PROLOGUE

The opening paragraph of a January 2021 article in the Organiser, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) mouthpiece, is striking in its effusiveness: “Blessed are these people by the entry of Sridhar Vembu with his IT behemoth ZOHO with a determination to transform the scenario. Poverty, illiteracy, caste tensions, migration & lack of self-sufficiency will be things of the past if honest Swadeshi Sridhar’s ongoing plans aren’t challenged by the forces responsible for perpetuating the listed/unlisted evils.” 

The “blessed”, whether they know it or not, are the residents of Govindaperi, a village in Tenkasi district in interior south Tamil Nadu, over 600 km from Chennai. Many of its residents are farm labourers and daily wage workers, their poverty framed by the startling beauty of acre upon acre of verdant paddy fields, with the imposing Western Ghats looming in the background. On a Wednesday evening in November, a gaggle of children in uniform come tumbling down a barely tarred road with paddy fields on either side, some on bicycles, some on foot. A school bus had trundled past a little earlier.

It’s an unlikely address for a billionaire tech entrepreneur, but down that road is where Sridhar lives, since moving back to India from California just before the pandemic. About 20 km away in Mathalamparai village is the Tenkasi office and training facility of Zoho, the global software products company he co-founded. The students heading home are from a charitable school he started, called Kalaivani Kalvi Maiyam.

Some of the residents in and around Govindaperi work in the school as canteen staff and in other jobs, while many more work on Sridhar’s land, which the villagers say he bought in 2009 and estimate to be over 400 acres. He lives in a house on the same premises as the school but set well away from the road, which multiple locals referred to as “agraharam.” The terminology is telling, since that is what the Brahmin quarter is traditionally called. While Sridhar is a Brahmin, the other residents of the village are from the intermediate Thevar and Nadar castes, with Scheduled Castes living in an adjoining village.  

The same Organiser article goes on about Sridhar’s “magnitude” and “uniqueness” before concluding: “Will the Nation notice this unique individual, his aggressive and down to earth ‘Aathmanirbhar’ implementation?” 

The question was likely rhetorical.

By the time the article was published, the Narendra Modi government had already awarded Sridhar the Padma Shri. In the years since, he has come to occupy a unique and increasingly influential position at the intersection of business, technology, and the politics and policies of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its fountainhead, the RSS.

As a successful tech entrepreneur who swapped California for Tenkasi, who runs a global firm out of Chennai, and speaks of building for rural India and the ‘Swadeshi’ model, the BJP could not have asked for a better poster boy. And unlike some of his more extravagant peers in India’s wealthiest lists, Sridhar projects an image of simplicity. Photographs of the veshti-clad tech leader cycling through villages or sitting by paddy fields are now familiar, images reinforced by his comments like “I don’t need more money, my tastes are simple” and “I am a capitalist and I don’t care about net worth.”

Much of this suggests an exemplar, a role model whose star in the Sangh Parivar constellation is in the ascendant.

Yet, a wider mirror held up to Sridhar’s life catches other reflections.