Adani Group hasn’t been the same after Hindenburg research report: Paranjoy Guha Thakurta
India’s prominent investigative journalist, editor, and publisher Paranjoy Guha Thakurta delves into the Adani group’s exponential growth after Narendra Modi became India’s Prime Minister, the impact of the Hindenburg Research report on the Adani group, the effects of corporate control over the media and the survival of alternate media platforms, in this special interview with T A Ameerudheen.
Edited excerpts from the interview:
T A Ameerudheen: Paranjoy, I, on behalf of the Vartha Bharati team welcome you to this interview.
Paranjoy: Thank you so much Ameerudheen for having me on this channel and thanks to all the viewers of Vartha Bharati.
Q: Let me start by asking you this straight question. You wrote many stories on Gautam Adani, So what made you curious about the Adani Group?
A: I've been a journalist for the last 46 years and I'm a student of the political economy of India. I've worked for several media organisations where I've written about and tracked the working of business groups and studied the intersection of business and politics in India. More than nine years ago, I wrote a book called “Gas Wars: Crony Capitalism and the Ambanis.” I've written several articles on the major business groups in India. Approximately seven years ago, in 2015, the Adani Group started becoming very big. In a way, this sudden growth is what differentiates the Adani Group from many other business groups like the Tatas, the Birlas, the Ambanis, and various other groups.
The Adani Group’s rise has been truly spectacular –20 or 25 years ago, nobody had heard the name of Mr. Gautam Adani. He was just another trader in diamonds in Mumbai's Zaveri Bazaar. His family had a small factory making plastic products. And then he became India's richest man, Asia's richest man, the world's second-richest man and the world's third-richest man. His rise has been truly spectacular and unprecedented.
Equally spectacular and equally surprising was what happened after the Hindenburg Research report - the 32,000-word report that was brought out by a short-selling firm based in New York in the US - came out on 24 January. There was a dramatic decline in the market prices of the shares of the publicly listed companies in the group.
The Adani Group is different from other big business conglomerates in India, such as the Birlas, the Tatas, the Ambanis, who all have widely diversified interests. But I dare say the Adani Group’s interests are wider than that of the others. The focus of the group is prominently on the infrastructure. From seaports to special economic zones to operating airports to power projects and electricity generating projects, using both coal and renewable sources of energy. India's biggest importer of coal is the Adani Group. India's biggest coal mine developer and operator in the private sector is the Adani Group. In terms of the generation of electricity, only the public sector company, the NTPC [National Thermal Power Corporation] is bigger than it. In terms of coal mining, only the public sector outfit, Coal India Limited is bigger than it.
That's not all. The Adani Group operates seaports, airports, and city gas distribution facilities. It builds roads and assembles defence equipment. The group’s real estate projects include the redevelopment of Dharavi in Mumbai which could become one of the biggest real estate projects of its kind in the world. His presence is across so many sectors. I haven't even touched on all of them. He has a presence in different countries, such as Australia, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Nepal. He tried to set up a major port in Myanmar. He was not successful. He's operating Israel's second-largest port at Haifa.
He borrowed money from a bank in Russia under controversial circumstances. He has strong business interests with his associates in China. When I say China, I mean mainly those residing in Taiwan. India doesn’t recognize Taiwan as an independent country. It's said to be a part of the People's Republic of China (PRC) which is often called Mainland China and Taiwan is seen to be a province of the PRC. India doesn't have separate diplomatic relations with Taiwan. Mr. Adani’s has his business associates over there. Besides, his older brother, Vinod Adani, and several of his companies have a presence in a number of tax havens, including Mauritius and Cyprus.
I haven't gone through the whole list. As far as bulk storage of foodgrains is concerned, the Adani Group is the second largest after the Food Corporation of India.
When you look at the media. Adani group owns NDTV, once New Delhi Television. It is the second-largest cement producer in India.
It has interests in the defence sector, in small arms and drones, also called unmanned aerial vehicles.
The list is very, very long. I believe the phenomenal expansion of the group, and its diversification make it different from other corporate groups in India.
Q: You just mentioned the Hindenburg Research report that took a heavy toll on the Adani Group. But in a short span, the group managed to come back. So how did they manage it? Has the Adani empire fallen?
A: No, I won’t say that. Where was the Adani Group, say in the middle of January, before the Hindenburg Research report came out?
If you look at the market capitalization of the major companies in the group, you find that soon after the Hindenburg Research report came out, the share prices of particular entities in the group collapsed by almost two-thirds. Thereafter, there has been a recovery and there have been new investments. At the same time, the Adani Group was highly leveraged in terms of debt, so they had to reduce its debt burden. Certain expansion programmes have been put on hold.
As we speak, in early June, you can say that the share prices of group companies have recovered from their lowest levels. So if it was 100 in the middle of January, it had collapsed to 33 in late February. It has come up now from 45 to 55. Still, the group is not where it was. Whether the share prices will fall again, whether it would rise gradually or whether there would be new disclosures about the group – these are all very difficult questions to answer. The stock markets in India go up and down. The markets can be very volatile as it has been in the past. So I wouldn't say this is the end. No, it's not the end of the Adani Group. Far from it. The group is heavily invested in major infrastructure projects. It has substantial physical assets. The group has invested in operating 12 seaports along the western and eastern coasts of India. The group operates ports in Australia, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Israel. So I wouldn't say that it is the end of the Adani empire. But the speed, the rate at which the Adani Group was expanding, that is not happening today. It is getting new investments, but these are not compensating fully for what was lost after the Hindenburg Research report came out. So new loans are not forthcoming in the same manner as they were earlier.
I'll give you a few examples to illustrate the point. TotalEnergies of France had said that it would invest 25% in a green hydrogen project with the Adani Group worth about 12.5 billion U.S. dollars. Now that investment has been put on hold. We are also not sure about various other projects, how they will progress, and the speed at which they will progress. For instance, there was a major project to make plastic products like PVC or polyvinyl chloride using coal at Mundra. It was first announced that the group was not going ahead with the project. Now it is being said that a new credit line has been obtained for the project and that it will be implemented.
It is too early to say that the end of the Adani story is over. I'm not saying that. But the pace of its expansion has undoubtedly slowed down. Also, many foreign investors and international financial institutions have downgraded the Adani Group’s stocks and shares. Its auditors have raised several questions. There have been several reports that do not show the group in good light. More may come. This indicates that it will be difficult for Mr. Adani to sustain the amazing pace at which the group has been expanding. After the Hindenburg Research report, I don't think the Adani group has been the same.
Q: Despite Hindenburg Research flagging so many issues about Adani Group, the Indian regulators almost gave it a clean chit. What does this tell us about the regulatory mechanisms in our country?
A: It doesn't speak very highly of the regulatory authorities in India, whether it is the regulator of the financial markets, that is, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI). There have been several investigations. Some are over, some are continuing, and some have been stalled. Some court decisions have come while others are pending. These cases relate to investigations not just by SEBI but also by the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence, the DRI, which is the intelligence wing of the Department of Revenue in the Ministry of Finance. The DRI looks at customs and intelligence issues; it scrutinises allegations of over-invoicing, under-invoicing, and how funds are allegedly round-tripped across jurisdictions, from one tax haven to another and how the funds are round-tripped back to India. We do not know what the Income Tax Department is doing. There have been first information reports submitted by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). But the progress in these investigations is not known.
For more than three years now, SEBI has been looking at certain offshore entities that are heavily invested in Adani Group companies. These are located in tax havens like Mauritius and Cyprus. SEBI has asked the Supreme Court for more time to complete its investigations and the Supreme Court of India headed by the Chief Justice of India, Justice YV Chandrachud, has given SEBI time till the middle of August to complete its investigations.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court appointed a committee of experts to look into whether or not there had been regulatory lapses on the part of SEBI as far as its investigations into the Adani Group are concerned. That committee presented its report in early May and that is also now public.
Q: What are the findings of that Supreme Court-appointed committee?
A: It's not easy to elaborate on the report of the committee in an interview like this. The report itself runs into over 170 pages. I will give you my personal opinion, and this is also an opinion expressed by several other analysts and observers and that includes Andy Mukherjee of Bloomberg Opinion, Sucheta Dalal of MoneyLife, and Abir Dasgupta, writing in the News Click portal. We believe that this report by the Supreme Court-appointed panel has exceeded its remit. What some people were apprehending and fearing appears to have come true. At one level, this committee has given a lot of advice to the Supreme Court of India about how to interpret the rules and the laws. This particular expert committee, headed by a former judge of the Supreme Court of India, also points out the loopholes in SEBI’s own rules.
There are a few issues at stake. Who is a related party? Is your brother a related party? If you are a publicly listed company, then all related party transactions have to be disclosed. That's one set of queries. Another set of queries pertains to what are called beneficial owners. Who is the beneficial owner of a company? You have entity A which is owned by entities B and C and D, and B, C and D are owned by E, F G and H, and it goes on and on and on.
Now SEBI has diluted its own disclosure requirements and its definition of who is a beneficial owner and what it earlier called the ultimate beneficial owner. In fact, SEBI is choosing to use the definition that has been given in the PMLA or the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, where the disclosure requirements are far less and the definition of a beneficial owner far less stringent. Earlier, Foreign Portfolio Investors were expected to make detailed disclosures. SEBI has diluted its own rules and regulations, and that will enable its investigations to really go nowhere in trying to ascertain where the money has come from. That is the key contention.
There are many complex issues involved. Names of so-called beneficial owners have been disclosed. The representatives of several international financial institutions were called to depose before the committee. They didn't come. Members of the public were not asked to depose. The committee picked and chose those who should depose before them. Therefore, the opposition parties have argued that what you need is a Joint Parliamentary Committee. Take the case of SEBI. It says that the DRI or the Income Tax Department or the Enforcement Directorate needs to coordinate with it, that by itself SEBI can do that much and no more. So you'll have to wait and watch.
Q: Let's move on to the media. You know that most of the media houses are, by and large, controlled or owned by corporate houses. So in your opinion how has it affected media freedom or the media performance in India?
A: This is a huge subject. I can give you a one-hour lecture on this. I teach this subject at the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad. For the last 19 years, every year I've been a member of the visiting faculty at the institute.
That big business groups have interests in the media is neither new nor is it unique to India. It is there across the world.
Dr Prannoy Roy and Radhika Roy went on record saying that the takeover of NDTV by the Adani Group was a hostile one. There's an old saying: he who pays the piper calls the tune. You cannot expect a media outlet owned by the Adani Group to say anything that is considered critical of the Adani Group. Similarly, if the Ambanis have a media outlet, you cannot expect that media outlet to publish anything or investigate something that is critical of the Ambani Group.
One would argue that in the recent past, especially over the last nine years, a larger section of the media in India has become subservient to those in power. And the small section of the media that is not subservient are asking difficult questions to those who are in power. But they are being pushed to the margins.
They have also been targeted by law enforcement agencies. Look at the number of so-called income tax searches, not just on the BBC.
The offices (and residences of the promoters) of NewsClick and NewsLaundry have been raided. All this has sent a chilling message. If you criticise those who are in positions of power, you are then treated as if you are a traitor to the nation. Journalists have been targeted. Not just Siddiq Kappan.
You are aware that I'm the only Indian citizen against whom the Adani Group has six defamation cases that are currently pending in different courts of law, five in Gujarat, and one in Rajasthan. So the law, the judicial process, the law enforcement process, all of them are being used and misused, I would say, to ensure that a larger section of the media does not ask difficult questions, does not hold truth to power.
This culture of subservience has started right from the top. Mr. Narendra Modi is so far the first and the only Prime Minister of India who has not held an unscripted press conference or media conference.
He has picked and chosen the persons who he has granted interviews to. He's granted interviews to at least some unusual personalities. A Canadian citizen, who's a very well-known actor, Mr. Akshay Kumar. Among the questions he asked Mr Modi was: aap aam kaise khate hain? Or, how do you eat your mango? Do you slice it and or cut the top and then suck the pulp and the juice? You can argue that this is a light-hearted interview but I would say that when you are interviewing the Prime Minister of India you should be able to ask him questions that are important.
So if Mr. Modi has not encouraged a culture of questioning, then how can you call the media the fourth estate? If the media cannot ask questions of those who are in power, then what is the media? What is left of the fourth pillar of democracy?
Q: But this was not the case a few years ago. For example, when The Hindu and The Indian Express broke the story about the Bofors scandal, a lot of media houses followed it up. In the run-up to the 2014 elections, there was the India Against Corruption movement, and every news outlet followed it up and did wonderful stories. But take the recent Rafale deal. Your book gives us a lot of details. But in the mainstream media, except The Hindu, no one has highlighted the story. Does this show that media ownership is the main culprit?
A: Certainly, that's an important part of what we are seeing today. For your information, Ravi Nair is the principal author of the book on the Rafale deal. It is titled “Flying Lies?” and the subtitle reads: “The role of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in India's biggest defence scandal.” The book runs into more than 500 pages. I'm the co-author and the publisher. It took us almost five years to put it together. But the point that you have made is very, very significant.
Never since the Emergency imposed by Indira Gandhi in 1975, have we seen such concerted attempts by those who are in positions of power to suppress dissenting voices. Indira Gandhi's government put many journalists behind bars. It was like, you killed democracy with one stroke of the knife.
But what we are seeing today in India over the last nine years or so is the death of media freedom, the death of democracy by a thousand cuts. Many journalists have been harassed in different ways. Once the ownership of a media organisation changes, the infrastructural support given to a journalist is absent when she or he decides to be independent. Take the case of popular television anchor Ravish Kumar before Mr. Adani took over NDTV. He now has his own YouTube channel. You saw the Income Tax raids in the offices of Dainik Bhaskar during the second wave of COVID-19 because the newspaper was calling out the government's lies and criticizing the way the pandemic was handled. Photographs of corpses floating on Mother Ganga were prominently displayed. When a journalist or a journalistic organisation does their job by reporting the truth, you are promptly dubbed anti-national.
Look at the way the law on sedition, which was a law that was enacted during British colonial times, has been used and misused. It shows that this government is intolerant of its critics. It also has a vindictive mindset. It wants to take revenge. Earlier governments have also not been tolerant. But this government, in my opinion, has been especially vengeful against its critics.
Q: You mean these vengeful actions might have created a fear mindset among the media persons.
A: Right. And a chilling effect. I mean, if you take action against A or B or C, you send a message to others. The message is clear: this is what we can do to you.
Q: You mentioned the functioning of the mainstream media. So I would like to ask you about your stint in the EPW (Economic and Political Weekly) which we all admire a lot because it is one of the top-notch publications in India. But when you wrote pieces on Gautam Adani in the magazine you were forced to quit. The trustees told you that you have to take down the article from the website before leaving the room where you were sitting. Why did the EPW board behave like that? They don't have many skeletons in the cupboard. What happened?
A: You know I've talked about this many times. I'll try and summarise the story in a nutshell. I don't really look at myself as some sort of a great martyr or a crusader. I was just doing my job.
In early 2016, the Sameeksha Trust which owns and publishes the Economic and Political Weekly decided to appoint me as an editor with effect from the 1st of April 2016, I resigned from that post towards the end of July 2017. It's going to be almost six years since I resigned. Let me quickly recall what happened in June 2017. I was the principal author of an article that broadly talked about how the rules pertaining to power projects in Special Economic Zones had changed and had been tweaked over the years, and the biggest beneficiary was Adani Power. So Mr. Adani had a lot to do with what happened after that.
The article also talked about how the Government of India, its various departments and ministries had been processing an application for a refund of customs duties without first checking whether that duty had been paid. The amount involved was a little more than Rs 500 crore. The same article was republished in The Wire and your viewers can read the article. It was published in June of 2017 with a headline to the effect that this was the Modi government's Rs 500 crore bonanza to the Adani Group. They can read it (https://thewire.in/business/modi-government-adani-group).
The Adani group sent a legal notice. I responded to the legal notice. But I was summoned by the Board of Trustees of Sameeksha Trust who said you have responded to a legal notice on behalf of the trust, which is the publisher of the EPW without the prior approval and consent of the trust. And this was an act of grave impropriety.
I argued that I may have made a mistake. I agree that I made a technical error. I'm said that I am willing to apologise for the technical error, but that this was not an act of grave impropriety. I was told I should pull that article down immediately from the website. It had not been printed on paper at that time. I was also told not to leave the room where I was sitting until that article had been pulled down.
The article was pulled down. After that, I asked for a piece of paper. I wrote a letter of resignation and I said, please accept it with immediate effect. Then I went and told the whole world about what had happened. I gave interviews. I was overwhelmed with the response. Hundreds of people, scholars, activists, and journalists, came out in my support, including Nobel laureates like Amartya Sen, and Angus Deaton, professors like Noam Chomsky, and former Finance Minister of West Bengal Dr. Ashok Mitra.
That legal notice was converted into two defamation cases. As you know, defamation has a civil side and a criminal side. The civil case was heard by a magistrate in Bhuj, the capital of the district of Kachchh in Gujarat. The magistrate told The Wire that you don't have to pull down this article, remove one sentence and remove one word. The case is currently pending before a magistrate's court in Mundra. But the criminal case happened only in the Mundra court.
Something unusual happened in May 2019. The general elections to the Lok Sabha had been completed, but the results were yet to be announced. It was a small gap of a few days. Mr. Adani's lawyers decided to withdraw the cases against everybody, except me.
Before that, I had physically appeared in court. Then came the pandemic. In between the two waves of the pandemic in January 2021, a non-bailable warrant of arrest was issued against me by the court of the First Class Judicial Magistrate in Mundra Pradeep B Soni. Interestingly, I got to know about the issuance of that non-bailable warrant through the Press Trust of India (PTI). It apparently reached the PTI correspondent in Ahmedabad before it reached my lawyer. For nine nights and ten days, I did not stay at home, as per my lawyer’s advice.
What was the allegation against me? I did not appear in court. This happened between the two waves of COVID. Courts were closed much of this time. Most importantly, the Supreme Court has guidelines that say that for non-appearance in court, a magistrate or a judge will first have to issue a bailable warrant and then, if the accused person still fails to appear in court, a non-bailable warrant can be issued. In my case, this hadn't happened.
I appeared before the magistrate in February 2021 and again in March 2021. Since then, nothing seems to have moved. So this is where the case stands, in both the civil case and the defamation case relating to the article which was first published in the Economic and Political Weekly and then reprinted by The Wire..
Can you imagine what impact it had on my family, my wife? On our children, on my recently-widowed sister? Can you imagine the mental agony they went through? So this is an example of how the way the law works or does not work. How the process is the punishment.
There are two other cases. There were gag orders issued against me for a series of three articles published in NewsClick. It was written by Abir Dasgupta and me. An objection was raised about the headline of the third article that related to Justice Arun Kumar Mishra. He was then a judge of the Supreme Court of India. The headline read: “Justice Arun Mishra’s final ‘gift” of Rs 8,000 crore to Adani (https://www.newsclick.in/Justice-Arun-Mishra%27s-Final-Gift-of-8000-Crore-to-Adani).
The lawyers representing the Adani Group have argued that this article had lowered the esteem of the judiciary in the eyes of the people of India by reporting. So a gag order was issued against me, Abir Dasgupta, and Newsclick. We have full respect for the judiciary. But this gag order was issued against all of us in August 2020. Then, another complaint alleging criminal defamation was filed against NewsClick, Abir and me, in connection with the second article in the above-mentioned series.
What happened then was that Prabir Purkayastha, who heads the company that runs NewsClick and who is 75 years old, a shareholder who had nothing to do with the publication of the series of articles, D Raghunandan, who is 73, Abir and me (I’m 67) were all summoned to appear before the court of the magistrate at the Grameen Nyayalay or village court in a district called Baran in the southern part of Rajasthan. The place is around 120 kms from Kota which is half-way between Delhi and Mumbai. There is a power project of the Adani Group in the district.
This is another example of how the process is the punishment. But I must clarify again and again, I am not criticising the judiciary, I have full respect for the law of the land.
I was the only journalist mentioned in that 32,000-word Hindenburg Research report at the end of which there were 88 questions. The 84th question named me and asked Adani why he tried to get a critical journalist like me arrested. The group’s representatives later replied that this was the decision of the judge, and so on and so forth. But this was clearly not the full story and so I decided to present the facts as I saw them.
Q: Do you think these acts of vendetta are happening because the current dispensation is invincible?
A: Look, how can you predict what will happen in the next general elections which are scheduled to take place in 2024? Is anybody invincible? Was Indira Gandhi invincible?
What was the outcome of the results in Karnataka? We are right now sitting in Bengaluru. What happened in the recently-concluded elections to the state legislative assembly in Karnataka? The Bharatiya Janata Party got 36% of the vote five years ago and again on this occasion. But this time it is out of power.
What will happen in the time to come is very difficult to predict. I am not a fortune teller. I don't know. We do not know what kind of issues would influence the electorate in the coming general elections. We have state elections happening in at least five states, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Telangana and Mizoram. Many things could happen before that. There could be welfare schemes announced by the government, by our honourable Prime Minister, which will have an influence on voters. Who knows what will happen next year when the snows melt in the Himalayas?
We know the impact that the Pulwama incident had on the elections in 2019. The then Governor of Jammu and Kashmir has gone on record saying that the Prime Minister, Mr. Narendra Modi was directly responsible for the deaths of 40 jawans of the CRPF or the Central Reserve Police Force. So we don't know the future. We don't know what can happen.
Q: You just mentioned the Karnataka elections. We are here in Karnataka. What happened here was a cash-strapped Congress defeated a cash-rich BJP. So do you think that the same result will happen in 2024?
A: Again, this is a very difficult question to answer. I agree with you that the outcome of the Karnataka elections holds very important lessons and pointers. Even if the BJP spent huge amounts of money, the Congress came to power. The results also show the limits of communalisation of politics, of Hindu-Muslim politics. From the hijab issue to how you should cut your goat to Bajrang Bali to Tipu Sultan, several issues sought to heighten tensions between the two communities. Let’s go further. The BJP’s vote share remained 36% but the opponents of the ruling regime came together. Whether something like this happen in all of India is a difficult question to answer.
Several surveys, including the one done by the CSDS, or the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, pointed out clearly the issues that mattered to the voters of Karnataka. And among those issues were corruption (the infamous 40% commission alleged by government contractors), inflation, and unemployment. So these are the issues that matter. A lot of people have argued that these issues don't matter. They claimed that voters are influenced by emotional issues, Hindu-Muslim issues, hijab etc. But I think Karnataka showed us how other important issues like unemployment, inflation, and corruption matter to ordinary voters.
Another very interesting aspect of the outcome of the Karnataka elections was the rural-urban divide. You saw that the BJP remained very strong in the urban areas but it performed poorly in the rural areas. These I think these are very important lessons. Whether these issues would be important for the rest of India, time alone will tell.
Q: How can non-mainstream media platforms like The Wire, Scroll.in, NewsClick or Vartha Bharati survive?
A: They can survive only with the support of their viewers. This programme is being shown on YouTube. But YouTube is owned by the Alphabet group, which also owns Google and its various services. It also owns the Android operating system, which is one of the world's giant digital monopolies. But wait, how much money will you get from YouTube? You don't know. And they will never tell you, because they are monopolists. But the support and contribution of money from your subscribers, your viewers, and your readers can help make things happen. That's what matters today.
T A Ameerudheen: Thank you so much Paranjoy for this excellent conversation.
Paranjoy: Thank you Ameerudheen and I hope the viewers of Vartha Bharati would have gained in one way or the other, even if in a small way, from this conversation. Thank you so much.
[Paranjoy Guha Thakurta is a journalist, an author, a filmmaker, a television presenter, and a podcaster. He wears so many hats. In 2016-17, he edited India's top-notch publication, the Economic and Political Weekly. During that period he wrote many exclusive stories about the exponential growth of Gautam Adani after Narendra Modi became the Prime Minister. His works were prominently mentioned in the Hindenburg Research report that triggered the collapse of Adani's share values. Currently, he's a consultant with NewsClick. For more details, visit https://paranjoy.in/]
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India stands by people of Iran in this time of tragedy: Jaishankar on death of President Raisi
New Delhi (PTI): India stands with the people of Iran at this time of tragedy, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said on Monday, expressing shock over the death of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian.
Raisi, Abdollahian and a number of other officials were found dead Monday at the site of the helicopter crash in northwestern Iran, Iranian media reported.
"Deeply shocked to hear of the passing away of Iran's President Dr Ebrahim Raisi and Foreign Minister H. Amir-Abdollahian in the helicopter crash," Jaishankar said on X.
"Recall my many meetings with them, most recently in January 2024. Our condolences to their families. We stand with the people of Iran at time of this tragedy," he said.
The 63-year-old Raisi and his entourage were heading to the northwestern city of Tabriz after returning from a visit to a locality on the Azerbaijan-Iran border on Sunday.
