A minnow takes a swing at the whale

Mumbai: Subhash Chandra has nothing left to lose. That, in the end, is the story.

The man who wired satellite television into Indian living rooms before anyone else dared stood before a phone camera last week and did the one thing India’s tycoons never do. He named Mukesh Ambani. Out loud. By name.

For the first time in his long career, Chandra pointed a finger at the country’s richest man and his television machine, and accused it of running a “fake narrative” against him.

Witch-hunting, he called it.

Propaganda.

Reliance swatted it away in a paragraph.

Baseless, it said.

Our media brands have never been used to attack anyone.

We wish him well.

And there, in miniature, is the fight.

One side speaks in furious, wounded videos shot on a handset.

The other replies in three cool sentences and moves on.

A minnow thrashing.

A whale that barely turns its head.

But do not mistake this minnow for a small fish. Chandra is the man who built the ocean. In 1992 he launched Zee TV, the first private Hindi satellite channel in the country, and lit the fuse on Indian pay television. He ruled the Hindi heartland and the regional markets like a colossus, channel after channel, language after language. He wired the cable that carried it and floated Dish TV, India’s first direct-to-home service.

Alongside Star, Sony and Sun, he built the ecosystem the industry, Ambani included, now fights to own. That is what makes this so hard to watch. This is not some chancer caught short. It is a founding father in the dock.

The trigger was a number. Rs 22,006 crore.

That is what the National Company Law Tribunal admitted in claims against Chandra in his personal insolvency. Against it, a repayment plan of Rs 6.5 crore. A haircut of 99.97 per cent. Read that again. Lenders get back roughly three paise on every hundred rupees.

Even the tribunal could not stomach it. Its two-member bench split down the middle, and the plan cleared only after a third member, judicial member Nilesh Sharma, was drafted in to break the tie. A near-total write-off, waved through on a casting vote. It now heads back to the original bench for a formal order under the Companies Act. When the court that approved a deal cannot itself agree on it, the lenders will pounce. Canara Bank already has. HDFC Bank is weighing the same.

Put like that it looks obscene, and Chandra knows it. So he has spent the week trying to unpick it.

He was a guarantor, he insists, not a borrower.

The real claim against him is Rs 3,992 crore, not Rs 22,000 crore.

He sold his Zee shares.

He mortgaged or sold his homes.

By his account, Rs 43,000 crore of a Rs 45,000 crore pile is gone, repaid by putting everything he owned on the table, and over a lifetime he has handed India’s banks Rs 60,000 to 70,000 crore in interest alone.

He even disputes that he was ever worth Rs 45,000 crore, a figure he says was conjured by treating the Essel group’s market value as his personal wallet.

His own 2016 Rajya Sabha declaration put his assets at Rs 39.08 crore.

A guarantor, he says, not a defaulter. A citizen, not a runaway.

Maybe. The line between a borrower and a guarantor is real, and much of the coverage has missed the difference. But a 99.97 per cent haircut is still a 99.97 per cent haircut. That number will be fought over for months.

What lifts this above a debtor’s lament is where Chandra has aimed.

Not at the banks.

At the newsroom.

He says TV18 and CNBC-TV18, Ambani’s channels, pushed the Rs-22,000-crore-for-Rs-6.5-crore line knowing it misled.

He says a friend rang Network18’s editor-in-chief and was told the editor had “instructions from above” and was “compelled.”

He says he then tried to reach Ambani by phone, and wrote to him.

That is an explosive charge, and an unproven one.

Reliance denies it flatly.

But it lands on a nerve Indian media has never quite soothed.

When one house owns the news and has business interests too, who keeps the news honest?

Chandra, of all people, knows the answer.

He built Zee News into a force, backed Narendra Modi in 2014, and never, he says, asked a favour in return.

A man who once ran the machine is now shouting at a bigger one.

Then he turned personal. “Mukesh ji, please stop the wrong propaganda against me and my group,” he said. “You are the son of Dhirubhai Ambani. I have learnt a lot from him. I think you have not learnt anything from him.”

A jab dressed as a compliment, and meant to sting.

His sharpest charge, though, is about the price of Zee itself.

Chandra, and investment firms close to him, some of them private equity, allege that he offered Zee to Ambani at Rs 600 a share.

Ambani’s camp, he claims, wanted to pay Rs 300.

He refused.

The reply, he alleges, was a threat to drag the stock to Rs 100.

Zee is circling that number now.

And the 2019 crash, when the share fell nearly 40 per cent in a single session, was no accident, he says, but a hammering by a wall of shell and benami companies that kept the sellers impossible to trace.

He goes further still. When he approached Ambani about selling Zee to clear his debts, he claims, Ambani told him: “Subhash ji, why are you paying back the banks’ money, including interest? No one does.”

None of it is proven.

Reliance denies all of it.

But it tells you how bitter this has turned.

There is a grim symmetry to it.

Rewind to 2021.

Invesco, Zee’s largest shareholder with nearly 18 per cent, moved to throw out Chandra’s son, Punit Goenka.

Zee called it invalid and illegal.

The Bombay high court first blocked the meeting, with justice G.S. Patel observing that a company must sometimes be “saved from its own shareholders”, before a division bench set that aside.

Reliance circled too, offered to fold its media into Zee, then walked away calling itself no friend of hostile deals.

Zee ran to Sony instead, a $10 billion dream announced in December 2021 to take on Netflix and Amazon. It never closed.

The regulator accused Chandra and Goenka of diverting Rs 200 crore, an order later set aside.

Sony, spooked by the probe and deadlocked over who would run the merged firm, killed the deal in January 2024 and billed Zee $90 million for the privilege.

While Zee bled, Reliance built.

In November 2024 it fused Viacom18 and Star India into a Rs 70,352 crore, or $8.5 billion, colossus chaired by Nita Ambani, with more than 100 channels, 50 million streaming homes, JioCinema, Hotstar and the cricket.

Zee, left without a partner, watched its revenue growth crawl to 2.2 per cent and its margins thin to about a tenth.

The whale did not need to beach the minnow.

It simply grew, and the tide went out.

So how does this end?

Start with the market, because so far it has treated the affair as noise.

Chandra no longer owns Zee, by his own admission, so his words move no price he controls.

Reliance is too vast to be dented by one man’s phone video.

Investors are watching the courtroom, not the camera.

The lenders are the ones to watch.

Canara has appealed, HDFC is weighing it, and if the appellate tribunal reopens that 99.97 per cent haircut, Chandra’s clean exit turns back into a fight.

But watch the whale, not just the minnow.

Reliance answered in three sentences and went quiet, and with Mukesh Ambani and his closest media lieutenant, Manoj Modi, the man Chandra named by name, quiet is rarely the same as done.

This is a house that plays the long game and tends to win it.

It does not shout back.

It waits, and lets the lawyers do the work.

So which way does it move?

One road is the high one: having said its piece, it lets a bankrupt founder shout himself hoarse and moves on, exactly as its statement suggests.

The other is slower and colder, the one Chandra plainly fears, a war of attrition fought not on camera but in the quiet corridors where the banks and the mandarins settle these things.

If it comes to that, there is only one ending. Reliance can outspend him and outwait him a thousand times over.

Chandra is borrowing Rs 2 to 4 crore from his family. A long fight is the one fight he cannot afford, and the whale knows it better than anyone.

Can he hold out?

For now, yes, because he has already lost almost everything a whale could take.

You cannot squeeze a man who has sold his shares and his homes.

But holding out is not winning.

The appeals can drag him back to the table, and the old regulatory shadow, that 2023 order over the alleged Rs 200 crore, set aside but with the probe never quite closed, has a way of returning.

Jail, or flight?

He has answered that by refusing to run.

His pitch is that he stayed and repaid, and did not bolt to London or Dubai like promoters before him.

A man borrowing Rs 2 to 4 crore from his family to set up a small punt in Switzerland is not fleeing. He is downsizing, loudly.

Then there is Zee, the real prize.

Stripped of a partner, thin on margin, its price circling Rs 100, it is exactly the wounded asset that invites a predator.

A hostile bid is no longer unthinkable.

But here the whale has its own problem.

Reliance already owns the Viacom18-Star giant. Swallow Zee on top of that and the Competition Commission stirs. One house holding that much of the Indian eyeball is a monopoly question no regulator can wave through. That may be Zee’s best shield.

Sony, the partner that walked in 2024, carries less of that baggage and could always circle a cheaper, lonelier Zee. But it has been burned once, and it remembers the promoter drama stapled to the asset.

Zee, on its part, is not lying down.

The company he founded, now run by his son Punit Goenka with Chandra as chairman emeritus, has just made its boldest throw in years.

It grabbed the Indian rights to 39 FIFA tournaments through 2034, the World Cups of 2026 and 2030, the Women’s World Cup of 2027, and launched four Unite8 sports channels to carry them, with Z5 streaming alongside.

It has piled on cricket too, the India tour of Zimbabwe, the ILT20. Z5’s revenue is up 58 per cent.

Football, in a country that breathes cricket, is a bold bet, some would say a reckless one, for a broadcaster this thin on cash.

It is a direct swing at the Reliance-Star and Sony sports machines on the priciest turf in television.

The founder may be down. The house he built is still throwing punches, and it will buy more and push Z5 harder before it is done.

And Delhi?

Do not expect a white knight.

Chandra is not without history with the ruling party.

Zee News backed Modi in 2014, and he later sat in the Rajya Sabha.

But that bridge looks long burned.

Chandra seems to know it.

He makes a point of saying he never once asked the government for a rescue, not even at the bottom, which plays as principle and also signals that none is coming.

When opposition MPs, Congress and Shiv Sena voices, raise his haircut in Parliament, he reads it not as sympathy but as a proxy war paid for by “powerful financial houses.”

Read the room he is describing and it is one where the money, not the man, has the ear of power.

Whether Modi or Amit Shah lift a finger for him is almost the wrong question.

Everything says they will not.

And the skeletons.

Chandra brandished the word, “you have many skeletons in your closet”, and then named not one.

That is the nature of the threat, and its weakness.

A skeleton described is evidence. A skeleton merely hinted at is leverage, or bluster, or both. Until he opens a cupboard and points, the line is exactly what Reliance calls the rest of it, an allegation with nothing attached.

Whether he holds a key to anything, or is simply rattling the biggest cage in the country on his way down, only he knows.

A man with nothing left to lose is either the most dangerous witness in the room, or the emptiest.

So what is this, really.

Courage, or theatre.

A wronged man’s stand, or a bankrupt’s last turn on the stage.

Probably both.

Chandra is stripped of his empire and reduced to a family loan and a Swiss desk.

He has run out of company, and nearly out of road. All he has left is his voice and a camera.

So he uses them. “Stop this dirty game,” he warned Ambani – the man with everything, from a man with almost nothing.

The whale, you suspect, has already moved on and is readying for bigger things like an IPO.

But every so often the minnow’s bite draws blood.

This one still might.