Non-Noodle Tangles

The story began a while back. Soon after Virbhadra Singh took over in December 2012, the Himachal Pradesh government cancelled a lease for Patanjali Food and Herbal Park Pvt Ltd. The 28-acre park, valued at Rs 35 crore, had been leased out for 99 years by the previous government for Re 1 per year. The cancellation was apparently due to the illegality of the deed.

The fallout was even more interesting: Patanjali stopped buying apple juice concentrate from HPMC. Apart from HPMC, only one company— based in Srinagar—sells the fruit juice concentrate in India. “We have chec­ked with the Srinagar company. Baba Ramdev is neither buying the concentrate from them and nor from us. Since it’s not us, we’re wondering from whom the Baba is sourcing apple juice concentrate,” says HPMC vice chairman Prakash Thakur. Meanwhile, Patanjali’s spokespersons deny that the concentrate is being sourced from China, which is what a number of other fruit juice companies are doing.

The Virbhadra Singh government may have targeted the baba, but other Congress governments have preferred to keep him on their side. Actually, for that matter even UPA 2, which allegedly started a witchhunt aga­i­nst Ramdev, saw merit in the baba’s swa­deshi push. The food processing ministry, then under Subodh Kant Sahay, gave a grant of Rs 10 crore to companies promoting cold storage and food processing. “Ramdev’s trust was one of the 10 entities selected,” say officials. But they admit the criteria for selection was opaque.

It was Subodh Kant Sahay who was pressed into service to get Ramdev to call off his 2011 Ram Lila Maidan protest. And it was with a bit of nudging from Sahay that Ramdev set up a food park in Sahay’s constituency of Ranchi. Patanjali Ayurved invested Rs 107 crore, taking a 25 per cent stake in the Jharkhand park. But in 2014, Ramdev bowed out of the project. Truth be told, the flurry of show-cause notices issued to Ramdev’s companies in 2011 (around the time of his Ram Lila agitation that embarrassed the government) have fizzled out. The island of Little Cumbrae in Scotland— ‘gifted’ to the Baba in 2009 by his devotees Sarwan and Sunita Poddar—is one example. The Enforcement Directorate initially said this was a classic case of money laundering. The catch: the Poddars were NRIs who had given a gift to a UK-based trust, Patanjali Yog Peeth Trust, both foreign entities.

Strangely, the ED forgot the small matter of Patanjali Ayurved Ltd, in which, as per filings by the company with the Registrar of Companies, the Poddars hold 7.2 per cent stake. “Both parties were questioned at that time in 2011 but both appear to be foreign entities and beyond the jurisdiction of Indian agencies. And there is nothing in the law that prevents a foreigner from taking a directorship or a stake in an Indian company,” say ED officials.

Other show-cause notices that made headlines in 2011 are now just a matter of adjudication before the ED Special Authority. Of three show-cause notices, in two cases, the ED accused Ramdev’s companies of ‘non-rea­lisation of export proceeds’—basically of not bringing back foreign exchange earned from exporting goods to countries like the US, Canada and the UK. In one case, the outsta­nding export amount is about Rs 35 lakh. First-time offenders, like Patanjali Ayurveda Ltd, invite no more than a nominal penalty of about 20 per cent.

The much touted ED case against the Jharkhand food park was one of FDI in the park of over Rs 2 crore. Ramdev’s company has also been accused of a delay in the rep­orting of received foreign funds to the RBI within the stipulated 6 months.

Ramdev’s clout hasn’t always kept the law at bay. Ramdev’s brother, Bharat Ram, was sent to a month’s judicial custody in June this year for allegedly instigating a crowd of workers that lynched a truck union worker outside the Patanjali Yog Peeth factory premises. The FIR said the handy collection of stones kept in bags and the sharp-edged weapons showed that the workers had made preparations well in advance. Even as the investigations were on, the SSP was transferred out.

But what has raised eyebrows is the government’s lethargy in investigating the theft of the allegedly for­ged documents by which the passport of Ramdev aide, Bal Kris­hna, was made. The CBI has filed a chargesheet in the Dehradun CBI court against the forged passport. But the file containing the alleged forged documents and affidavits­—that went missing from the records of the Haridwar Municipal Cor­poration—has not been traced. No progress has been made so far in the FIR that was lodged at Shehar Kotwali near Har ki Pauri over the theft of the papers either.

There has been a similar lack of progress in reports filed by successive district magistrates, who have pointed out that land belo­nging to farmers and the irrigation department has been encroached upon by Patanjali Yog Peeth and Divya Mandir Trust. Clearly, Ramdev is not to be stopped so easily.