Inside Track: Charity Begins at Home

Businessman Mehli Mistry could possibly be reinstated as a trustee of the Bai Hirabai Tata Charitable Institution set up in 1923 by Sir Ratanji Tata in memory of his mother. Mistry has raised a valid point — though some question why he acquiesced for so long — which has led to red faces at Tatas.

Businessman Mehli Mistry could possibly be reinstated as a trustee of the Bai Hirabai Tata Charitable Institution set up in 1923 by Sir Ratanji Tata in memory of his mother. Mistry has raised a valid point — though some question why he acquiesced for so long — which has led to red faces at Tatas. Mistry’s trusteeship ended because two non-Parsi trustees voted against him, but the trust deed states clearly that all trustees must be of the Zoroastrian faith and residing in either Navsari or the then Bombay presidency. If the trusteeship issue has generated much interest, it is because though the corpus is relatively modest, it has common trustees with the powerful Sir Ratan Tata Trust, a key shareholder in Tata Sons, where a battle is brewing for control of India’s largest business group.

Sir Ratanji Tata honoured his mother’s wishes in setting up the trust, which stipulates that Parsi beneficiaries or trustees could be disqualified if they renounced their religion. Hirabai, like his father Jamsetji Tata, descended from a long line of Parsi priests of Navsari and desired that the charity in her name be for her co-religionists in her hometown. The late Ratan Tata (RNT), however, was at pains to establish the cosmopolitanism of the Tata group, and rejected claims to Tata trusts from exclusively Zoroastrian charities. The Charities Commissioner is believed to have once turned down an appeal to declare the Hirabai Institute secular. (Former CJI, M H Kania, gave an opinion backing RNT’s view, purportedly on the basis of a codicil to Sir Ratanji Tata’s own will, after which R K Krishna Kumar was appointed the first non-Parsi trustee.) The 2,000-odd Parsis of Navsari have not received any direct benefit from the Hirabai Institute, though the trust deed suggests that the 46 bighas of the Tatas’ Navsari estate should be used for a recreational centre, meeting ground or hospital for Parsis.

Indians whose noses were out of joint because Pakistan stole a march over us by hosting the US-Iran talks are in unusual company. Pakistan’s once powerful tiny political and social elite is fuming that Field Marshal Asim Munir,  whom they had dismissed as the son of a middle-class teacher and imam, has bested them even in the sphere they thought was their last forte: international  diplomacy. They assumed they still retained the upper hand in international connections. Some of these side-lined individuals have recently been attempting to uncover the background  of Bilal Bin Saqib, the so-called crypto wizard who surfaced from nowhere and opened the doors for Munir in Trump’s inner circle and totally transformed the US-Pakistan relationship. The 35-year-old “crypto bro’’, who was not seen earlier in Pakistan’s exclusive social circles, has explained on Facebook  that he is the son of Mohammed Saqib, a wellbeing consultant coach specialising in hypnotherapy. Discreetly he did not mention his father-in-law,  a Pakistani Lt General!

Saqib graduated from LSE, London, in social innovation and entrepreneurship, working his way through college.  But  his mysterious dizzying rise in the virtual currency world in  under five years is unexplained. For instance, who introduced him to Changpeng Zhao, nicknamed  CZ,  disgraced billionaire founder of Binance Holdings Ltd, the world’s biggest crypto currency exchange?  CZ was jailed in the USA for money laundering, but pardoned last year by Donald Trump. Saqib’s past remains enigmatic, but It is easy to connect the dots explaining why Munir is Trump’s favourite field marshal, using Saqib as the go-between to boost the Trump family’s crypto currency business. In bankrupt Pakistan, the ball was set rolling in 2024  for de-regulating  crypto currency despite the IMF’s objections  to crypto, often a platform for funding terrorism. This Friday, Pakistan’s central bank lifted its ban on crypto services. The country will be the world biggest market for crypto dealers with 40 million users contributing around $300 billion. In the last two years, Saqib has worn multiple hats — adviser to the Trump World Liberty Financial, CEO of Pakistan’s Crypto Council, and head of Pakistan’s Virtual Assets Regulatory  Authority, where CZ is strategic advisor!

In October 2021, when I inquired from the architect of the under-construction Parliament House the Lok Sabha’s seating capacity, he said his brief was that the Lok Sabha should accommodate 772 MPs, compared to the existing strength of 550 MPs. However, when Parliament House was inaugurated in May 2023, the number of seats had mysteriously shot up to 888. Some Chanakya in the government had conceived the Machiavellian scheme of linking the doable Women’s Reservation Bill with delimitation, an exercise so risky for India’s federal stability that all governments, including Indira Gandhi’s, had opted to postpone the Pandora’s Box indefinitely. By clubbing the two Bills together, the BJP government cannot be accused of lacking the intent to implement the long-pending Women’s Reservation Bill, scoring political brownie points.