Tarnished Dynasty

The latest first information report (FIR) filed by Delhi Police’s Economic Offences Wing against Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi and six others in the long-running National Herald case is a moral indictment of a political dynasty that has come to embody entitlement without accountability.

The allegations, drawn from an Enforcement Directorate (ED) complaint spanning investigations from 2008 to 2024, describe what prosecutors call an “elaborate criminal conspiracy” to take control of assets worth over Rs. 2,000 crore belonging to Associated Journals Ltd (AJL), the original publisher of the National Herald. The mechanism is almost offensively audacious: the conversion of a Rs. 90.21-crore loan extended by the All India Congress Committee (AICC) into equity, which was then cornered by Young Indian, a private company in which Sonia and Rahul together hold 76 per cent stake. The price paid for this was allegedly a paltry Rs. 50 lakh.

The FIR alleges that Congress, under the stewardship of its then president and general secretary, voluntarily surrendered a recoverable asset of Rs. 90 crore and with it, effective ownership of properties worth nearly Rs. 2,000 crore without open consultation, market valuation or transparent process. Shareholders of AJL, reduced overnight to irrelevance after Young Indian acquired 99 percent of the company, are said to have been cheated. So too, the FIR suggests, were Congress donors, whose money was effectively bartered away.

Three properties stand as symbols of this quiet expropriation: Herald House in central Delhi, AJL House in Mumbai’s Bandra East, and a prime property in Lucknow. All had been allotted at concessional rates for public purposes but allegedly ended up serving private control. To call this a mere ‘technical breach,’ as the Congress routinely does, is to insult both common sense and corporate governance.

The Gandhis’ standard defence, that this is a case of political vendetta, has worn thin with repetition. The original complaint came not from a government agency but from Subramanian Swamy in 2013. Trial courts took cognisance in 2014. The High Court declined to intervene. Formal charges were filed by the ED in April 2024.

Yet the Congress’s instinctive response remains denial without explanation. When confronted with the new FIR, it has claimed ignorance. When asked about Young Indian’s alleged bogus donations, fake advertisement revenue and questionable advance rents, the party falls back on scripted outrage.

The National Herald was not an ordinary corporate asset but a political legacy, founded by Jawaharlal Nehru as a voice of the freedom movement. To see it reduced to a vehicle in a labyrinthine financial transaction replete with shell companies and suspicious revenues speaks to the moral hollowing-out of the very dynasty that claims custodianship of India’s republican soul. Each new filing in the National Herald case chips away at what little moral authority still survives with the Congress. India’s opposition needs credibility. Instead, it is saddled with a dynasty trapped in legal quicksand of its own making.