One Rupee, Piramal Finance, and the Ruins of DHFL: A Letter to Mr. Ajay Piramal
This open letter to Ajay Piramal interrogates the moral dissonance between Piramal Finance’s “Neeyat” advertising campaign, which celebrates honesty through the return of a single rupee, and the lived reality of DHFL depositors whose life savings were erased through a deeply contested insolvency process. By juxtaposing corporate virtue-signalling with the transfer of nearly ₹45,000 crore of DHFL assets for ₹1, the text argues that legality has been deployed to eclipse legitimacy, and branding to obscure accountability. Situating the DHFL resolution within a wider system of crony capitalism, opaque political financing, captured institutions, and manufactured consent, the letter frames the episode as part of a broader legitimation crisis in BJP-ruled India, where ethics are subordinated to power and proximity. At its core, the piece demands that “conscious capitalism” be measured not by advertisements or philanthropy, but by what is returned to those who trusted, funded, and were dispossessed.
Copy and paste this URL into your WordPress site to embed
Copy and paste this code into your site to embed