Fringe politician with the air of a don

In the public eye, Sinh is known as a Congress leader and a media entrepreneur from the North-East.

Matang Sinh met visitors at his Gole Market residence in New Delhi in a small hall that one would reach after passing through byzantine corridors and climbing narrow stairs. He would make an appearance in the hall through a small door that would otherwise be shut.

His office in Noida was equally eerie, with gun-toting security personnel guarding the entrance to the office as well as to his room. Visitors had to pass through an elaborate security check before getting an entry into his den. He was warm and down-to-earth in his interaction but the ambiance, combined with his safari suit, ring-studded fingers and betel-leaf-stained teeth, gave him the air of a don.

In the public eye, Sinh is known as a Congress leader and a media entrepreneur from the North-East. He claims he was born in Assam and played a crucial role in building Youth Congress in the state before he caught former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi’s eye and moved to New Delhi on his insistence. He remained away from the limelight till 1993 before former prime minister Narasimha Rao appointed him the minister of state for parliamentary affairs. The stint was short lived and in 1998, Sinh was expelled from the Congress for using derogatory language towards Congress president Sonia Gandhi on a news channel after the party did not elect him for the Upper House. He made two efforts to get back into the party fold but with little success.

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His rootless existence in national politics, however, didn’t dampen his clout. According to people who know him, he was up-to-the-minute on what was happening inside the party. He received Congress and regional leaders from West Bengal and the North-East at his residence regularly, according to his staff. He fondly recounted stories of unsavoury favours senior politicians sought from him and how he happily obliged them. In 2013, when the news of Saradha scam broke, a senior minister of the Trinamool Congress visited him with a request to arrange a meeting with Sonia.

It seems far-fetched that his decade-old news broadcast business of around six channels might have lent him the sway he enjoyed in Delhi. Sinh got into the broadcast business thanks to his estranged wife Manoranjana Sinh. A former journalist, Manoranjana met Sinh while she covered Parliament for a leading business daily published from New Delhi. The two were married soon. Manoranjana claims she had applied for news broadcast licenses in 2003 and launched Positiv TV, the company that still houses the channels including a Hindi news channel Focus TV. Being the primary investor in the company, Sinh managed to oust Manoranjana after their marriage went sour. The two are still fighting legal battles to settle the ownership of Positiv TV.

As for the channels, while Focus TV remains a non-starter in the Hindi space, the regional channels did well in the North-East initially. But by late 2000s, the market started getting crowded with new launches directly or indirectly backed by politicians. Soon, the going got tough and Positiv TV, according to Manoranjana, began accumulating losses. In his letter, Saradha group founder Sudipto Sen alleged that Sinh took Rs 28 crore from him in exchange for selling 50 per cent stake in his Bangla news channel.

It isn’t only Sen that Sinh tried to raise funds from. According to a petition filed by Manoranjana with the Company Law Board, Sinh tried to sell majority stake in Positiv TV to Congress MP Naveen Jindal who was embroiled in a legal battle with Zee Enterprise promoter Subhash Chandra. Sinh, however, maintained that he only raised a loan from Jindal and did not cede the control of the company to him.
Sinh’s fringe play in politics and the news business notwithstanding, the reports that ousted home secretary Anil Goswami tried to stall his arrest and helped him keep the Z-plus security cover do little to lift the haze under which he operated.

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