Ranchi: On Radium Road in Ranchi, the palatial Sushila Niketan stands out as an outlier in a 5 km radius. The bungalow is splendid, its boundary walls massive and stands eerily quiet. The silence was broken on 6 December as hoards of media descended here expecting an Income Tax (I-T) team raid any time.
Named after Congress Rajya Sabha MP Dhiraj Sahu’s mother Sushila Devi, the home of the influential family from Jharkhand’s Lohardaga eventually saw the I-T searches in connection with the alleged ill-gotten wealth of the Jharkhand liquor baron.
Neighbours and at least a dozen Congress state leaders recalled that this house was built by Congress leader and Dhiraj’s father Baldeo Sahu himself some 50 years ago and that all the sons and the grandsons along with their spouses come often and stay here.
A 70-year-old neighbour quipped that nobody returned empty-handed from the Sahu houses in Ranchi and Lohardaga, nor will the I-T officials.
As the pictures of the confiscation of crores of rupees from properties of the Sahu family in Odisha played out on the television screens, there is hardly any sense of surprise among politicians and businessmen around Radium Road in Ranchi.
Phone calls and messages to Dhiraj Sahu went unanswered.
Family tree & business ownership
Senior Congress leaders and friends close to the Sahu family told ThePrint that Baldeo Sahu and Sushila Devi had six sons and five daughters and that all their sons got involved in the family businesses.
Among the six sons, two-time Ranchi MP Shiv Prasad Sahu was the eldest while Dhiraj Sahu is the youngest. Nandlal Sahu, Uday Shanker Prasad, Gopal Sahu, and Kishore Sahu made up the rest. Only three brothers — Uday, Gopal, and Dhiraj — are now alive.
Uday is the chairman of the family-run Boudh Distillery in Odisha that produces spirits for the manufacturing of Indian Made Foreign Liquor (IMFL). Gopal fought on a Congress ticket against sitting BJP MP Jayant Sinha from Hazaribagh in the 2019 general elections, but lost by nearly 5 lakh votes. Dhiraj is a member of the Rajya Sabha from Jharkhand since 2009.
A family friend of the Sahus said that all the children of the Sahu brothers have joined the family business in some form or capacity.
Shiv Prasad’s sons Sanjay and Rahul Sahu are the directors of the family firms Kishore Prasad Bijay Prasad Ltd. and Kwality Bottlers, respectively.
Nandlal’s son Durgesh Sahu runs a marriage hall in Ranchi among other businesses. The director of Boudh Distillery and Baldeo Sahu Infra is Uday’s son Amit, according to the Sahu family friend. Amit also manages the family’s private hospital in Ranchi.
Kishore has two sons Rohit and Ritesh Sahu. The family friend told ThePrint that Rohit oversees the functioning of Sapphire International School in Ranchi. Ritesh is the managing director of four companies, including the Boudh Distillery.
Dhiraj has a son, Harshit Sahu, and a daughter. Hasrshit is the director of Baldeo Sahu Infra.
The Sahu family friend, however, could not recall the names of Gopal’s children.
Also Read: Opaque model, unchecked sales — inside Congress MP Dhiraj Sahu’s family liquor empire in Odisha
‘Shiv Prasad most political, Uday Shanker true inheritor’
Another family friend said Shiv Prasad was the “most political” among all the Sahu siblings and that he was very popular among tribals. The Ranchi MP used to spend a lot of time among them and enjoyed ‘Handia’, a country rice liquor, instead of wine or foreign liquor, he added.
Uday has the best business acumen and has understood the intricacies of business like his father, he said, crediting him with the Sahu business empire’s rapid expansion and continuous expansion.
If the accounts of the family friends quoted above and at least half a dozen politicians from Congress in Jharkhand are to be believed, Dhiraj is not the brightest among his siblings. One of them was a little more charitable in his observation, calling Dhiraj as “humble, very simple” and not displaying any sign of family wealth and influence.
Some of these politicians told ThePrint that Dhiraj’s name dominated headlines just because he is an MP and added that his riches were ancestral wealth bequeathed to him.
A top Congress leader told ThePrint that Dhiraj lacks both the business acumen of his brother Uday Shankar Prasad and the political connection of Shiv Prasad Sahu. “He lacks ‘I’ of intellect and ‘B’ of business. His only good fortune is that he was born in an affluent family where people have been gifted with financial success. His role is limited to organising events in Lohardaga district and keeps travelling back and forth between Lohardaga, Ranchi, Delhi, and Bangkok,” the Congress leader told ThePrint.
Highlighting Dhiraj’s loss in the 2019 and 2014 general elections from Chatra, the Congress leader asserted that the party gifted him a Rajya Sabha ticket because of the Sahu family’s steadfast support.
Tales of fabulous wealth
A senior Congress leader told ThePrint that it would not be a surprise if the daily turnover of the country liquor empire was Rs 10 crore, adding that the announcement of confiscation of Rs 300 crore is coming from lack of knowledge of the business and understanding of the Sahu family’s past.
Apocryphal tales of wealth that go back to pre-Independence days abound among this section of Ranchi’s coterie.There are fabled stories of how Baldeo Sahu opened his coffers on the call of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru for the cause of a nascent, independent India.
When the Heavy Engineering Corporation was incorporated by the Nehru government in the late 1950s, there were not too many hotel businesses operating in this region, another senior Congress leader told ThePrint, adding that the Sahu family then used to own a hotel which still functions at the heart of Ranchi city.
Family friends also recalled the story of hearing from their grandparents about how Baldeo Sahu took Rajendra Prasad on long rides on his BSA motorbike from Lohardaga to Daltonganj in the 1940s.
Baldeo Sahu’s empire began with country liquor in the then undivided Bihar around the 1950s, and then he started moving his business slowly to neighbouring Odisha, they said.
While the business progressed rapidly and the family went on to become dominant players in Odisha, the younger generation of the Sahus diversified into different sectors. In 2012, the multi-speciality hospital was opened at Ranchi’s Albert Ekka Chowk.
The family also opened a private school in Ranchi, they said, explaining the family has various small businesses spanning across different districts of Jharkhand.
Nearly all the politicians in Ranchi who know Dhiraj Sahu and his family agreed that the amount of money that the I-T teams seized was not “unexpected” given their flourishing family business and how dominant they were in the country liquor business in Odisha.
They also concurred that even if the hoarded cash was illegal and there was some sort of tax evasion, the overall business empire is not built solely on cheating and corruption.
However, they conceded that hoarding cash — and of this much amount — was nothing short of “stupidity” of the Sahu brothers and the people who run their operations in Odisha. One of the Congress leaders remarked that the family’s “ignorance” resulted in the I-T raids.
Another senior leader was confident that the Sahus will not have any problem in explaining the source of the money and suggested the media to wait for an official statement from the I-T department. “We have heard since childhood that in this part of India, people running daru bhattis (distilleries) keep huge amounts of money in sacks. Hence, Rs 300 crore should not be beyond explanation for Sahu family,” the Congress leader told ThePrint.
To a question on Sahu’s family’s financial help to the Congress party in Jharkhand, a senior state functionary said that if Sahu family had contributed financially based on their ability, the party would have won 50 assembly seats in Jharkhand.
The state functionary acknowledged the helping hand of the Sahus at individual level but added that their financial sway and political influence was limited to Lohardaga district.
Lohardaga occupies a central position for the three generations of the Sahu family with granddaughters and grandsons assembling there for ceremonies to make them a grand spectacle, according to the family friends.
The above-mentioned Congress functionary endorsed the view that barring Shiv Prasad, none of the siblings could hold sway over voters, as established by the electoral defeats of Dhiraj and Gopal.
Also Read: What happens to cash seized in income tax raids? A look as Congress MP-linked ‘Rs 350cr’ op goes on
‘Money looted from Jal, Jungle, Zameen’
The phrase ‘Jal, Jungle, Zameen (water, forest, land)’ is synonymous with Jharkhand which was carved out of Bihar in 2000.
Leader of Opposition in Jharkhand Assembly Amar Bauri alleged that the Sahu family has amassed such huge wealth only after selling ‘Jal, Jungle, Zameen’ and that the coalition government of Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM)- Congress and Rashtriya Janta Dal (RJD) has played a huge role in it.
The seized money could well be the kickbacks hoarded from the sand mafia, transfer postings and other illegal activities and was stacked at Dhiraj Sahu’s business premise for safety, the BJP legislator said.
Bauri also dismissed the Congress act of distancing itself from the Sahu family business empire, saying the Rajya Sabha MP shares a cordial relationship with the party high command. Sahu is one of their treasurers who has been doing “dishonest work with utmost honesty”, he alleged.
BJP state vice-president Jai Prakash Bhai Patel told ThePrint that the Congress distancing itself is an act of attempting to wash its hands off the sins committed by the Sahus. Patel added that though he would wait for the I-T statement, he suspected corruption considering the amount of cash seized in the post-demonetisation era.
Similarly, Jharkhand BJP spokesperson Shiv Pujan Pathak said that there is a mismatch between assets and liabilities declared by Dhiraj Sahu in the election affidavit in 2018 and money seized at premises linked to him.
He claimed that the confiscated money could not be limited only to the Sahu family and that it could well be the returns from the Mahadev betting app in Chhattisgarh.
“I had read somewhere that when ED was raiding bureaucrats in Jharkhand, money was being diverted from Ranchi and other parts of the state to outside. I don’t rule out that some portion of the money recovered in Odisha was corruption money that was diverted by the Jharkhand government,” Pathak told ThePrint.
ThePrint reached out to Jharkhand Congress president Rajesh Thakur who sought to skirt the question about the cash seizures.
“I am not the PM that I will say anything based on a newspaper article. The I-T department has not made any official statement as of now. We have seen BJP national president Bangaru Laxman taking bribes on TV and he was sentenced for the crime as well. Earlier, Rs 1,300 crore were recovered from a Gujarat businessman, the PM did not make any tweet or statement. This whole case should be seen in context with only the I-T department and the Sahu family and their business operations. The Congress party has nothing to do with their business,” Thakur told ThePrint.
(Edited by Tony Rai)