This article examines the DHFL resolution and Piramal Group’s subsequent restructuring as a paradigmatic case of contemporary financial consolidation in India, tracing how regulatory design, corporate strategy, and state-enabled mechanisms converged to produce an outcome that is legally final yet institutionally opaque. It analyses the RBI’s supervisory–administrative dual role, the CoC’s opacity, the judiciary’s tendency toward implied finality, and the structural conflicts that limited independent scrutiny during the insolvency process. The paper then situates Piramal’s rare reverse merger—where the listed parent (PEL) was absorbed into its regulated lending subsidiary (PFL)—as a decisive act executed amidst pending appeals, effectively embedding DHFL-acquired assets inside a newly listed NBFC-ICC. The listing-by-merger, driven by upper-layer regulatory requirements, market optics, and corporate consolidation goals, is shown to function not merely as compliance but as a strategic reorganisation that consolidates control, complicates retrospective accountability, and reconfigures contested assets into an ostensibly neutral balance sheet. By synthesising legal, regulatory, financial and political-economy perspectives, the article argues that the Piramal–DHFL arc reveals a wider architecture of contemporary consolidation—one in which regulatory frameworks, capital markets, and corporate power align to enable irreversible restructurings under conditions of weakened transparency and constrained avenues for redress.
The Hidden Chemistry of Piramal Pharma’s “Tri-Activ”: A DHFL Victim Writes to Ajay Piramal
This letter addresses Piramal Pharma’s Tri-Activ line of disinfectants, critically examining the disparity between the products’ marketed claims of “triple protection” and the documented human health and ecological risks posed by their chemical constituents, notably ethanol and benzalkonium chloride (BAC). Written from the perspective of a survivor of systemic corporate harm, it combines lived experience with peer-reviewed evidence to demand transparency, full disclosure of toxicological and environmental data, and remedial measures including independent environmental monitoring, responsible labeling, and extended producer responsibility initiatives. Beyond consumer safety, the letter interrogates regulatory ambiguities, corporate ethics, and the broader social and ecological consequences of commodified cleanliness, framing the correspondence as a civic appeal for accountability and moral stewardship in the pharmaco-industrial sector.
The Fallen Sceptre(s) Of Your Justice: Dirty My-Self and Piramal Pharma’s Tri-Activ
“The Fallen Sceptre(s) of Your Justice: A Pseudo/Quasi-Pharmaco-Philosophical Reflection on Piramal Pharma’s Tri-Activ — and Other Things Otherwise” is an ecosophical and deconstructive meditation on the spectral transformation of power—from gods to kings to states to corporations—through the pharmaco-industrial complex. Anchored in the case of Piramal Pharma’s Tri-Activ disinfectant products, the piece entwines lyrical confession, ecological critique, and self-reflexive philosophical inquiry to expose how the rhetoric of purity and hygiene conceals necropolitical violence and ecological toxicity. Blurring boundaries between body and world, sickness and system, the text stages the body as a site of contamination, resistance, and remembrance, where care becomes commodified and justice spectral. Through interlacing idioms of Tagore, Derrida, and anarchist refusal, it calls for reclaiming the fallen sceptre of justice from algorithmic kings and chemical prophets—toward an ethics of vulnerability, ecological interdependence, and collective redemption.
On Systemic Erasure: From Electoral Rolls to the DHFL Resolution Process: A Letter to Ajay Piramal
This letter addresses the systemic erasure at the heart of both contemporary electoral disenfranchisement and the DHFL Corporate Insolvency Resolution Process, arguing that what appears as legal and administrative procedure is in fact a coordinated state–corporate apparatus of dispossession. Just as voters are made to vanish through calibrated electoral roll manipulation and bureaucratized opacity, depositors were erased from the DHFL resolution through committee intermediation, controlled documentation, engineered CoC voting, judicial sanction, and regulatory abdication. The RTI regime—designed as a transparency safeguard—functioned instead as a ritual of deferral, where responsibility was endlessly transferred across institutions to ensure that accountability remained structurally unreachable. The result is the same in both domains: those who constitute the basis of legitimacy—citizens as voters and as depositors—are stripped of presence, agency, and voice. This is a crisis not of procedure but of democratic integrity, where legality is weaponized to launder injustice and the polity is exhausted into silence. The letter refuses that silence.
Philanthropy, Pharma, and Finance: A Letter Unveiling the Piramal Equation
“Philanthropy, Pharma, and Finance: A Letter Unveiling the Piramal Equation” is an open letter that interrogates the moral architecture of “philanthropic capitalism” through the lens of the Piramal Group’s intertwined ventures in pharmaceuticals and finance. Drawing upon the language of public accountability and philosophical critique, it examines how narratives of “conscious” and “value-based” enterprise often conceal deeper entanglements of debt, profit, and political patronage. Blending forensic analysis with rhetorical irony, the letter situates Piramal’s corporate conduct within the wider ecosystem of India’s crony-capitalist order, where the boundaries between care and commerce, virtue and valuation, increasingly blur. Ultimately, it is both a document of resistance and a call for ethical introspection in an age where balance sheets masquerade as moral credentials.
Will to Hide: Vote Theft, DHFL Scam, and the Silencing of RTI in BJP-ruled India (Video)
In this video of OBMA, we trace how truth in contemporary India is not hidden in darkness, but blinded by the illegitimate, coercive glare of power itself. From the quiet theft of votes through digital deletions and duplicated identities, to the DHFL scam that turned public funds into private fortunes, to the slow asphyxiation of the Right to Information (RTI)— the same pattern of concealment runs through it all. This is not ignorance, but design: the rule of the “Golden Disc,” where polished words like development and national interest mask the disappearance of citizens, accountability, and justice. We ask: when every institution is scripted to glorify the untruth, who will unveil the face of truth?
“Highly Suspicious” Vote Theft: From Electoral Rolls to the DHFL CIRP
This exposé examines the converging crises of electoral integrity and financial justice in contemporary India, highlighting systemic capture by political, corporate, and institutional actors. It traces large-scale voter-roll manipulations—exacerbated under the Election Commission’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of 2025—and parallels them with opaque corporate insolvency resolutions, particularly the DHFL–Piramal case, to reveal a unified architecture of dispossession. Both domains exhibit technocratic opacity, concentrated discretionary authority, elite appropriation, and juridical complicity, resulting in the systematic disenfranchisement of marginalized voters and the financial expropriation of small depositors. Independent investigations, RTI filings, and media reporting document repeated patterns of procedural evasion, selective inclusion, and institutional passivity, demonstrating that these are not isolated incidents but interlinked mechanisms reinforcing crony-authoritarian consolidation. The report maps the roles of the BJP, corporate beneficiaries, judiciary, regulators, and auditors, showing how bureaucratic fragmentation and doctrinal deference transform public institutions into instruments of private gain. It further underscores the hollowing out of transparency, the weaponization of data, and the deliberate weakening of civic oversight, arguing that both democratic participation and fiduciary fairness have been subordinated to elite advantage. Concluding with actionable recommendations, the exposé advocates for machine-readable disclosure, judicial enforcement of equitable restitution, audit-grade transparency in corporate resolutions, curbs on opaque political funding, and independent civic verification, framing these measures as essential to restore accountability, defend the rule of law, and safeguard the participatory foundations of Indian democracy.
Arrest Me or Erase Me — But Your Corporate Empire Cannot Silence Me: A Letter to Ajay Piramal
This satirical polemic addresses Ajay Piramal and the wider nexus of the BJP-led state and crony corporates (notably Adani-Ambani), charging them with using legal, political, and extra-legal means to silence dissent. Framed as two provocative requests, the author first volunteers to be arrested and prosecuted for “defamation” — demanding the spectacle of litigation as a public test of whether asking questions about the DHFL debacle is now a punishable offense. The letter catalogs named victims of legal harassment, violence, and suspicious deaths (journalists, RTI activists, and dissenting civil-society actors), criticizes SLAPP-style tactics attributed to corporate counsel (DSK Legal), and recalls Vijay Mallya’s critique of Indian prisons to underline the contested nature of incarceration. Second, in darker satirical mode, the author offers to be “erased” by the state-corporate apparatus to expose the climate in which inconvenient lives are neutralized, invoking calls previously made for legalizing active euthanasia as a political statement about living under a failing “welfare” state. The piece concludes by situating the critique within Mumbai’s cultural imagery — quoting “Yeh Hai Bombay Meri Jaan” — and appends a list of institutional and international recipients.
The Fragile Himalayas: Climate, Hindutva Developmentalism, and the Collapsing Ecology of the Third Pole
The Himalayas—often called the “Third Pole”—are collapsing under the dual weight of climate change and a reckless developmental paradigm driven by Hindutva nationalism. This article examines how the BJP’s infrastructural expansion, exemplified by the Char Dham project and many other recent instances, embodies an extractive model that desecrates the sacred mountain ecology in the name of “spiritual connectivity” and national pride. By exposing the contradictions between ecological fragility and politico-economic hubris, it argues that the Himalayan crisis is not a natural disaster but a moral and civilizational collapse—where faith has been mechanized, rivers commodified, and glaciers sacrificed for profit and propaganda. Drawing on ecological ethics, political ecology, and environmental sociology, the piece calls for an epistemic and ethical reorientation—from GDP-centrism to earth-centric governance that recognizes the Himalayas as living systems rather than geological resources. Ultimately, saving the Himalayas demands confronting not only climate change but also the ideological machinery that normalizes ecocide under the rhetoric of development.
Affidavit And Public Legal Representation In Opposition To The Special Intensive Revision (SIR) Of Electoral Rolls, 2025
This affidavit opposes the 2025 Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls as an unconstitutional and discriminatory exercise that extends the exclusionary logic of the NRC–CAA–NPR regime. Framed as an administrative update, the SIR reproduces a politics of fear, surveillance, communal polarization and bureaucratic coercion—already driving marginalized citizens to despair and suicide. It exposes the State’s transformation of citizenship from birthright to conditional privilege, mediated by data and documents. Against this, the affidavit invokes planetary citizenship—an ethical-ecological vision affirming belonging beyond paper, religion, nation, or algorithm.
Once in a Blue Moon Academia 