The only thing social media has taught us is that it is never too early to bring out the toilet humour. What has emerged over the past 48 hours is the scale of the shitstorm that one Mr ‘Big Man’ has stirred up for over a decade now. All it took was for authorities in the US to spot one of his best works and issue an arrest warrant for him.
The ‘Big Man’ here is Gautam Shantilal Adani. And he’s on trial. There is sympathy. He needs it. ‘Gautam Adani: A 26/11 terror attack survivor now faces biggest trial of his life’. The headline is nothing if not carefully crafted or handed down by Adani’s PR. The piece itself is one of the finest bits of investigative journalism to emerge from the bowels of Delhi. The ‘Big Man’ is not a victim, no sir. He’s a survivor, the greatest of our species.
Mr. ‘Big Man’, our designated survivor, apparently sat on a toilet seat as terrorism gripped Mumbai in 2008. On that fateful day, and from that famed seat, an idea took shape. ‘I could do this as easily in Mumbai as Amdavad. Wait. Can the world be my stage?’
If the common Indian folk thought people with oodles of power and money conduct their business any differently from the rest of them, they’re sadly mistaken. There’s nothing cool here, folks. Even the names—Gautam, Sagar, Ranjit, Saurabh, and Rupesh. Sounds like a roll call at a government college. Can these adarsh balaks do any wrong?
Sure, US authorities say. But Adani had been forewarned in the true Indian tradition.
One has to appreciate someone waking up at 3:42 am with a brainwave and getting onto X with complex math to back it all up. One has to also appreciate how proceedings in that New York court went on, straight-faced.
“In furtherance of the Bribery Scheme, the co-conspirators, through Gautam S Adani, Sagar R Adani, Vneet S Jaain, and others, had offered and promised to Indian government officials approximately Rs 2,029 crore in bribes in exchange for Indian government officials…,” the court document said.
It is shameful that at a time when ‘New India’ has begun shining and when the green shoots of recovery are appearing, US authorities are out to get Gautam, Sagar, Ranjit, Saurabh, and Rupesh when they’re only helping poor government officials make a living.
It is shameful that these bribes happened on Indian soil and that the US is poking its bald-headed nose into internal matters, which we can obviously sort out.
It is also shameful that US courts have acted on this information. Indian courts are only tied down because we have a backlog, and our judges have literally cried about this in public.
Guess who’s not crying? Us. We stole money they will never find. These are the reparations that Shashi Tharoor kept whining about. And in the true traditions of US crime capers, our heroes have nicknames too. Gautambhai was apparently referred to as ‘SAG’, ‘Mr. A.’, ‘Numero Uno’, and ‘the big man’. Jaain was called ‘V’, ‘snake’, and ‘Numero uno minus one’. Credit to the British here; our boys have indeed learnt their English.
They also embraced the bahikhata tradition. Like true traders, they remembered to make notes and ledgered it all down. Mr Sagar Adani, let's call him the ‘little man’, remembered to record all the naughty stuff on his Notes app. The proud Indians also embraced corporate traditions. In June 2022, Rupesh sent a PPT file titled ‘1 SLIDE.pptx’ that had a proposal to “satisfy a portion of the corrupt payment.” If the presentation had one slide, it probably said ‘MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN’, signed by Gautambhai.
Speaking of making things great again, guess who’s back. Modiji’s best friend is waiting to be anointed the US President for a second time. There are obviously walls to be built and organs to be grabbed, but there is also a shitload that needs a clean up.
Note: This is a satirical piece on the criminal indictment filed in the US against Gautam Adani and others on charges of bribery.