Sen and Saradha: Story of political intrigue

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SEN AND SARADHA: STORY OF POLITICAL INTRIGUE

By Ashok Malik
Editorial
The Pioneer
http://www.dailypioneer.com
Saturday, April 27, 2013

Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee cannot get away with
blaming 34 years of Left misrule. While that point of a
toxic legacy is well taken, she has been at Writers'
Buildings for two years now

As a tragic, wrenching human story, the implications of
the collapse of the Saradha Group in West Bengal have few
parallels in recent times. Tens of thousands of people
have been defrauded for literally hundreds of billions of
rupees by the bucket-shop operation that Saradha’s
founder-promoter, Sudipta Sen, ran. As politicians argue
it out every evening in television studios, exchanging
barbs and waving and reading from equally damaging
letters and documents, the small investor is somehow
forgotten in the din.

In going down, Saradha and Sen have sunk the hopes,
dreams and meagre, carefully-gathered capital of very
ordinary working-class and lower middle-class people. The
suicide of a domestic help who lost everything to Saradha
offered a prism to this dark reality. Heaven knows what
lies ahead.

There are several aspects to the Saradha saga. There is
the politics of course, particularly in West Bengal,
since Sen seemed to have bought into about every party.
There is a sorry tale of corruption in media and of
shysters and thugs masquerading as influential
journalists. There is a lesson to be learnt in the
continuing and unrelenting fascination for and success of
chit funds, which have proven to be Ponzi schemes time
and again. Relatedly, there is the issue of how, despite
all talk of “financial inclusion”, the formal savings and
investment structure has bypassed large sections of the
Indian population. Each of these merits importance.

The Saradha Group was set up under the nose of the Left
Front Government and continued to flourish after the
Trinamool Congress came to power in 2011. It had a way of
purchasing support and political protection. The two
Trinamool MPs who had business dealings with it began as
critics of the chit fund company. One of them is a media
baron whose family made its fortune running an
extortionate and criminalised stevedore syndicate at the
Kolkata Port. The second MP is a journalist who wrote
strong articles against Saradha before signing up with it
for an exorbitant monthly fee.

Continues at:

http://www.dailypioneer.com/columnists/edit/sen-and-saradha-story-of-political-intrigue.html

Jai Maharaj, Jyotishi
Om Shanti

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