Subrata Roy: The man who built an empire – until it fell apart

Outside Sahara Shahar in Lucknow, Wednesday. (Express photo by Vishal Srivastav)

On November 14, Roy died in a Mumbai hospital of a cardiorespiratory arrest following, what a company statement said, had been an extended battle with complications arising from metastatic malignancy, hypertension, and diabetes. He was 75.

The building of an empire

Born in Bihar’s Araria district, Roy spent his childhood in Calcutta before his father’s job at a sugar mill in UP’s Deoria district got the family to move to the adjacent Gorakhpur district. After a diploma in mechanical engineering, Roy started his chit fund business in Gorakhpur before making Lucknow the centre of his business empire.

Dr Deepak Chopra (extreme left) seen along with actor Amitabh Bachchan, Subrata Roy Sahara, political leader Amar Singh at the luanch of Environmental Excellence Centre at Amby valley. (Express archives)

The imposing Sahara Tower is among Lucknow’s earliest high-rises, towering above the nearby buildings at Kapoorthala crossing, one of Lucknow’s most prominent locations. Built in the mid-1980s, this was the headquarters of the Sahara India chit fund business and it was here that Roy sat, in his luxurious office on the top floor. In early 1990, after Roy launched his newspaper ‘Rashtriya Sahara’, which was among the top three Hindi dailies in the 1990s and 2000s, another Sahara Tower came up close to the first one.

But it is Sahara Shahar – Roy’s fortress-like residence in the posh Gomti Nagar area of Lucknow – that’s the stuff of stories, both real and apocryphal. Spread across 270 acres, since the mid-1990s, this has been his family home where he lived with his wife, two sons and parents.

It was during the Mulayam Singh government’s term in 1995 that Roy got 170 acres on lease from the Lucknow Municipal Corporation; the remaining 100 acres, in the city’s green belt, was given to him on lease by the Lucknow Development Authority.

Former Prime Minister Inder Kumar Gujral with Sahara Group Chairman Subrata Roy (Express archives)

With the land mired in legal hurdles, not all of 270 acres could be developed, but where he could, Roy built big, glamorous auditoriums, luxurious guesthouses and what was unheard in those times – a helipad for choppers, complete with a fuel station.

However, legal complications meant that theatres, towers for Sahara India offices, malls, commercial complexes, and residential colonies with flats and cottages remained unfinished inside the complex.

A statue of Mother India at the entrance greeted both Roy’s high-profile celebrity guests and the common Lucknowites, who hoped to get a peek of the mansion behind the high walls but were kept out by the tight security apparatus.

Residents of Vipul Khand colony, which lies across the road from Sahara Shahar, speak of how, for about a decade after 2000, when the mansion came up, the sounds of choppers taking off and landing and the sight of limousines streaming in and out were part of their everyday life. Former US president Bill Clinton and tennis star Boris Becker are known to have been among Roy’s guests at Sahara Shahar.

Vijay Mallya (R), co-owner of the Force India Formula One team, and Sahara Group Chairman Subrata Roy shake hands at a news conference in New Delhi. (Express archives)

They talk of how the only time they saw Roy and his family members outside Sahara Shahar was during the wedding festivities of his elder son Sushanto in 2004, when the baaratis, including Amitabh Bachchan and the who’s who of India’s film and political circles, danced to Bollywood tunes.

Politics and the high table

However, by the mid-1990s, Roy had made a name for himself in political circles as he hobnobbed with some of the top politicians in Uttar Pradesh then.

Roy is known to have developed close ties with then Congress stalwart Vir Bahadur Singh, who was UP CM from 1985 to 1988 and who, like Roy, hailed from Gorakhpur.

After Vir Bahadur Singh’s death in 1989, Roy caught the attention of another rising star in UP politics, Mulayam Singh Yadav, who headed the first Janata Dal government in the state in 1989. By the time Mulayam founded the Samajwadi Party in 1992, Roy had found his space in the leader’s inner circle, which included politician Amar Singh, business magnate Anil Ambani and superstar Amitabh Bachchan.

Around this time, he is also known to have played a key role in the party’s electoral contests – both Parliament and the state Assembly.

During the 1996 Lok Sabha election, when the Samajwadi Party fielded film star Raj Babbar against BJP stalwart Atal Bihari Vajpayee in Lucknow, Roy took over the reins of Babbar’s election management, with one of the floors of Sahara Tower being turned into the election management centre.

Sahara chief Subrata Roy waves as he enters the Supreme Court to appear for hearing in a case against the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) over a dispute of returning money to its investors, in New Delhi. (Express archives)

Then Deputy SP and circle officer of Lucknow’s Mahanagar area, Rajesh Kumar Pandey, who retired as IG in 2022, recalls an incident that took place at this centre ahead of the 1996 election.

“Ashutosh Pandey (then ASP and now ADG, UP Police) and I were at Kapoorthala crossing on the evening of May 1 when we saw hundreds of people coming out of the Rashtriya Sahara building. Sensing a problem, we stopped a few of them and started questioning them. Since they all gave different reasons for their presence there, we asked our team to search their bags. As word spread of our search, a stampede-like situation followed and the men started running helter-skelter. Some ran towards the Sahara Tower. A search of their bags revealed a small bottle with a chemical, a pamphlet with some instructions and voter slips. The men told us that the chemical was meant to remove the indelible voter ink.”

The retired officer adds, “We immediately informed our senior officers and the district magistrate. The then DM got the chemical checked by an official and indeed, it erased the indelible ink. The DM immediately wrote to the Election Commission and a case was lodged at Mahanagar police station.”

Ashutosh Pandey too confirmed the incident and recalls that Raj Babbar had then come to the police station and got into an argument with the personnel on duty.

Rajesh Pandey says the case, however, never went into trial as the court dismissed the matter. “Every time a police team reached Sahara Tower to probe the case, the building would be vacant,” he says.

The consummate businessman that he was, Roy knew who he had to bet on. “Atal Bihari Vajpayee won that election and became the Prime Minister. After the swearing-in ceremony, he came to Lucknow and addressed a public meeting at Begum Hazrat Mahal Park in Hazratganj area. While Vajpayee was giving his speech, Sahara India choppers showered flower petals at the public meeting.”

As Roy’s clout peaked between 1995 and 2006, Lucknow had its share of Bollywood glitz as top film stars and celebrities, from Amitabh Bachchan to Shah Rukh Khan, Salman Khan, and the Indian cricket and hockey teams, besides prominent politicians, graced Roy’s parties and his residence at Sahara Shahar.

In 2003, when Mulayam became CM for the third time, Roy managed to get prime land in the heart of Hazratganj for the city’s first mall, ‘Sahara Mall’. The city’s oldest hotel, Carlton, had to give up a share of its land for the mall.

The first time Roy faced some government action was in 1999, during the tenure of the BJP government led by Kalyan Singh. Singh had ordered the razing of the boundary walls of Roy’s dream project, ‘Sahara Shahar’, in the posh Gomti Nagar area, which, according to the Lucknow Development Authority, was made on encroached land.

Mother Teresa with Sahara Group Chairman Subrata Roy (Express archives)

Later, in 2008, then CM Mayawati ordered the construction of a flyover, with the government taking over a big portion of Sahara Shahar.

In 2011, with SEBI taking cognisance of complaints that Sahara India investors were being paid their savings, Roy’s empire in Lucknow started to shrink.

After 2010, as his newspaper, television channels, film production and real estate businesses either stopped doing business or were closed due to court cases, his palatial residence, Sahara Shahar, and the Lucknow headquarters of his empire, Sahara Towers, wore a deserted look.

On Wednesday, November 15, for the first time in a decade, the gates of Sahara Shahar were thrown open. Once again, like the old times, cars streamed in and out as hundreds turned up to pay homage to the man who built – and lost – an empire.