Why Did Sridhar Vembu Really Come to India?

The story you've been sold: A billionaire tech entrepreneur renounces Silicon Valley, returns to a Tamil Nadu village, lives simply, cycles to work, talks about dharma and reversing brain drain. Simple living, high thinking. A saint in a cotton shirt.

The story the California courts tell: He moved to India in late 2019. Filed for divorce in 2021. In between, he transferred ownership of Zoho's US subsidiary to entities controlled by his associate Tony Thomas and his sister Radha Vembu, who now holds an estimated 47.8% stake in the company, without his wife's knowledge or consent.

A California court didn't mince words. It found that Vembu had acted "without regard for respondent's interests in community assets and without regard for the law." It ordered him to post a $1.7 billion bond. Unprecedented, the court itself said.

His wife Pramila Srinivasan, who by her own account supported the household in Zoho's early years and was kept in the dark about the ownership restructuring, is still fighting the case in California. Their son, who has autism and requires lifelong care, lives with her in the Bay Area. He is 26 years old.

Vembu left him behind.

The move to rural India wasn't a philosophical act. It was a jurisdictional one. California's community property law requires marital assets to be split equally in a divorce. 

The solution, apparently, was to move the assets and himself out of California's reach before the divorce became formal. The village was the alibi. The dharma was the disguise. This is the conclusion the evidence points to. 

The trial is not yet concluded and Vembu has denied all allegations, calling them complete fiction. But the court, looking at the same evidence, found his explanations not credible.

And then came the reward. The Modi government gave him the Padma Shri on January 26, 2021 and appointed him to the National Security Advisory Board just days later, in February 2021. 

The formal divorce filing came in August that year. The government honoured him while the marriage was already in ruins and the asset transfers were already underway.

But the courts and the Padma Shri are almost secondary. The real villainy is what he did to millions of ordinary Indians who believed him. 

The man built an entire public persona on selflessness, on the idea that he had walked away from wealth and comfort for the sake of rural youth, for India, for something larger than himself. People quoted him. Teachers cited him. Young men from small towns looked up to him.

It was a performance. 

Underneath the saint was a man who had abandoned his wife of nearly three decades, walked away from a son who needed him, moved a billion dollar empire out of legal reach, and dressed the whole operation up as enlightenment.

That is the real story of why Sridhar Vembu came to India.- Darab Farooqi