Two years ago, on 17 November, liquor baron Ponty Chadha and his brother Hardeep killed each other in a shootout at the family’s Chhatarpur farmhouse. Mehboob Jeelani profiled Chadha in our November 2013 issue. In this excerpt from that piece, Jeelani relates the series of events that led to that fateful day.
[I]n 2010, [Ponty] Chadha’s brother Hardeep began pressuring their father, who was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, to dictate that the family’s holdings be evenly split between Chadha, Hardeep, and their third brother, Rajinder, according to a report later published in India Today. Chadha bristled: it was his leadership that grew the family’s alcohol distribution network from a single small town in western Uttar Pradesh into the largest liquor monopoly in north India; it was his hard graft that pushed the frontiers of their empire into other lucrative industries, such as sand mining and real estate; and it was his influence that seeped behind the lace curtains and into the back seats of cherry-topped Ambassadors in Dehradun, Chandigarh, Lucknow, and Delhi.
Hardeep eventually prevailed on their ailing father, and Chadha felt compelled to accede to his dying wishes. But he did so in bad faith: when their father passed away, in April 2011, Chadha reneged on the deal. For the next 16 months, the brothers argued face-to-face and through intermediaries over what they were each due. According to Balbir Singh Kohli, a close relative of the Chadha family, Chadha felt Hardeep was being manipulated. “Some people are misleading him against me,” Chadha told Kohli. “I want him to understand that.”
If 45-year-old Hardeep was susceptible to manipulation, perhaps it was because he ached to step out of Chadha’s shadow. “Wherever Hardeep went, people always recognised him as Ponty’s brother,” Ravi Sodhi, a spokesperson for Chadha’s largest company, Wave Group, told me. “He wanted his own identity.” As a result, he became increasingly imperious. “Hardeep would shout and yell at his servants just to say that he was someone important in the family,” Sodhi said. He had also taken to stroking a cat while sitting in a throne as he received guests at the Chhatarpur mansion he shared with the family and, on a recent occasion, he had inexplicably set fire to carpets worth lakhs of rupees. “After every passing month, the dispute grew bigger,” Kohli said.
The brothers’ larger quarrel over the family’s empire soon began to centre on a pair of farmhouses that Hardeep intended to dispose of against his brother’s wishes. Chadha, who was magnanimous with friends and enemies alike but could brook no impudence, was furious. Although the homes were a negligible part of the fortune he had accumulated over his two and a half decades of canny business leadership and oily political lobbying, he had resolved to keep them in the family.
On 15 November 2012, with the brothers’ acrimony reaching a fever pitch, family members prevailed on them to meet at a Delhi gurdwara. Remarkably, a second settlement was reached: according to India Today, Chadha agreed to buy Hardeep out of the business for something between Rs 400 crore and Rs 1,200 crore. It must have seemed like a small price to pay to rid himself, and the empire he built, of his brother’s meddling. But whatever relief there was didn’t last long. The next day, another meeting was called between Chadha and his brother. Hardeep, reportedly hectored by the people counselling him against Chadha, annulled the payout deal. It was the final nail.
Shortly after 9.50 a.m. on Saturday the 17th, Chadha convened a meeting of armed men at his family’s Chhatarpur mansion, on Delhi’s south-western outskirts, where he lived with his mother and both his brothers. In attendance was his long-time henchman, Sukhdev Singh Namdhari (who was now serving as Uttarakhand’s minorities commissioner), as well as at least 11 others. According to chargesheets later filed in a Delhi district court, Chadha divided his and Namdhari’s men into two detachments and directed them to storm the contested properties, forcibly evict anyone present, and seize control, while he and Namdhari stayed back and waited for news.
Arriving at 42 DLF Farms, the squad assigned to the property overturned a white Maruti parked in front of one of the property’s several gates, and then set about smashing all the gate locks. They rushed onto the grounds and busted into the house, viciously beating as many of the staff and security guards as they could find, stripping them of their mobile phones, and then forcing them off the property. According to statements made by several of the staff members, there were 30 to 40 men in the raiding party, which carried rifles, pistols, revolvers, hockey sticks, dandas and swords. After seizing the farmhouse, new locks and cans of black paint were distributed to some of the men. They painted over a “for sale” sign that Hardeep had put up and a plaque outside the house that bore his name, then secured all the gates. But one of the staff members who had been assaulted managed to escape with his mobile phone and get word to Hardeep, who was soon racing to the property from his office in Noida.
Once the house was locked down, Chadha and Namdhari were called. At 12.30 p.m., they reached the locked rear entrance in a dark green Toyota Land Cruiser. Sachin Tyagi, a 27-year-old Uttarakhand police constable assigned to Namdhari as a personal security officer was in the front next to the driver, strapped with a nine-millimetre carbine rifle. One of Chadha’s aides, Narender Ahlawat, soon arrived to open the gate. Just as he popped the lock, Hardeep charged up in a Mercedes. According to witness statements, Hardeep sprung out of the car brandishing a pistol, and approached Ahlawat, hurling abuses. Then he shoved Ahlawat, and shot him in the leg.
Chadha began to climb out of the Land Cruiser, but Hardeep was now facing him. Hardeep cursed his brother, then pumped seven shots into his legs, abdomen, back and chest. He then turned towards the open gate. Namdhari levelled his pistol—a .30-bore that he had licensed illegally using a forged ration card—at Hardeep. Tyagi, too, put Chadha’s brother in his sights. Then they opened fire, hitting him twice. A slug that entered through Hardeep’s back tore a track through his lungs, filling them with blood, before exiting briefly through his right armpit and then boring clean through his arm.
Chadha was haemorrhaging wildly, but he was apparently still alive. Namdhari and Tyagi secured him in the Land Cruiser as Hardeep, suffocating with his own blood, took shelter in a guardhouse by the gate, where his body was later found. The Land Cruiser then tore off in the direction of Fortis Hospital, in Vasant Kunj, with Chadha bleeding out in the back seat. At 1.05 p.m., doctors at the hospital declared him dead on arrival.
An extract from ‘Under the Influence,’ published in The Caravan’s November 2013 issue.Read the story in full here.