On August 13, 2022, during Covid, a Tiranga rally for Independence Day was taken out from the Delhi Gymkhana Club situated across the road from the Prime Minister’s house – perhaps the most heavily guarded square kilometre in India.

Four months earlier on April 1, 2022, the Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA) had appointed a six-member team of director-administrators in compliance with a National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) order. (See Timeline below).

The Tiranga rally was led by two of the six – BJP member Kuljit Chahal and former IRS officer Ashish Verma. Inexplicably, the rally was not authorised, and they also decided to film it with a drone – two acts that were oddly provocative in this highest security zone. 

The rally ended with the police registering an FIR suo moto. The ACP who came to investigate the drone was not allowed to enter the Club. The two Directors and the Club F&B manager, Bhatnagar, were named in the FIR, which did not mention a drone despite video footage of it and staff witnesses corroborating its presence.  

As things spiralled, Club staff members lodged an FIR and went to court alleging serious intimidation and harassment after the episode. An FIR was separately lodged about the drone by Col Ashish Khanna, the Club’s former CEO and Secretary (who had taken the Club to court in 2020, alleging wrongful termination), with video evidence. The drone was never found. 

If it sounds bizarre that the Prime Minister’s own party members and appointees created a security issue near his residence, the entire period of government administration from 2021 onwards offers a list of such paradoxical episodes that raise serious questions of intent. 

Before examining what went wrong, a brief timeline establishes the arc of events till 2024.

The MCA was approached by members and applicants in good faith, from 2016 to 2018, to address Club mismanagement. Its mandate was clear: clean up the affairs of the Club,  eliminate fraud and corruption and restore a legacy institution to financial propriety . 

Yet there is a long trail of incriminating and self-sabotaging acts of commission and omission since. Apart from hiking charges considerably to improve profitability, holding certain sporting events, commissioning forensic accounting reports that were never officially finalised or utilised for change, and endless rounds of membership data collection that were never concluded over five long years, it is difficult to discern any serious attempts at transforming the mess MCA had purportedly come in for. 

Instead, the MCA-appointed administrators presided over an incredible run of puzzling events, all of which somehow managed to take the Club's affairs to a new nadir and make its accounts, finances, image, and management worse than they were before. The most serious are the financial issues that have compounded rather than cleared up.