The Sovereign Insider: A Philosophical Indictment of Corporate Immunity in India — An Open Letter to Ajay Piramal

Posted on 24th November, 2025 (GMT 06:57 hrs)

ABSTRACT

This open letter to Mr. Ajay Piramal is a philosophical indictment of the structural immunity enjoyed by India’s most privileged corporate actors, written from the vantage point of the outsider — the figure who stands scorched at the margins while power glides in the cool interior of impunity. Drawing on Camus, Kafka, Agamben, Śūdraka, and Brecht, the letter argues that the DHFL debacle and a string of insider-trading controversies reveal not isolated breaches but a systemic architecture in which political patronage, regulatory indulgence, and judicial hesitation combine to create a sovereign exception for the well-connected. Through satire, allegory, and critical theory, the narrative exposes how legality becomes porous, accountability becomes theatrical, and “honour” becomes a performative mask concealing a chaosophic, irrationally rational logic of sanctioned violence. The letter positions Piramal not merely as an individual accused of impropriety but as a symptom of a deeper political–economic disorder in which capital transcends consequence while ordinary depositors bear the existential weight of abandonment. Ultimately, it is a citizen’s dispatch from the perimeter of power — a call to recognise how India’s corporate–political nexus manufactures insiders and outsiders with sunlit inevitability.

Introduction

This post is an open letter addressed to Mr. Ajay Piramal. It has been written in response to a series of events surrounding the DHFL crisis and the larger pattern of legal, political, and financial immunity that powerful corporate actors often seem to enjoy in India.

The purpose of the letter is not merely to discuss insider-trading allegations or regulatory lapses. Rather, it attempts to show how these episodes point to a much deeper problem: a system where certain individuals appear to move above the law, protected by political networks, judicial hesitation, and a culture of impunity.

The language of the letter is philosophical, drawing from writers such as Albert Camus, Kafka, and Giorgio Agamben to explain how ordinary citizens — especially small depositors and pensioners affected by the DHFL collapse — are treated very differently from politically connected business figures. It argues that what we often call “honour,” “reputation,” or “corporate trust” is sometimes a mask that hides a structure of privilege, proximity, and power.

This letter has also been copied to the Hon’ble Prothonotary and Senior Master of the Bombay High Court (Case No. S/42/2025) in the hope that questions of justice, transparency, and accountability will receive the attention they deserve.

The text that follows is not a legal argument.
It is a citizen’s appeal, written from the perspective of someone who stands with the many depositors, families, and ordinary savers who continue to live with the consequences of the DHFL resolution process.

What follows is the letter.

To
Mr. Ajay Piramal,
High Priest of India’s Inside Track
(Occupant of That Sacred Space Where Law Concludes Its Jurisdiction)

Sub: On the Allegedly Sovereign Insider — A Philosophical Dispatch to Mr. Piramal

Dear Mr. Piramal,

I write to you from the periphery — that turbulent zone where Camus’ étranger stands squinting into the blinding absurdity of existence, condemned to freedom not by action but by atmospheric misalignment. It is the same sun-crushed horizon where Meursault discovers that guilt is not a matter of what one has done, but of how one fails to perform the proper ritual of belonging. A zone where the sun itself becomes a judge, and its glare — as with Meursault at the beach — becomes both alibi and executioner.

It is into this sunlit exile that DHFL’s dispossessed — the elderly pensioners, middle-class savers, small depositors — were pushed when your corporate machinery siphoned life out of a dying institution under the benevolent, heat-resistant canopy of political guardianship. They, like Meursault, were punished not for crimes, but for lacking the correct posture in front of power structures.

You, meanwhile, inhabit the gilded core — the realm where insider information transforms from regulatory concept into metaphysical condition. A place where, like Meursault’s curious indifference that confounded judges more than the murder itself, your detachment from consequence becomes your strongest defence. In your universe, facts do not accumulate toward guilt; they dissipate into ambience. The law, like the magistrate who could not understand Meursault’s refusal to feign remorse, cannot comprehend your refusal to be touched by it — and thus tiptoes around you in baffled reverence.

Permit me a brief theoretical provocation: You are not merely an alleged insider. You are what Agamben would call the sovereign exception of Indian capitalism — the one who stands simultaneously inside and outside juridical order. Inside the market, outside the market’s discipline; inside political patronage, outside political scrutiny. Inside legality, outside its weight. A sovereign without crown or sceptre, yet endowed with SAT absolutions, regulatory indulgences, and a seeming parliamentary majority (?) functioning as your invisible police escort.

And the episodes accumulate with an almost absurdist rhythm:

— 2016 Abbott deal: family members like Anand Piramal, not formally on payroll, mysteriously endowed with the same omniscient “sun glare” of UPSI that blinded the rest of the economy: dynastic nepo-capitalism, just like Jay Shah?
— 2019 SAT absolution: the juridical equivalent of the courtroom’s obsession with Meursault’s behaviour at his mother’s funeral — all spectacle, no substance, yet decisive in the verdict.
— 2024 Jijina ₹43.55-crore UPSI settlement: a financial indulgence reminiscent of the priest’s last-rites insistence in The Stranger — absolution offered as a transaction, the machinery of grace outsourced.
— Shriram stake-sale timing irregularities: where “timing” becomes a metaphysical category, much like Meursault’s fateful moment under the Algerian sun — the instant when the universe rearranges its logic to produce a crime without intent.
— Vodafone–Essar spectral trades: the corporate séance, where your system materialises at precisely the profitable instant, as though guided by the same cosmic indifference that made Meursault fire four extra shots “as though knocking on the door of misfortune.”

Each bead on this rosary of impunity reinforces a single truth: in India’s late-capitalist catechism, absolution is a resource allocated through proximity, not ethics.

Kafka, of course, understood this architecture before any of us. In The Trial, the law’s labyrinth devours the weak with opaque hunger. You, however, have reinvented the labyrinth: it tilts toward you like a loyal canine, its corridors expanding or collapsing according to your convenience. For Joseph K., law was suffocating, inscrutable, inexplicable; for you, it is CFC/HFC air-conditioned, amicable, and atmospherically compliant. For millions of retail investors, law is punitive. For you, it is decorative — a ventilation system rather than an en-cage-ment. Your Gandhi Foundation defeats the logic of Gandhi in the context of your fetishistic obsession with the courtroom’s spatiality. 

Then comes the political frisson — that low, reassuring hum behind your empire. Your proximity to the ruling dispensation — the same party that has perfected the vocabulary of outsiders (ghuspetiya, infiltrators, termites) — creates a grand irony: the state’s so-called outsiders are crushed by the MAN-oeuvres of the true insiders. Muslims branded infiltrators, migrants labelled threats, DHFL victims rendered invisible — all while the real infiltration of UPSI channels, crony “more equal” regulatory membranes, and ethical boundaries proceeds smoothly under the incandescent glow of corporate–political inter-communion. At a time when the climate crisis is already generating waves of displacement, the coming tides of climate refugees will inevitably puncture the fragile mythologies of nation-statist imagiNATIONs. Borders — those arbitrary lines defended with such fervour — will dissolve under the pressure of ecological reality, giving way to a necessary world-federative consciousness severed from the cartographic neuroses imposed upon us.

And yet, in this grand future where borders erode, your present practices already reveal the farce of nationalist posturing: even as the Sangh Parivar exhorts the public to “Boycott China,” your own sourcing office in Shangh-AI continues to operate with the serene indifference of capital to ideology. It is a useful reminder that while the state manufactures enemies for the masses, capital never boycotts a supply chain.

I knew you were an “honourable man.” Yet despite this honour of posture, one cannot help but ask: By what metaphysical mechanics does one glide past every contour of consequence — including the NCLT’s order of 19 May 2021 and the NCLAT’s reaffirmation on 27 January 2022 — as though jurisprudence were not a binding architecture but a polite, non-committal suggestion? As though the law itself were merely a procedural ornament rather than a structural constraint?  

Your escape cannot be read as personal cunning alone; it demands theoretical framing. In the architecture of cronyism and monopoly capitalism, the allegedly sovereign insider is not shielded by innocence but by structural consecration. Ritualized bribes (if you like, you may use the term “political charity”, following Orwellian Doublespeak) of ₹85 crore via unconstitutional electoral bonds and ₹25 crore to dubious PM CARES are not “payments” in the transactional sense; they function as what political theorists would recognise as ritual acts of incorporation — symbolic offerings through which capital secures its place within the ruling ideology. This must be read via the layers of the Flashnet dealings with BJP Minister Piyush Goyal. 

In such a system, legality is not a boundary but a spurious porous membrane; judicial orders do not constrain the allegedly sovereign insider — they merely gesture toward a procedural ideal that exists for others. Immunity is not granted; it is constituted. Blessing is not bestowed; it is structural. And political patronage — in your case, repeatedly conferred by the BJP — does not protect an individual but reproduces a political-economy of exception, wherein certain actors float above the law as naturally as oil floats on water.

Thus the question is no longer: How do you escape allegations?
The question is: What kind of system requires your escape in order to preserve itself?

In this theatre, you are not simply a businessperson. You are a structural condition within India’s monopoly-capitalist courtroom, whose indifference itself becomes a juridical argument, whose unresponsiveness to consequence is mistaken for innocence, and whose detachment from moral gravity becomes indistinguishable from quasi-divine protection.

Camus’ outsider was executed not for murder but for failing to cry. In today’s Indian absurdity, outsiders are punished for lacking capital, lacking access, lacking sanctioned belonging. Meanwhile, those possessing all three glide through allegations — with serene, sunlit inevitability.

You, Mr. Piramal, have mastered this glide.

Your saga is not about alleged insider trading alone. It is about perpetually infused structural immunity — the quiet, unspoken contract between capital-relations and political power through which accountability becomes a theatrical suggestion, as frivolous as recommending sunscreen to the sun.

I am sorry to say this, but to many among the disenfranchised, docilised bodies, you increasingly resemble Śakāra from Śūdraka’s ancient plurilingual play Mṛcchakaṭikam — the king’s brother-in-law, that petty sovereign of impunity whose power springs not from virtue but from proximity. Śakāra, after all, is a stalker of women (one cannot help but recall the resonances of Chanaya in the Snoopgate scandal), a figure who weaponises access rather than merit. His peculiar idiolect — oscillating between buffoonery and menace — has long been read as an index of structural privilege. One might even compare it, in a transhistoric gesture, with Brecht’s Arturo Ui, that theatrical goon who appropriates Miltonic blank verse to inflate his own grotesque authority.

And some of us also remember — though in a different register of vyañjanā (suggestion, resonance) — the rākṣasa concealed within the mudrā: the monstrous imprint of money-sorcerer power that passes itself off as a seal of legitimacy. In that sense, your public ‘honour’ appears less as dharma and more as the chaosophic, irrationally rational calculus through which modern petty sovereigns transmute violence into order — the sanctioned brutality of those who rule from behind the curtain.

Consider this letter a modest dispatch from beyond your orbit — from the collective of strangers rendered structurally dispensable. You may never read it. You don’t need to. The machinery that reportedly protects you is designed precisely to guarantee your eternal centrality: eternally inside even when caught outside; eternally innocent even when flooded by the Gordian knot of allegations; eternally sovereign even when the law briefly performs resistance for dramatic effect.

From the perimeter of your empire’s shadow,
Debeprasad (sic) Sadhan (patriarchal insertion!) Bandopadhyay
An Outsider or A Flaneur, Who Knows Exactly Why He Is One

COPY TO:

1. Shri A.H. Laddhad, The Hon’ble Prothonotary and Senior Master, Bombay High Court (Case No. S/42/2025)