By Papri Sri Raman
At first, I was tempted to call this piece, Banks, Babus and Bulls. But then I thought, nothing really changes, and films only confirm this. Especially in India.
The recent RBI merger of the old Lakshmi Vilas Bank with Singapore’s DBS Bank brings to mind two films trending on the OTT platform for the last three months. Both are on financial scams. Banks that lent money to alleged scamsters are at the heart of these scams and in each case, some bank has been open to tweaking, one little clerk, one big bossman… some collaborator inside the banks.
The first web series, titled, Bad Boy Billionaires, is a documentary on four Indians, Vijay Mallya, Nirav Modi, Subrata Roy and Ramalinga Raju. The second film is Hansal Mehta’s Scam 1992 – The Harshad Mehta Story, based on journalist Sucheta Dalal and Debashish Basu’s book The Scam: Who Won, Who Lost, Who Got Away.
Five gamers for us to consider. All coming into their own professionally in the 1970s and ’80s. All from middle-class families, except for Mallya. All dreamers. Two rounds of bank nationalisations had happened in 1969 and 1980. Before that, the 1950s Mundhra scandal (only of 12 million rupees) had exposed the nexus between the bureaucracy, stock market speculators and rogue businessmen, banks and NBFCs.
In the ’80s, banks had to keep 63.5 per cent of their deposits with RBI, in cash or government securities. The system was skewered. Banks could lend and borrow securities through a process called Ready Forward Deals through a 15-day loan from one bank to another with government securities as collateral. Mehta, Mallya, Roy, Raju and Modi — all had to transit through the narrow bank visions of the ’80s but Bad Boy does not connect the dots.
We can’t really call Bad Boy stories biopics; they are rather a collage of old and new screen shots stitched together by filmmakers Johanna Hamilton, Dylan Mohan Gray and Nick Read to tell only that part of protagonist narratives that provide a visual testimony to their work lives. The documentary is not even about the life and times of colourful characters like Mallya or Roy. Despite the catchy title, it gives no perspective to the viewer. Ten years ago, Kingshuk Nag’s book on Raju, a man who supported a dozen charities, called it ‘India’s biggest corporate fraud’ and told us more.
Politically connected Raju, once chairman of Satyam Computers, reportedly admitted to embezzling company funds of ₹7136 crore. Poetically, he had said, he was ‘riding a tiger’. RBI sources revealed, Indian and foreign banks had provided guarantees of around Rs 8,000 crore to various Raju companies. Raju, out on bail, successfully opposed telecast of his biography, so India got to see only three bad boys.
For Modi, there is a female diamond worker, for Roy, there is a female chit fund agent, who through their testimonies, portray a very sympathetic picture of the two. For Malaya, his son paints the pastel brush. Dreaming and failing in business are not crimes. No criminal intent comes through in the film. One does not see any bank wrongdoing, though the Punjab National Bank issued fraudulent letters of undertaking worth ₹11,356.84 crore to Modi.
Scam 1992 is one of India’s most watched series for 2020, with accolades showered on theatre actor Pratik Gandhi; this only goes to prove that actors are able to role play better than any reality show.
In recent months, this has been also the most written about show, covered by a dozen economic newspapers and websites. After his tv show Khana Kazana, which made master chef Sanjeev Kapoor famous, Mehta’s Bollywood journey for 25 plus years has been marked by small successes. These include Shahid and Aligarh with Rajkumar Rao in recent years. Clearly, Hansal likes taking risks — Risk Hai to Ishk Hai — his films don’t have superstars and big budgets, they become compelling in the intimate OTT platforms and provide visibility to fine actors who have been in the business of acting for more than a decade but did not have the kind of attention the Mehta films have brought them. And mind you, not everyone can visualise the absurdity of the banking system as Hansal Mehta has done in Scam 1992. It reminds one of Michael Douglas’ fine film Wall Street or Leonardo Di Caprio’s The Wolf of Wall Street or the BBC docu-drama Too Big to Fail. From Bollywood we haven’t seen that kind of stories, and Hansal Mehta is thus a first of his kind in crafting such a financial films genre.
India has 46 foreign banks today. Four banks —Standard Chartered, ANZ Grindlays, Bank of America and Citibank accounted for 56 per cent of all securities transactions in the 1990s. Citibank was found to be short-selling government securities and is shown as the ogre in Scam 1992. Dubious roles of the RBI and SBI is scantily camouflaged, as are the characters like Chandraswami or K Madhavan, or then RBI Governor S Venkitaraman, SBI Chairman M N Goiporia and the media members. Goiporia and SBI’s C L Khemani were humiliated for trying to earn the government bank some profit through share investment. Never done before 1992, this opening has led to SBI becoming India’s biggest bank.
In the film, Harshad clearly emerges a visionary. All these operations… Insider trading, BR transactions, borrowing from A and returning to B…. all these currently practiced processes happened as Harshad showed the way. The viewership has been so high as he comes out as a financial Pioneer who was victimised by the government; and the foreign bank cartel won. It ensured his ignominious death. (We must not forget that in 2019, the Income Tax Appellate Tribunal scrapped over Rs 2,000 crore of tax additions made by the IT Department on Harshad Mehta’s wife Jyoti and brother Ashwin for assessment year 1992-93.) For the family it was a 27-year-old burden.
Difficulty of doing business with banks and loopholes have only grown meanwhile, along with the tweakers — like Ketan Parekh, Dilip Pendse, Rajesh Jhunjhunwala, Pramod Khera; the IL& FS scam is worth about Rs 13,000 crore, all with connivance of top government and bank officials. All subjects of future films. Playing the stock market is no crime, Nirmal Kotecha hasn’t done too badly. Only Harshad was naïve and enters viewer hearts and minds as the system’s classic fall guy rather than the operator. (IPA Service)