In Indian business and industry, officials will ask for bribe. When you accommodate it in your books, other sets of officials will investigate and find it wrong. Finally a pistol shot will have to be your way out: The Death of a Bangalore businessman
Editor, Sahyadri Books & Bloom Books, Trivandrum
Over the past century and a half, many famous detective novels have been written that have made the world sit up and think. From the hundreds of stories and novels of Sir. Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, to the hundred and fifty novels of E. Stanley Gardner, the creator of the Perry Mason, who created amazing thrills in criminal courtrooms, to the equal number of novels of James Hadley Chase, the master of many characters who created logical stories of every kind of crime and murder imaginable, and to the writings of many others in modern times, they have been written in thousands. Most of these are textbooks in criminal jurisprudence, forensics, legal medicine and criminal investigation at law and police academies and universities around the world. All the top investigators in agencies around the world, from Interpol to the FBI, are their readers or have studied them and adopted their ideas. However, they do not constitute even one percent of their readers and students. That ninety-nine percent are ordinary people in all countries of the world. It is these books that have taught them what crime is, what criminal investigation is, what the pitfalls in it are, where the evidence is and how it is hidden. What meant by this is that the knowledge and methods of criminal investigation are not the monopoly of crime investigators.
What they all taught us was that there was no new crime, everything was repetition of some old crime, that a person who shoots himself does not shoot himself in the heart, but in the head, and that it is the person standing on the other side always the one who shoots him in the chest! In many of these cases, the victim's own gun was skillfully stolen and used, which made the investigation difficult. In many cases, the lack of gun powder burns on the victim's hand, which should have been there if a gun had been used by him, proved the crime and established that it was carried out by outsiders. In many cases, investigators have proven that some of the angles at which a bullet enters the body and passes through it cannot be made by one shooting oneself, but only by others. Similarly, it was also proven that right-handed people do not shoot themselves in the right side of the heart, left-handed people do not shoot themselves in the left side of the heart, and at angles other than those that are appropriate for that, and so on.
The reason for mentioning this here is that C J Roy, a Malayali businessman, the owner and chairman of the Confident Real Estate Developers’ Group, which had built a business based in Bangalore within a quarter century, with real estate and housing projects spanning Kerala and Karnataka and even abroad, was found shot dead at his corporate headquarters in Bangalore shortly after returning from abroad, after being summoned by the Income Tax authorities during a raid. Not all suicides that are being propagated as suicides were suicides.
One noted thing is, of the nearly 24000 homes he built and sold, none of the owners have ever made a complaint. The Central Economic Intelligence Bureau, the Enforcement Directorate and the Income Tax Department have been investigating him for long. He was accepting behind-the-counter- deposits from private persons without accepting loans from banks and running his business on a zero-debt basis. It was easy to collapse his business for politicians in authority, especially for those in the Bharatiya Janata Party which is ruling at the centre, to unleash all these investigating agencies simultaneously, such that the secret depositors would call their deposits back, creating something like a bank-run which is the fear of all financiers. Moreover, due to freezing of bank accounts by these agencies, what money available there was couldn’t be taken out. One pistol shot, made either by himself or by another, became the solution.
The Income Tax Department, which was present there at the time of the incident and is now being accused by the relatives, and the Bangalore Police, which is investigating the crime from the CCTV footage captured from there, say that there was no raid there that day, that there were only steps to retrieve some documents from a room that they had sealed earlier, and that if this was a suicide, then nothing was done by them to put him under pressure to commit it. Was the killer one of the Income Tax Department officials? Or was he disguised as one among them? Isn't that a possibility? Isn't that more likely?
(The following, written on the same day, was not published then, due to the information that a supposed suicide note of this businessman came out in the form a diary. Anyway it is published now).
When a raid is going on in an office building complex, like the ones the Income Tax Department of the Central Government do, which has been going on there for a long time, and everything from the records in the victim's hands to phones and guns, if guns are there, is confiscated, and no one from outside is allowed to enter there, if this is a murder, doesn't it mean that the murderer was among them, and aren't they the first suspect? If they have phones and guns in their persons, did anyone there seize them? Even if the victim's gun was not in his possession at that time, couldn't it have been seized in a raid conducted earlier with this intent and been in their possession? Apart from his office staff who were under their surveillance and control at that time, who else was there at the time of the incident? As the police interpreted and told the public, if there was no raid that day there that would have forced him to shoot himself, if they had summoned him from abroad to ensure his presence at 2 pm in the sealed room while extracting the documents, then why did they go there at as early as 6 am, and in preparation for what? While they had blocked all communications, who else knew that he would be there at two o'clock except those who had summoned him? If anyone knew that, then who would enter there from outside when everyone was banned from outside except those who were there? Whether this was a suicide or not, it was their need or the need of external forces working through them, and they made it happen. Shouldn't it be the first to be investigated?
When someone says that one locked a room, shot oneself inside, and then sat down on a chair, or that the gunshots coming through the soundproof walls were heard by others and they kicked the door open and discovered him, the unnaturalness and artificiality of it is clear from that itself. The fact that he locked the room, others heard the gunshots, and kicked the door open and found him are just mere statements, of people who, where the successors or heirs and the control of a business worth billions of rupees is considered, are just interested parties. It was similar false statements that also were exposed by their authors in the aforementioned classics. Doyle has even written about a crime committed by inserting a trained Alunku (Pangolin- small insectivorous mammal in the order Pholidota with large keratinous scales covering it's body; trained monkeys also can be effectively used) through a grill in a locked room and solved the puzzle of the locked room.. The fact that he was alive when he was found and that he was taken to a hospital far away instead of the nearest one also raises many doubts about many people.
There is also a rumor that he was secretly receiving and managing the black money obtained through corruption from many politicians and leaders as secret deposits, and that he may have been killed because they felt that if it came out in this series of raids said to have been instigated at the request of foreign countries like the UAE where he had made investments, their future would be in danger. And that rumor is not a small one either- these secret deposits very nearly came to light. Even if the money was not returned, when the information about these secret deposits were very close to coming out, it is also a need of theirs that such a suicide which sealed his lips forever should take place as a security for them. In that case, those in the investigation agencies may be their representatives or they may have planted their representatives among them from outside. Those who go and take part directly in investigations are just foot soldiers anyway!
In any case, when a central government investigation is going on somewhere and the victim supposedly goes to another room, takes a gun and shoots himself, that investigation agency is entirely responsible for it. That is why investigation protocols are put in place to prevent such incidents. If they are to be overcome, there must be an external influence. They should not merely explain, but should be held responsible. What a person writes in a diary as his thoughts on any possible event of suicide that he may or may not commit someday if need be or not, he does not have to carry out himself.
Written on 31 January 2026 and first published in English on 07 February 2026
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