Way back in 2008, the year we launched the Financial Chronicle in India, the last newspaper I worked for, and edited, I received an interesting email from The Age, Melbourne, offering to collaborate on a work of investigative journalism.
The assignment related to India's switchover to polymer currency notes from paper, that was reportedly being manipulated by the honchos at North Block, the den of India's high finance mavens.
Usha Thorat, as Deputy Governor of India's central bank in Mumbai, and its top official in charge of currency management, had proposed to North Block the switch from paper to polymer, as RBI began planning to introduce ₹10 plastic banknotes under her supervision. RBI even floated a global tender to procure polymer sheets for printing, citing longer life cycle and better counterfeit resistance.
The Age was tracking India because an Australian firm was negotiating a contract for polymer note supplies with RBI, and that newspaper suspected a major scam in the making, pitting an Australian polymer currency maker against the paper currency cartel in England that had long had a vice-like grip on the Indian market.
An editor at The Age revealed that they had tracked down an agent to his 'East End Apartments' in Delhi's Mayur Vihar, as a vital link in this transcontinental game.
As things would pan out, this Tamil middleman had deep links with Tamil politicians both in Delhi and Chennai.
Excited, I agreed to collaborate, and reached out to Anil Ambani's pointman in Delhi, Tony Jesudasan, the go-to person in town for access to every government file, and a vital lifeline for many top New Delhi journos, in case he had heard something. Tony, God bless his soul, is no longer around.
'Don't even get anywhere near to that subject,' Tony told me. 'Isher Judge Ahluwalia,' God bless her soul too, 'is the India link to the cartel that supplies currency paper to India. They are powerful people,' he warned.
Isher, for the uninformed, was the prima donna among Delhi's economic mavens, and an economist of credible repute who was only overshadowed by her outstanding and powerful husband, Montek, the man behind the Enron-Dabhol debacle of a decade earlier, having cleared the project by merely snapping his fingers with flourish at the committee of secretaries' meeting. He was now heading the government's plan panel in Manmohan Singh's government.
As Finance Secretary and Finance Minister, respectively, the Singh duo had heralded India's economic reforms way back in 1991, making them the undisputed moghuls of India's market transition from command to commandeered economy.
Sniffing a mega scoop in the making, I assigned Badie, our dirty man on the job, to chase the lead from The Age, and tagged him to their newsroom for follow-up.
As it turned out, Badie knew our mystery man at East End too well for comfort. So he hemmed and hawed, and procrastinated, and stalled till time ran out, and The Age started publishing its exclusive series of investigative reports exposing bribery scandals involving Australian polymer banknote producers.
Back home, at our newsroom, it was business as usual. And soon, the polymer currency story disappeared from our collective memory, along with The Age, years before the Chronicle itself downed shutters... and was eventually forgotten... until this weeked, at The Regal in Maryland, when I woke up to Dhurandhar, and the memories flashed back relentlessly.
In the ongoing sordid brouhaha over the done and the not done, the right and the wrong, the good and the evil, and the Hindu and the Muslim, in an all-out propaganda war of nerves between India and Pakistan, moviegoers and critics alike seem to have missed out on the fine print of a currency scam that Pakistan perpetrated on India, just around the time that RBI's Thorat was desperately attempting 'counterfeit resistance' at home, and The Age was on its polymer chase half way across the world.
Embedded in Dhurandhar, the blockbuster, is a critical leak from the Indian deep state pointing to a tainted government minister involved in the currency scam that has so far remained below the radar, and has gone unreported till date.
For the record, P Chidambaram was India's finance minister in the run up to the 26/11 assault on Mumbai that Dhurandar exposes, leading movie-goers into a Karachi den where counterfeit Indian currency notes were being printed, and from where VoIP calls were made directing the assault on Mumbai.
Dhurandhar refers to a nameless 'Indian minister' who signed a currency paper deal in London that year, before flying into Dubai with his son, where they reportedly handed over two printing templates to the ISI's middleman, and laundered cash. This is serious allegation.
Between May 2004 and November 2008, P Chidambaram was finance minister in Manmohan Singh's cabinet. In that role he had the last word on currency transition from paper to polymer. For inexplicable reasons, that plan for counterfeit resistance was dropped by RBI under his watch in the North Block, when the government decided to continue with paper.
Thorat, now on private sector company boards, can shine light on who pre-empted her plan for polymer. And why.
As things stand, Chidambaram and son Karti, have been charged with several corruption and money laundering scams, for which they have spent time in CBI custody, and are currently out on bail.
PC has already been implicated in three corruption cases as finance minister, with son KC, all in and around 2008, the year Mumbai came under attack:
INX Media: Irregular FIPB approval of foreign investment for INX Media Pvt. Ltd., with funds reportedly routed as kickbacks.
Aircel-Maxis: Alleged receipt of inducement payments by Karti Chidambaram to facilitate foreign investment approval for Aircel by Maxis Communications.
Chinese Visa: Alleged bribery related to facilitating project visa approvals for Chinese nationals in India.
The three cases point to Chinese, Malaysian and Swiss financial links. That's potential nexus with ISI.
Investigations and trials are ongoing.
The CBI and Enforcement Directorate have submitted evidence, including chargesheets, documents, emails, and financial records, but the courts have yet to rule on the guilt of the accused.
In the INX Media case, funds came from FIH Mauritius Investments Ltd. Zanser Group, a Swiss investment and real estate business, owns 12.6 per cent stake in its parent company.
In the Aircel-Maxis case, the funds were reportedly routed through offshore accounts in Mauritius and Singapore.
Payments to Karti Chidambaram were reported to have been routed via shell companies and offshore entities in these jurisdictions.
Shady individuals are linked to the other transactions for which Chidambaram and Karti have been investigated.
Interestingly, days after the Mumbai attack, Chidambaram was assigned to the home ministry, ostensibly to secure India from further terrorist onslaught.
Soon, ISI went silent.During Chidambaram's tenure as home minister, finance, and former defence, minister Pranab Mukherjee wrote to the Prime Minister complaining that his security had been compromised with bugging devices planted in his North Block office. Though Mukherjee did not name a suspect, his finger resoundingly pointed at home minister Chidambaram, which was reason why he got the defence intelligence, and not the home ministry, to investigate the breach.
We can never say for certain that Chidambaram transacted with non-state Pakistani actors in counterfeit currency dumping by the ISI. Global financial scams pass through several invisible hands that never register their fingerprints. So, we will never get to know what happened, at least, until the government takes a categorical stand on that scandal. And that looks unlikely.
Yet, Dhurandhar, the movie, deliberately leaks an extraordinary lead to an incredible monster that can hardly be stuff of Bollywood make-belief. The chain of events is too circumstantial to ignore, even when accounting for the missing links in the narrative: RBI did contemplate a switchover to polymer, to resist counterfeit currency. But the move was abruptly dropped. Paper was contracted with the London currency cartel. ISI did push fake currency into India. 26/11 happened. The finance minister was shifted to home ministry, the next finance minister's telephone was tapped. Where did ISI get the plates to print Indian currency notes in Karachi?
Dhurandhar knows best.
It is time for us to get there.
PS: For years, Delhi's media circles had been familiar with a dhurandhar in the Manmohan Singh cabinet as stuff of informed gossip, on everything from an Epstein-like CD in private circulation, to a go-between journalist facilitating the Chinese embassy in Huawei's and sundry deals, to 'favouring' correspondents to plant stories, to browbeating media owners to mute adverse reportage, to texting naughty somethings to a top Bollywood actress at a national 'Business Awards' ceremony in Mumbai.
Time, then, for the next Blockbuster.
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