On Systemic Erasure: From Electoral Rolls to the DHFL Resolution Process: A Letter to Ajay Piramal
On Systemic Erasure: From Electoral Rolls to the DHFL Resolution Process: A Letter to Ajay Piramal
Posted on 9th November, 2025 (GMT 07:58 hrs)
ABSTRACT
This letter addresses the systemic erasure at the heart of both contemporary electoral disenfranchisement and the DHFL Corporate Insolvency Resolution Process, arguing that what appears as legal and administrative procedure is in fact a coordinated state–corporate apparatus of dispossession. Just as voters are made to vanish through calibrated electoral roll manipulation and bureaucratized opacity, depositors were erased from the DHFL resolution through committee intermediation, controlled documentation, engineered CoC voting, judicial sanction, and regulatory abdication. The RTI regime—designed as a transparency safeguard—functioned instead as a ritual of deferral, where responsibility was endlessly transferred across institutions to ensure that accountability remained structurally unreachable. The result is the same in both domains: those who constitute the basis of legitimacy—citizens as voters and as depositors—are stripped of presence, agency, and voice. This is a crisis not of procedure but of democratic integrity, where legality is weaponized to launder injustice and the polity is exhausted into silence. The letter refuses that silence.
To
Mr. Ajay Piramal,
CBE (as decorated), Paramavaiṣṇava (as self-regarded)
Sub: On Systemic Erasure: From Electoral Rolls to the DHFL Resolution Process
Dear Mr. Piramal,
I write to you not in anger, but in the strange composure that arrives when one has already lost what was once believed to be protected by law, transparency, and public good (we are now labdhapraṇāśa).
I had genuinely attempted to cultivate mitralābha with you. Yet, at a certain point, it became evident that the situation had veered into kākolūkīya—a peculiar form of mitrabheda that reveals itself only when trust begins to fracture.
I am one among the lakhs who entrusted life-savings to DHFL, only to be told—through the alchemy of “resolution”—that value itself can be dissolved, redistributed, and sanctified through procedure. There are losses that occur in the marketplace, and there are losses engineered in the shadows between law and power within the state-corporate nexus. What happened to us, as DHFL victims, belongs decisively to the latter.
Permit me to elaborate with a certain philosophical irony.
In our “democracy” in India today, disappearance has become an administrative art. Names vanish from electoral rolls. Voter identities are multiplied, merged, or deleted with an elegance that would impress any accountant of metaphysics. Special trains ferrying people from other states are being used to carry out brazen, daylight vote dacoity in Bihar⤡. Neighborhoods that exist in full material reality seem to fade at the precise moment when their political agency is needed. Consider, for instance, a single apartment block that, on paper or as an algorithm, contains perhaps “500-600 registered voters”—a population density that defies geometry, architecture, and oxygen itself. It is as if arithmetic has begun disproving geometric spatiality—a civic reenactment of the historical Black Hole of Calcutta, except here the suffocation is of electoral (il-)legitimacy. It is difficult not to recall Satyajit Ray’s beloved character Lalmohan Ganguly, alias Jatayu, exclaiming “Highly suspicious!”—a phrase he frequently used with comic earnestness. Yet here, the line is stripped of humour; there is no laughter, only the drastic weight of what follows.
Moreover, this is not a case of “parihāsa-vijalpitaṃ sakhe” (as Dushyanta remarks to his vidūṣaka in Abhijñānaśākuntalam); nothing here is playful or light. What we are confronting is a tragic incident of claustrophobic erasures under the current BJP regime. By the by, it is not entirely unknown that your acquisition of DHFL did not occur without certain proximities—whether through the Piyush Goyal (the Flashnet scam), through political “charity” (or bribes) routed via unconstitutional electoral bonds and ambiguous PM CARES, or through alignments that overlap with BJP-favoured judicial figures, including Justice Bela Trivedi⤡ ⤡.
I am searching for madhu⤡—nectar, elixir, ambrosia—from that land of Digwal whose living biodiversity was once its own sacred sweetness. However, the madhu is gone. It was devastated under your watch. And so I speak to you now not as a beneficiary of your “development,” but as one who has witnessed what you have enacted: environmental extraction masquerading as progress—ecocide sanctioned through corporate sanctity.
There is a structural resonance between the BJP–ECI-enabled voter-roll manipulations and the DHFL CIRP’s sidelining of depositors. In both, those who constitute the body of legitimacy—the voter in democracy and the depositor in insolvency—are rendered external to decision-making. Voters disappear through calibrated deletions, duplication, ghost entries, and SIR-driven filtration; depositors disappear through committees, professionalized intermediaries, opaque deliberations, and a declared finality framed as justice. The DHFL CIRP reflects the same system design as the “Vote Chori Factory”: opacity of process and documentation, concentrated authority in a small CoC–RP inner circle, asymmetric benefit to a winning corporate applicant at the expense of the affected public, and regulatory institutions that decline oversight. Critical documents were made non-downloadable during the CIRP, RTI pathways produced jurisdictional deflection, the ex-promoters’ repayment proposal (directed by the NCLT to be heard on 19 May 2021) was effectively nullified through an NCLAT stay within six days, and successive CoC votes were steered toward what appeared to be a predetermined resolution outcome.
This culminated in crony appropriation formalized through judicial sanction, most notably the Supreme Court’s April 2025 verdict directing avoidance recoveries to the resolution applicant rather than to creditors, deepening losses borne by FD and NCD holders—despite earlier NCLAT findings (27 January 2022, 63 Moons) that the process had been contrary to law and riddled with material irregularities. Meanwhile, regulators and oversight bodies practiced systematic passivity, with repeated RTI refusals mirroring the Election Commission’s non-disclosure of machine-readable electoral roll data—state-engineered opacity functioning as infrastructure for extraction. In effect, election-time disenfranchisement and insolvency-time depositor dispossession in the case of DHFL are not parallel anomalies but one system: a bureaucratic-legal machinery under the Modi-Shah raj (the second British raj)that decides “who counts” and “who is compensated,” transforming legality into camouflage and exhausting citizens into acquiescence.
The pattern is not coincidental; it is systemic:
- Disappearance of the voter from the roll.
- Disappearance of the depositors’ agency from the resolution.
- Disappearance of transparency from the RTI response chain.
And yet, the rhetoric continues to speak of trust, public interest, national economic stability, and dharmic duty. It is remarkable how moral language can be used to sanctify economic violence.
What reinforces this crisis is our experience under the RTI regime itself. We filed multiple RTIs seeking the most basic accountability records of the DHFL Committee of Creditors—expenditure statements, minutes of meetings, voting breakdowns, litigation and travel fund flows, audit trails, and the identification of the authority ultimately responsible for oversight. The responses formed a choreography of bureaucratic evasion: RBI forwarded queries to IBBI; IBBI redirected them to DFS; DFS pointed back to RBI; CAG disclaimed centralized audit data; even the Supreme Court registry declined to clarify which authority held the records. Each reply was framed differently, yet communicated the same meaning: “information not available,” “not under jurisdiction,” or “not classified as information under Section 2(f).” Appeals to First Appellate Authorities resulted only in restatements of the same denials. The pattern is unmistakable—a will to hide, not an absence of data: just like the ECI’s outright claim of “absence” (/deletion!) of several CCTV footages for so many polling booths!
RTI here is not transparency; it is a ritual of deferral designed to exhaust the citizen. The murder of DHFL itself was procedural. The murder of accountability was administrative.
We have written about these issues through our OBMA platform at length as well as made a video presentation⤡:
- “Highly Suspicious” Vote Theft: From Electoral Rolls to the DHFL CIRP⤡
- Will to Hide: Vote Theft, DHFL Scam, and the Silencing of RTI in BJP-ruled India (Video) ⤡
You have often invoked the Bhagavad Gita as an ethical guide to managerial leadership. However, I take the Gita seriously—so seriously that I cannot pretend that karma can be neutralized through philanthropic capitalism. The Gita does not absolve one who benefits from systemic injustice merely because the process has been legalized. Dharma is not the decor of power; it is the accountability that power must answer to.
I know the answer I am likely to receive, if any: “the matter is settled, the courts have spoken, the resolution stands”. But legality and justice are never synonyms—this, Indian history has taught repeatedly. When ordinary citizens are stripped of their deposits and simultaneously stripped of their electoral presence, it signals not administrative oversight, but a deeper crisis of democratic legitimacy in Modi’s India.
I do not write with the illusion that this letter will restore my lost savings or the lost democratic dignity of those erased from voter rolls. I write because silence, too, is a form of collaboration—and we, the dispossessed, refuse to be collaborators.
The economy can survive the loss of capital, but a nation cannot survive the loss of trust and accountability.
I can only hope you will attempt to “spray madhu” now—perhaps with your pharmaceutical “Tri-Activ.” Yet the churning (manthana) you preside over, whether of the Arabian Sea through your luxury real estate ventures or of public wealth through corporate restructurings, yields no nectar. It resembles instead that ancient metaphor of deceitful duality: viṣakumbhaṃ payomukham—a vessel of poison masked with a mouth of milk. The sweetness is only surface; what lies beneath (hidden!) corrodes life itself.
So, hereby we invoke madhu in the bitter bleakness of your crony philanthropic capitalism:
ऋग्वेद १.९० (मधु सूक्त)
मधु वाता ऋतायते मधु क्षरन्ति सिन्धवः।
माध्वीर्नः सन्त्वोषधीः ॥
मधु नक्तमुतोषसो मधुमत् पार्थिवं रजः।
मधु द्यौरस्तु नः पिता ॥
मधुमन्नो वनस्पतिर्मधुमां अस्तु सूर्यः।
माध्वीर्गावो भवन्तु नः ॥
मधु जन्तुना आमुत्त मा मधु क्षरन्तु धारया।
मधु वाता ऋतायते मधु क्षरन्तु सिन्धवः ॥
Hypothetically Yours,
लड़ेंगे या मरेंगे!
इंक़लाब ज़िंदाबाद!
Debeprasad (sic) Sadhan (patriarchal insertion?!) Bandopadhyay (sic)
COPY TO:
- Shri A.H. Laddhad, The Hon’ble Prothonotary and Senior Master, Bombay High Court (With reference to Case No. S/42/2025)
बहुजनहिताय बहुजनसुखाय च॥
(“For the happiness of the many, for the welfare of the many”)
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