How Baba Ramdev seduced a reluctant CEO
SK Patra, a jovial, balding man with discoloured teeth, remembers a sudden summons from Ramdev when he was CEO of Bhanu Farms, a food processing venture in Jabalpur owned by the Kolkata-based Bangur conglomerate, one of Asia’s richest, with expertise in commodities such as cement and jute, and, of course, food processing.
"Ramdev had gotten to know about my antecedents and was very keen that I come and join them," says Patra, slightly self-important though an undeniably credible witness.
In the five years since the formation of Patanjali Ayurveda Limited in January 2006, the company had undergone a metamorphosis. Patanjali had moved from being a yoga-events-based company and Ayurvedic pharmacy to debuting in food processing. Its units processed juice from amla, apple and aloe vera, as well as processed corn, soyabean, barley, oats and millets, and produced packaged spices and soaps.
Patanjali Ayurveda was growing stunningly: On March 31, 2011, the last day of the financial year 2010–11, the company reported its first doubling of revenues from Rs 167 crore to Rs 317 crore.
But the company was about to hit a roadblock. Balkrishna, under Ramdev’s direction, had tried to put in place the nuts and bolts for the Patanjali food park. But in April 2011 a host of top employees managing the food park suddenly – and mysteriously – quit the company. This included the IIM-educated CEO of the food park, CL Kamal, who had been with Patanjali since 2009.
With the core leadership team gone, the nascent Patanjali food park understandably began to flounder. Patanjali Ayurveda also had to indefinitely halt its ambitious plans to expand into activities related to the manufacture of dyes and paints, clothing, and power generation and distribution. It was then that a desperate Ramdev called Patra.
Patra’s credentials were unimpeachable.
An IIT-trained engineer, he had had a long and successful career spanning four decades in post-harvest technologies and food processing. While Patra was reluctant to meet Ramdev and take his offer any further, his wife, impressed with Ramdev’s work in the ongoing anti-corruption movement, insisted that Patra should at least meet him. But once he reached Haridwar, one thing led to another and Patra never looked back: he was seduced and coaxed by Ramdev into joining him, a decision Patra came to regret deeply. It seems hard for people to refuse Ramdev.
As Patra wandered the halls of Patanjali Yogpeeth that April, took in the scale of Yog Gram, watched the nation’s leaders quaking in fear of Ramdev, it must have been tempting to ally with him. Little did Patra know that things were about to change dramatically.
Within days of the midnight police swoop at his protest site in June, Ramdev was, as mentioned earlier, clobbered by political controversies and notices from various government agencies, including the Reserve Bank of India and the Enforcement Directorate. On June 7, 2011 India Today reported that the CBI and the income tax department had launched probes into Ramdev’s 34 companies.
The CBI inquiry into Balkrishna’s passport followed four weeks later and is still ongoing, as is the Enforcement Directorate’s investigation into FEMA violations and charges of money laundering. If the FEMA violations are proved, they would only carry a financial penalty, but if the charges regarding Balkrishna’s passport are upheld by the court, he may be imprisoned for two years.
Ramdev’s fallout with the government also resulted in the reopening of investigations into the disappearance of Shankar Dev by the CBI. Ramdev appeared on a Times Now show in conversation with Arnab Goswami and said that the reinvestigation was a part of the Congress conspiracy against him using its "dirty tricks department". He alleged that the government was conspiring to fabricate evidence against him to implicate him in murder and a "drugs, sex and tax racket".
The debacle at the Ramlila grounds had derailed the momentum that Ramdev’s Bharat Swabhiman Party had gathered. It seemed that Ramdev’s political career was finished. For anyone else this may have been a reasonable conclusion to draw.
But Ramdev has a remarkable ability to fight back. The boy from Said Alipur had not come this far by being a quitter. He’d taken on the government and very nearly brought it down. With his television channels, he could easily do this again. When he told millions of people across the country that the government was unfairly persecuting him, most believed him. Undeniably, the government’s relentless pursuit did have the whiff of vindictive persecution.
Ramdev became the rallying call of a resistance movement. It brought him new allies who were powerful, politically savvy and waiting in the wings to seize power in New Delhi.
But while Ramdev was scheming and strategising, and Balkrishna was fighting serious charges of forgery, neither had the mental bandwidth for business.
(Excerpted with permission from Godman to Tycoon: The Untold Story of Baba Ramdev by Priyanka Pathak-Narain, available in bookstores and on www.juggernaut.in)