What does it take to go public? In a biographical web series on Harshad Mehta, the merchant mentions four elements: research, risk, passion, and luck. But he leaves out the one thing that transported him from a crowded chawl in the remote suburbs of Mumbai to a sprawling terrace apartment in a posh ocean-facing neighborhood that had its own pool.
The twist, the fifth element, served Harshad Mehta very well. Without wickedness, he could have remained a broker on the Bombay Stock Exchange or, at best, a mid-tier trader. In fact like Scam 1992 – The Story of Harshad Mehta reveals, it might even have been alive.
The 10-episode web series resurrects the broker who was once celebrated as the “great bull” of the Bombay Stock Exchange for his ability to keep the market on the rise. Mehta was celebrated as a financial prodigy who shook an archaic system and transformed Mumbai Dalal Street into New York City Wall Street.
But a series of newspaper reports exposed the breaks in history from poverty to wealth for Mehta: he had rigged the system in collusion with public sector banks and private financial institutions, causing losses amounting to hundreds of millions of rupees. Mehta was charged with some of his crimes and was serving a prison sentence when he died of a heart attack on December 31, 2001.
The first whiff of Mehta’s involvement in the 1992 securities scam was provided by Times of India journalist Sucheta Dalal. She later wrote the book The scam: who won, who lost, who got away together with Debashis Basu. The web series is adapted from The fraud, and features Dalal as one of the central characters.
The gripping rise and fall saga has been directed by Hansal Mehta and written by Sumit Purohit and Saurav Dey. The events take place mainly in the Mumbai of the 80s and 90s, a pre-digital era in which information moves more slowly and loopholes are more easily exploited.
And yet, change is in the air. The country’s new prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, vows to move away from a more restrictive past. Companies are changing their traditional names for fancier English names. Even the venerable State Bank of India wants to get its feet into the markets.
The fruit is ready to be picked by Harshad, played by Pratik Gandhi with a winning mix of charisma and criminality. Addicted to profits and willing to do whatever it takes, Harshad, his brother Ashwin (Hemant Kher), and a few associates move up the stock market and social ladder.
They shake up the old money system, which includes a veteran bear trader (Satish Kaushik) and the head of Citibank in India, Thiagarajan (Nikhil Dwivedi). These men have been playing with the system for years, the series claims, but Harshad is better and faster than most of them.
The script does an excellent job of simplifying complex financial matters and describing how Harshad uses trickery, deceit, and flattery to amass a huge fortune. The first few episodes capture Harshad’s high energy levels, his impatience with the rules, and his endless optimism. Always moving from one deal to another and undeterred by setbacks, Harshad keeps dreaming of new ways to rip off the system.
This predecessor of Ketan Parekh and Nirav Modi finds willing participants for his mission both in banks and in high-profile places. The man god Swami, inspired by the influential astrologer Chandraswami, facilitates Mehta’s access to government institutions.
Harshad’s first portrait is largely based on newspaper accounts. Harshad likes to use idioms and sayings to illustrate his ambitions. The dialogue plunges into an endless bag of aphorisms to explain his prowess. Harshad wins several titles on the trading floor: Big Bull, Cheetah, Mongoose, Kapil Dev / Albert Einstein / Amitabh Bachchan from the Bombay Stock Exchange.
Harshad describes himself as the best: Mumbai will change, but the sea will always be there, he says. I am the sea
After Sucheta Dalal (Shreya Dhanwantry) begins turning the hot advice of Harshad haters into news, the government machine finally kicks in. The Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, Venkitarajan (Anant Narayan Mahadevan), is among the officials alarmed by Harshad’s methods. Harshad’s detractors are also working behind the scenes to bring him down. The series suggests that Dalal’s first notice comes from this field.
The creators appear to have been duly legalized. Except in some places, the series uses real names, either of individuals or institutions. Much of the information about the securities scam and its dramatis personae is in the public domain, a fact that the creators of the series take full advantage of.
1992 scam it works perfectly as long as it’s tied to what we know about Harshad Mehta’s unscrupulous rank. Paradoxically, the series begins to lose focus after the fraud becomes apparent. There is a sneaky sympathy for the devil in the opening scenes where his snobby English-speaking counterparts show Harshad his place. In later episodes, the outsider becomes something of a pathetic victim after claiming that he has bribed the country’s prime minister, Narasimha Rao. An unnecessarily aggressive Central Bureau of Investigation official (Rajat Kapoor) is rejected and the political establishment scrambles to punish Harshad.
“My greatest crime is that I am Harshad Mehta,” declares the merchant, his arrogance intact until the end.
“Harshad was the perfect peddler, an opposing thinker, and an ambitious entrepreneur all rolled into one,” Dalal and Basu write in their book. Although Pratik Gandhi does not physically resemble the burly runner, his sheer conviction and riveting performance bring Harshad Mehta to life. The ensemble cast also perform admirably, with notable twists from Hemant Kher as Harshad’s brother, KK Raina as the chairman of Unit Trust of India MK Pherwani, and Chirag Vohra as Harshad’s employee, Bhushan.
The reporter who denounces Harshad’s deception is not adequately served by a series that is enslaved to its antihero. Shreya Dhanwantry’s Sucheta reflects Harshad’s urgency in several ways. It seems he already anticipated the breaking news cycle by insisting that his sketchy initial reports on the securities scam be released. His boss Rajdeep (inspired by Rajdeep Sardesai) advises him to overlay his stories with proofs and more voices, as any editor would, but Sucheta throws a tantrum.
Like many movies and web series, 1992 scam He ruins his depiction of newsroom dynamics by confusing insistence on rigorous reporting with callousness and censorship. While Shreya Dhanwantry is perfectly suited as an obsessive journalist, her character loses prominence once Harshad’s hustle and bustle comes to light.
Indefatigable and incorrigible in real life, Harshad Mehta manages to capture fiction about himself from the afterlife. Its gigantic success rate helped overcome scruples in the late 1980s and 1990s. 1992 scam provides ample evidence of Mehta’s dishonesty for over 500 minutes, just to float the idea that the system was the biggest villain. This bull got big but then ran into the wolves that were stronger, the series suggests lamely.
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Scam 1992 web series explores aspiration and twisted ambition, says director Hansal Mehta
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