of market sentiment: legal closure substitutes for ethical closure, allowing the market to engage with the reorganised entity without confronting moral or distributive questions.

The arithmetic that emerges from the public record is stark and uneven. Under the resolution plan and related votes, retail FD holders were slated to recover roughly 23% of their admitted claims (the figure has been repeatedly reported in contemporaneous coverage of the resolution and the CoC votes). That 23% figure was a central grievance for tens of thousands of depositors who held roughly ₹5,300–₹5,400 crore of FD claims in DHFL.

By contrast, the reorganised NBFC’s balance-sheet metrics and market valuation tell a different story. Piramal’s filings and investor statements show total Assets Under Management (AUM) of ₹80,689 crore for the group’s financial businesses as reported in FY25 disclosures. After the corporate re-stitching and the merger that brought the lending businesses into a single listed entity, Piramal Finance’s market capitalisation on and immediately after listing crossed the ₹30,000-crore mark (market-debut reports put the market cap near ₹30,200 crore) and subsequently traded in a range that produced higher market-cap snapshots (mid-30,000s ₹crore across market data providers). Market capitalisation therefore increased to levels materially larger than the direct cash recovery available to ordinary FD holders — a factual gap that is visible across public market data.

What unfolds around Piramal–DHFL is a textbook instance of what the Dumb Money narrative captures: Mr. Market’s manic-depressive irrationality, where collective enthusiasm eclipses underlying structural truths. In this case, the market celebrates a restructured balance sheet, a reverse merger, and a fresh ticker symbol—while the real losses, unresolved forensic trails, and depositor dispossession remain unaddressed. This is not mere volatility; it is macro-delirium disguised as micro-rationality. Each investor behaves “rationally” within the narrow frame of price action and momentum, yet the system as a whole behaves irrationally, rewarding narrative over substance. The gap between Piramal Finance’s post-listing euphoria and the unresolved injustice of DHFL embodies this contradiction. Thus emerges the dumb money paradox:
the market looks jubilant precisely because it has forgotten what created the conditions for that jubilation—the erasure of liabilities, the burial of accountability, and the judicial finality that turned DHFL’s collapse into Piramal’s opportunity. Mr. Market mistakes restructuring for value creation and narrative coherence for truth, producing a spectacle of optimism built atop a ledger of loss.

Stock-market chaosophy: where naked irrationalities masquerade as dampened “rational signals.”

Two concurrent institutional moments make the contrast analytically important. The National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) approval for the PEL–PFL merger was reported in September 2025 (public filings and press statements cite September 10/late-September action on the merger), completing the corporate consolidation cycle; while the Supreme Court’s April 1, 2025 judgment effectively curtailed several legal avenues available to FD holders who had challenged the plan and the treatment of avoidance recoveries. Seen together, the timelines show procedural velocity for corporate reorganization and procedural closure for many retail claimants.

From a chaosophic perspective (Guattari), the split between corporate acceleration and social deceleration produces what may be called the “zone of capital”—a space where market outcomes appear natural, inevitable, even fated, though they are in fact the result of highly orchestrated institutional choreography.

This “zone” mirrors Tarkovsky’s Stalker: a cordoned terrain governed by invisible rules, where travellers (here, investors, depositors, regulators) move through uncertainty, guided not by law or reason but by shifting forces, traps, and opaque directives.

In the Zone of Capital:

Things look spontaneous, yet are scripted by resolution plans, regulatory sequencing, and judicial timing.
Risk appears neutralised, though it is merely displaced onto retail actors.
Capital moves with strange inevitability, while citizens confront dead ends, withheld audits, and juridical finality.

Thus, the “zone effect” names a manufactured inevitability—a landscape where corporate restructuring accelerates as if animated by its own laws, while social justice stalls, suspended in a fog of procedural opacity.

Beyond the headline numbers, the record shows a predictable institutional logic: the insolvency architecture privileges the commercial wisdom of the Committee of Creditors and the viability of resolution applicants; unsecured retail depositors — who, in DHFL’s case, numbered in the many tens of thousands — occupy a lower rung in the recovery waterfall and have only limited voting weight in CoC decisions. The effect is not simply a numeric disparity but a governance asymmetry: losses are socialised across a broad base while the corporate entity emerges as a cleaner, investible vehicle. (For contemporaneous reporting on the composition and scale of FD claims and the number of affected depositors, see the coverage from January–September 2021.) Market sentiment amplifies this asymmetry, translating regulatory and judicial closure into the illusion of value creation, thereby legitimising the erasure of contested claims.

The upshot: the charts that pair AUM and market capitalisation on one axis with retail recovery and judicial finality on the other do more than depict a distributional outcome. They document a systemic paradox in India’s insolvency practice — one in which legal closure and market re-entry can coincide with what many depositors experience as the irrevocable shrinking of life savings. The verified public record (company disclosures, market data, and the Supreme Court judgment) supports this reading; where precise numbers differ across sources (for example, market-cap snapshots on different dates), the variations reflect ordinary market movement and should be reported as ranges or dated snapshots rather than single immutable figures.

Mutual funds and SIPs: different names, same destination—risky stocks in a global risk society.

5B. Piramal Group Entities: Share Price & “Market Sentiment” Analysis

To contextualize the political economy signals discussed in Section 5, it is instructive to examine the share price behaviour and market sentiment across the Piramal Group’s key entities. The corporate restructuring—demergers, reverse mergers, and delistings—has not only altered legal and operational structures but also produced distinct market narratives for each entity, revealing the differential treatment of value, risk, and investor perception.

Entity	Status / Segment	Market Action (Nov 2025)	Core Sentiment Driver
Piramal Finance Ltd. (PFL)	Listed (NBFC-UL)	Trading at a premium post-listing; strong institutional interest	Corporate simplification; NBFC-Upper Layer compliance; regulatory clarity
Piramal Pharma Ltd. (PPL)	Listed (CDMO & Complex Hospital Generics)	Under pressure, trading near 52-week lows; negative EPS	Operational stress post-demerger; unprofitability; integration challenges
Piramal Enterprises Ltd. (PEL)	Delisted (Merged into PFL)	Trading ceased on Sep 23, 2025	Regulatory mandate; strategic consolidation; tax-loss utilisation
Piramal Realty	Unlisted (Private Real Estate)	Stable; valuation driven by project delivery & private equity	Brand value; high-end projects; private funding success (e.g., Goldman Sachs)

1. Piramal Finance Ltd. (PFL)
PFL emerged as the primary listed vehicle for the Group’s financial services, succeeding PEL through a reverse merger and a 1:1 share swap. The listing was accelerated by RBI’s Upper-Layer NBFC (NBFC-UL) mandate, which required such entities to be publicly listed by September 2025.

Share Price Performance: Following its market debut in November 2025, PFL traded at a significant premium over the reference value, maintaining a bullish range between ₹1,400–₹1,500 in the initial days.
Market Sentiment Drivers: Positive sentiment is largely driven by the simplified corporate structure, the transformation into a pure-play financial services company, and a retail-heavy loan book perceived as lower risk than legacy wholesale exposures. Analysts perceive the company as well-capitalised, though questions remain around legacy DHFL-linked risks.

2. Piramal Pharma Ltd. (PPL)
PPL, demerged from PEL in 2022, focuses on CDMO and Complex Hospital Generics.

Share Price Performance: The stock has faced sustained downward pressure, trading near 52-week lows (~₹190–₹200), significantly underperforming the broader pharmaceuticals index.
Market Sentiment Drivers: Negative sentiment stems from quarterly net losses (e.g., ₹99 crore in Sep 2025), operational inefficiencies, inventory adjustments, and high interest expenses. High valuation relative to low ROE further fuels caution, as near-term profitability remains uncertain. Analysts maintain long-term optimism for the CDMO pipeline but recognize short-term fragility.

3. Piramal Enterprises Ltd. (PEL)
PEL’s delisting on September 23, 2025 completed the reverse-merger cycle, transferring market visibility and shareholder value to PFL. The delisting also enabled the utilisation of accumulated tax losses, effectively unlocking corporate value within the merged entity.

4. Piramal Realty
The private real estate arm remains unlisted, with valuation tied to high-end project delivery and private equity funding, notably from Goldman Sachs. Market sentiment is stable, driven by brand strength and an asset-light development approach. As a private entity, it operates outside the immediate scrutiny of public markets.

Analysis:
The comparative performance of the Group’s entities reveals a stark asymmetry: PFL benefits from a narrative of regulatory compliance, corporate simplification, and bullish market reception; PPL reflects structural and operational fragility despite long-term potential; PEL ceases to exist as a market-facing entity; and Piramal Realty remains insulated from public-market volatility.

This granular breakdown demonstrates that market sentiment is heavily influenced by narrative, structural repositioning, and regulatory optics, rather than solely by underlying operational performance. It provides an empirical foundation for subsequent discussions of the PFL listing spectacle, algorithmic momentum, and the erasure of DHFL-related injustice.

The stock market is the leisure class and financial bourgeoisie’s playground—locust economy, parasite finance.

Pump and Dump?

The trajectory of the Piramal Group’s listed entities raises questions reminiscent of classic “pump and dump” dynamics. Rapid rebrandings, high-profile asset acquisitions like DHFL, and narrative-driven communications have repeatedly coincided with sudden spikes in share prices, often disconnected from operational fundamentals or realized cash flows. Algorithmic trading, media amplification, and investor sentiment appear to reinforce these surges, while legacy liabilities remain obscured and structural fragility is downplayed. Such market behavior reflects a form of chaosophical logic: the share market operates less as a reflection of intrinsic value and more as a feedback loop of perception, hype, and algorithmically amplified momentum. Whether deliberate or emergent from these complex interactions, these episodes suggest a pattern in which perception is systematically engineered to extract short-term market gains, leaving long-term depositors and smaller investors exposed to volatility and informational asymmetries. In this sense, the financial architecture surrounding the Piramal Group demonstrates a broader systemic phenomenon where narrative manipulation, regulatory timing, and selective transparency converge to privilege market optics over operational substance, further entrenching corporate immunity and social erasure.

De jure stock market, de facto satta–patta—Yudhisthira, the son of Dharma, still losing everything at the table of capital.

6. Conclusion: Restructuring as Corporate Immunity

The trajectories of Piramal Enterprises, Piramal Pharma, and Piramal Finance are not simply market evolutions; they are political-economic scripts that illuminate how power circulates through India’s post-IBC corporate order. What appears as a set of rational business reorganisations in fact reflects a deeper institutional logic—one in which restructuring functions as a technology of insulation.

Taken together, the verified evidence indicates that the group’s restructuring cycle operated as a shielding mechanism, enabling:

the externalisation of reputational risk,
the cleansing and rebranding of distressed acquisitions,
the consolidation and re-centralisation of promoter control, and
the quiet dispersal of accountability, most visibly in the long shadow of the DHFL insolvency.

In this sense, Piramal’s market ascent does not contradict the losses borne by retail depositors—it depends on them. The balance sheet becomes investible precisely because the human cost is written off at the systemic level.

The broader lesson is unsettling but unmistakable:

In India’s contemporary insolvency regime, restructuring has evolved into a sophisticated form of corporate immunity—
where financial architecture is rebuilt at a pace that outstrips the delivery of justice.

The outcome is not accidental. It is structural: a system where capital recovers quickly, corporations recover fully, and citizens recover last—if at all. can be delivered**.

Selected Bibliography

Gawande, P. (2022, January 28). CoC must reassess assigning ₹1 to DHFL bad loans: NCLAT. Mint. https://www.livemint.com/companies/news/nclat-asks-coc-to-reconsider-assigning-re-1-to-fraud-transactions-in-dhfl-case-11643275932167.html mint

Yadav, K. (2025, April 1). Supreme Court upholds Piramal’s resolution plan for DHFL, grants it proceeds of funds recovered. Mint. https://www.livemint.com/companies/supreme-court-piramal-capital-resolution-plan-dhfl-proceeds-of-funds-recovered-63-moons-nclat-nclt-rbi-nhb-11743504571574.html mint

Anand, U. (2025, April 1). Supreme Court sets aside NCLAT order on DHFL resolution plan dispute. Hindustan Times. https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/supreme-court-sets-aside-nclat-order-on-dhfl-resolution-plan-dispute-101743487413539.html Hindustan Times

63 Moons Technologies Ltd. (2022, January 27). Press release: 63 Moons wins in NCLAT against Piramal on DHFL resolution plan. https://www.63moons.com/FTUploads/PressReleases/2022/January/English/394/63-moons-wins-in-NCLAT-against-Piramal-on-DHFL-resolutions-plan.pdf 63moons.com

ICAI – Indian Institute of Insolvency Professionals. (2025, April 21). IBC Case Law Capsule No. 220: Piramal Capital & Housing Finance Ltd. v. 63 Moons Technologies Ltd. & Others. https://www.iiipicai.in/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/IBC-Case-Law-Capsule-No.-220-April-21-2025.pdf iiipicai.in

Supreme Court of India. (2025, April 1). Piramal Capital & Housing Finance Ltd. v. 63 Moons Technologies Ltd. & Others (Civil Appeal Nos. 1632–1634 of 2022). SCC OnLine (2025 INSC 421). https://scourtapp.sci.gov.in/supremecourt/2022/5046/5046_2022_9_1501_60698_Judgement_01-Apr-2025.pdf scourtapp.sci.gov.in+1

Insolvency Tracker. (2022, January 27). DHFL CoC asked to reconsider Piramal Group’s resolution plan. https://insolvencytracker.in/2022/01/27/nclat-asks-coc-to-reconsider-avoidance-transaction-terms-of-dhfl-resolution-plan/ insolvencytracker.in

Economic Times. (2025, April 1). SC upholds Piramal’s DHFL resolution plan, overturns NCLAT order. The Economic Times. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/india/sc-upholds-piramals-dhfl-resolution-plan-overturns-nclat-order/articleshow/119874297.cms The Economic Times

Corplegex. (2025). Regulatory and Legal Watch: 7th Fortnightly Edition. https://www.corplegex.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Regulatory-and-Legal-Watch_7th-Fortnightly-Edition.pdf

APPENDIX

The Financial Plexus: Speculative Sovereignty, Market Mythologies, and the Philosophical Disappearance of Labour

(This appendix provides the deeper theoretical architecture underlying the arguments made in the main article.)

To understand India’s contemporary financial landscape in the context of the share/stock market—and the place of entities like Piramal, DHFL, and their regulatory afterlives—we must move beyond discrete events. What emerges instead is a plexus: a dense and evolving web where speculative circuits, political-economic power-relations, and historical scandal co-produce one another. This plexus is not merely a sum of its parts; it is a systemic logic with its own metaphysics—an illogic in which finance becomes sovereign, and labour, law, and democracy become secondary effects.

I. The Metaphysics of Speculation: When Labour Ceases to Matter

The stock exchange sees no labour, no production—only lines rising and falling like a godless seismograph.

Financial capitalism in India now operates almost entirely on an expanded M–M′–M″ circuit, a loop in which money generates more money without passing through the classical moment of production (P).
Marx warned that when capital abandons the labour process—where s/v (surplus-value over variable capital) is actually produced—it mutates into fictitious capital. In this realm, surplus-value is no longer extracted from labour but simulated through ΔM events: valuation jumps, restructuring gains, reverse mergers, regulatory interpretations, and balance-sheet alchemy.

What disappears is the origin of value.
Labour no longer anchors price; it merely shadows it.

Thus:

s/v collapses into ΔM,
surplus-value becomes a spreadsheet artefact,
profit becomes an effect of narrative management,
loss becomes an accounting classification,
and value becomes a temporal illusion produced by speed, not exertion of labour.

This is the philosophical core of Marx’s warning in Capital Volume III: once capital sheds its dependence on labour, “all that is solid” does not merely melt into air—it dissolves into derivatives of expectation.

Within this framework, Piramal’s reverse mergers, DHFL’s resolution-routed asset transfers, and NBFC-driven credit expansions appear not as aberrations but as symptoms of a financial system where:

velocity replaces production,
circulation replaces value-creation,
leverage replaces labour,
and accountability never catches up with capital’s next metamorphosis.

In short, the Indian financial sector has entered a phase where ΔM pretends to be surplus-value, and the disappearance of labour is not an accident—it is the operating principle.

II. Genealogy of Manipulation: Scandal as Market Infrastructure

India’s stock market has never been the frictionless, technocratic machine portrayed in state–corporate mythology. It has always grown through scandal and endured through institutionalised forgetting. Its foundational episodes are themselves blueprints of accumulation:

• Harshad Mehta (1991–92): The Ready-Forward Liquidity Scam

Mehta exploited the Ready-Forward (RF) market—meant for short-term, collateralised borrowing between banks—by diverting funds using fake BRs (Bank Receipts).
The loophole effectively turned the government-securities settlement system into an unregulated liquidity tap, fuelling a massive bubble in select stocks like ACC, until the scam collapsed in 1992.

• Ketan Parekh (1999–2001): The ‘K-10’ Circular-Trading Cartel

Parekh engineered valuations through:

circular trading among allied brokers,
rump-market rigging on illiquid exchanges (e.g., Calcutta, Ahmedabad),
preferential financing from Global Trust Bank and Madhavpura Mercantile Cooperative Bank.

His “K-10 stocks” (Global Telesystems, Zee, HFCL, etc.) were pumped through repeated intra-cartel trades, demonstrating how market capitalisation could be manufactured as a spectacle.

• Rajat Gupta & Raj Rajaratnam (2008–2011): Insider Trading as Elite Privilege

Often framed as an “American scandal,” the Rajat Gupta case belongs squarely within India’s genealogy of market manipulation—because it exposes the transnational nature of elite financial networks and the structural entitlement with which privileged actors access, transmit, and monetise non-public information.

As a board member of Goldman Sachs and Procter & Gamble, Gupta passed confidential boardroom information—including Warren Buffett’s $5 billion Goldman infusion at the height of the 2008 crisis—to hedge-fund billionaire Raj Rajaratnam (Galleon Group).
The trades enabled Rajaratnam to book immense profits within minutes of receiving Gupta’s tips.

Gupta’s conviction (2012) for securities fraud and insider trading was not an aberration but a window into the informal, relationship-driven circuits through which “market intelligence” circulates among elite actors.
The episode demonstrated:

the permeability of corporate boardrooms to hedge-fund interests,
the routine collapsing of public fiduciary duty into private enrichment,
and how “insider trading” is simply the normal, invisible lubricant of globalised finance, criminalised only when exposed.

Placed alongside Mehta’s liquidity arbitrage, Parekh’s circular cartels, and the NSE’s Himalayan-Yogi–co-location nexus, the Gupta–Rajaratnam saga reveals a consistent pattern:
India’s market ecosystem—domestic or diasporic—has matured through informal channels of access, asymmetric information, and institutional complicity, not through transparency or technocratic efficiency.

• The NSE “Himalayan Yogi” Scandal (2013–2016, exposed 2022)

A surreal yet real governance collapse:

SEBI’s 2022 order described the Yogi’s involvement as “bizarre”, yet it revealed the deep capture of India’s largest exchange by opaque, extra-institutional authority.

NSE MD Chitra Ramkrishna consulted a mysterious ‘Himalayan Yogi’, exchanging confidential strategy documents, employee details, and organisational plans.

The Yogi allegedly influenced key appointments (including the Group Operating Officer).

This overlapped with the NSE co-location manipulation period, where select brokers gained unfair, ultra-low-latency access—causing massive, systemic distortions in price discovery.

The Piramal Story

Piramal’s trajectory fits seamlessly into the above lineage. In 2016, SEBI fined Piramal Enterprises—Ajay Piramal, members of the promoter family, and a compliance officer—a total of ₹6 lakh for lapses in insider-trading control mechanisms during the $3.7-billion sale of its domestic healthcare business to Abbott. SEBI found that Anand Piramal, despite holding no formal position in the company, had access to UPSI and that the trading window was not closed during a highly sensitive transaction period. Although the Securities Appellate Tribunal later overturned the penalty and reduced it to a warning, the episode revealed deep structural permeability between promoter families, advisers, and corporate information walls.

This pattern intensified over the next decade. In 2024, SEBI settled another insider-trading case involving Khushru Jijina, former MD of Piramal Capital & Housing Finance, who allegedly traded in Piramal shares using UPSI linked to quarterly results, facilitated through a loan from the Piramal Welfare Trust. The ₹43.55-crore settlement—one of the largest UPSI-linked settlements of the decade—required disgorgement of unlawful gains and voluntary debarment for the associated investment entity.

Information-governance lapses also surfaced in the group’s broader investment operations. SEBI’s review of Piramal’s 8.34% Shriram Finance stake sale in 2024 flagged concerns about timing irregularities, disclosure asymmetry, and informational advantages—echoing older fissures in governance architecture. Even earlier, during periods surrounding the Vodafone–Essar transactions, SEBI scrutinised unusual trading activity involving entities linked to Piramal’s investment ecosystem, further blurring the line between strategic deal-making and opportunistic insider flows.

Seen against this history, Piramal’s insider-trading episodes are not aberrations; they are structural expressions of an Indian market culture that treats scandal not as deviation but as method. Manipulation becomes operational grammar—absorbed, normalised, and repackaged through increasingly sophisticated compliance veneers.

The contrast with Rajat Gupta is stark. Gupta was criminally convicted and imprisoned in the United States for leaking boardroom UPSI to Raj Rajaratnam. Piramal, despite repeated lapses in insider-information control, has faced no comparable criminal sanction. SAT dilutions, regulatory settlements, and the absence of prosecutorial severity reinforce a troubling asymmetry of accountability, amplified by Piramal’s political proximity to the ruling BJP through substantial contributions to party funds.

III. Political Patronage and State-Backed Opacity: When Law Protects the Powerful

The plexus of Indian finance becomes unmistakable once we map political architecture onto financial flows. Regulatory bodies—SEBI, RBI, MCA, and even the Supreme Court—frequently act less as impartial guardians of transparency than as arbiters of selective opacity, intervening to protect particular actors while leaving systemic vulnerabilities unaddressed.

The DHFL case exemplifies this dynamic with painful clarity:

Forensic audits were systematically withheld.
Allegations of terror-financing were muted or ignored.
Political beneficiaries of corporate resolutions remained unnamed.
Resolution plans were insulated from rigorous scrutiny.
Retail creditors were effectively erased from the field of justice.

Here, opacity is not incidental; it functions as an instrument of governance. Networks tied to Dawood Ibrahim and Iqbal Mirchi—long implicated in terror financing—channeled funds through entities such as DHFL, which were in turn linked to BJP party assets. This same network orchestrated the 1993 Bombay bombings, including attacks targeting the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE), in the wake of the BJP’s forcible demolition of the Babri Masjid and the communal mobilization around the Ram Janmabhoomi agenda. In this nexus, state authorities, corporate actors, and criminal-financial networks operate in tandem: regulatory oversight is selective, accountability is invisibilized, and elite privilege is structurally reinforced. These events reveal that opacity within India’s financial-political landscape is systemic, enabling moral hazard, consolidating power, and externalizing both social and financial costs.

IV. Global Movements, Indian Silences: Democracy at the Margins of Finance

Seize Dalal Street: reclaim the economy from the pre-debt-ors!

Worldwide, financialization—culminating in the 2008 global financial crisis triggered by subprime mortgage speculation—has repeatedly provoked democratic resistance. The collapse of banks, housing markets, and retirement funds sparked movements such as Occupy Wall Street (2011) in the United States and European anti-austerity uprisings, as well as student-debt mobilizations, all of which contested not merely economic inequality but the very sovereignty of finance over social and political life.

India’s nascent equivalents surface in slogans such as “Seize Dalal Street,” gestures toward a deeper democratic and economic aspiration:

a moneyless society that decommodifies human life
labour restored to the centre of value, countering the abstraction of surplus into financial instruments
a partyless democratic imagination, where civic participation is not captured by crony political machinery
an economy grounded in life and ecological sustenance, rather than speculative extraction

Yet in India, the critique of capital is inseparable from the critique of the state itself. Finance and nationalism have been deliberately intertwined: corporate actors, political intermediaries, and criminal-financial networks co-produce regulatory and market outcomes, as seen in the DHFL–Piramal nexus. The IBC-enabled resolution, selective regulatory enforcement, and the erasure of retail creditors demonstrate how state power actively structures financial sovereignty, effectively collapsing constitutional protections into instruments of market expedience.

Thus, the DHFL–Piramal question is not merely about credit or corporate restructuring; it implicates the constitutional architecture itself—property rights, creditor protections, and democratic accountability—while exposing the structural capture of institutions by a narrow nexus of finance, politics, and patronage. and democratic.

V. The Plexus as a System of Control: Recursive Power Without Accountability

The plexus operates as a recursive machine:

Speculation creates artificial valuations.
Scandal destabilises markets.
Political patronage selectively stabilises institutions.
Opacity erases responsibility.
Regulatory engineering formalises the new order.

Each cycle is more refined than the last.

Within this loop:

labour is replaced by data,
citizens by creditors,
accountability by narrative management,
democracy by financial sovereignty.

This is the real architecture of India’s contemporary political economy:
a system in which finance does not merely influence the state—it co-governs it.