SEPTEMBER 17, 2014
New Delhi, India
One could hardly have blamed Dinesh Thakur if he’d taken the money he’d earned as a whistleblower and retired to enjoy time with his family. But more than a year after the U.S. government’s settlement with Ranbaxy, Thakur was waiting impatiently in the shabby outer office of Room 348-A of India’s Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. For three months, he’d called, emailed, and even sent letters by registered mail to schedule an appointment with the country’s health minister, Dr. Harsh Vardhan. When that failed, he’d turned to Sonal’s uncle, the chief minister of Chattisgarh, to arrange the meeting. Finally, the day had arrived. But thirty minutes, an hour, then two hours crept by as Vardhan tended to other matters.
In his clamor to see Vardhan, Thakur didn’t have a clear plan. He had a belief: that the campaign he’d begun when he’d first contacted the FDA nine years earlier remained unfinished. No one who worked at Ranbaxy had been prosecuted. The former executives who had overseen the fraud had fanned out to companies across the industry. Thakur’s allegations against Ranbaxy had forced the FDA to better scrutinize India’s drug companies. But what the agency uncovered—the widespread, willful manufacturing of poor-quality drugs—still persisted, largely unchecked.
To Thakur, it seemed logical that he should play some role in helping India to help itself. He knew more than almost anyone about the perilous shortcuts India’s drug companies were taking. He’d thought long and hard about possible solutions. He longed to be of use. Though not a celebrity, he had gained notoriety—as a whistleblower who’d not only made a fortune by doing the right thing but was still alive, in a country where whistleblowers often wound up dead. But not everyone saw him as a positive change agent. In the wake of the Ranbaxy settlement, pharmaceutical lobbyists had maligned him to journalists, accusing him of being “anti-national,” and suggested that his efforts reflected a “foreign hand” trying to bring down Indian companies. Thakur suspected that their accusations had made it even harder for him to get on Vardhan’s calendar.
When Thakur was finally ushered into Vardhan’s office, the minister made his lack of interest clear. Vardhan kept one eye on the news, watching reports of flooding in Kashmir, while his secretary helped him arrange travel. After more waiting, the brief meeting ended with Vardhan asking Thakur to send whatever it was he wanted to say in writing. Within a month, Thakur sent Vardhan a biting three-page letter. “I truly appreciated your attention to what I had to say while you discussed your schedule with your secretary in those five minutes,” he began. He went on to explain that, despite sanctions by international regulators, Indian drug companies had done little to change their practices or attitudes and were being egged on in their defiant stance by a regulator, the Central Drugs Standard Control Organization, which Vardhan himself had called out publicly as a “snake pit of vested interests.”
Without a new mind-set, Thakur warned, “this once prosperous industry will wither away taking with it the prospects of thousands of well paying jobs for the people of India.” The first step, he advised, would be for India to acknowledge the quality problems with some of its drugs—the same suggestion that his mentor Raj Kumar had given Ranbaxy’s executives years earlier: come clean. To that end, Thakur offered his services. “As a person of Indian origin, an avid public health worker and someone who wishes to see the pharmaceutical industry grow and prosper in India, I came to your office to offer my service, my knowledge, my experience and my commitment to help you solve this problem.”
He never received a response.
Thakur moved through the Indian bureaucracy, trying to find someone interested in reforming the drug industry. Instead, he was greeted with silence, indifference, or downright hostility. He was repeatedly told that because he was a U.S. citizen, his efforts would be viewed as anti-Indian and as a conspiracy by the West to defame the Indian pharmaceutical industry.
Even in the best circumstances, fixing anything in India was a formidable task, and Thakur was operating from a no-man’s-land familiar to many whistleblowers. No company would hire him. Drug makers viewed him as an enemy. The government wanted him to go away. He had become a professional exile. He was also essentially stateless. A naturalized American citizen and an overseas Indian citizen with a lifelong visa, he felt that he belonged to both countries and to neither. He shuttled back and forth between Sonal and the children in New Delhi and the family condo in Tampa, more out of habit than necessity. Each time he took the journey, it seemed less clear to him where he belonged—except among other whistleblowers.
Five months after the Ranbaxy settlement, Thakur had donned a dark suit and gray silk tie and stood before a crowd of hundreds at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Washington, D.C., to receive a Whistleblower of the Year Award from the Taxpayers Against Fraud Education Fund (TAFEF). It was the same group that had first helped him find a lawyer back in 2007. He used the event to speak about the importance of role models in public life, pointing to the example that Raj Kumar had set at Ranbaxy and the fight that Debbie Robertson had waged at the FDA.
An event several weeks earlier, also organized by TAFEF, had helped Thakur feel more at home in a community he could rightfully call his own. For the first time in its history, TAFEF had invited all the whistleblowers it had helped over the years to spend a weekend together in the Florida Keys. About eighteen of them came. Some were unknown, while others were marquee names, like the financial sleuth Harry Markopolos, who had first alerted the Securities and Exchange Commission to Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. Cheryl Eckard, a former quality assurance manager at GlaxoSmithKline, helped host the event. She’d been granted $96 million, the largest whistleblower recovery ever, for exposing nonsterile manufacturing at a GSK plant in Puerto Rico.
Patrick Burns, the acting executive director of Taxpayers Against Fraud, had been worried about getting whistleblowers together: “They don’t herd well,” he later said. But they all shared something in common. As he put it, “These are people who have chosen integrity, and they’ve paid a price for it.” The whistleblowers spent the weekend fishing and sharing meals, and they visited the house where the writer Ernest Hemingway had lived and worked. Famously, dozens of six-toed cats lived at the house, and it seemed about right that the whistleblowers, often maladapted themselves, should be visiting the polydactyl creatures.
Thakur found the weekend cathartic. He became fast friends with Cheryl Eckard, who announced delightedly to Burns, “These are my people.” As Burns later reflected: “Whistleblowers are like polar bears at a roadside zoo in Kansas. They’re pretty sure there’s another polar bear in the world, but they’ve never seen one.”
In October 2014, the Thakur family moved to a larger and grander home within the gated community of World Spa West in Gurgaon. Sonal hoped it would be a joyful place to restore her fractured family. She had taken exquisite care with the interior: light, patterned window trimmings, dark wood furnishings, and whimsy in the children’s rooms, with a princess theme for Mohavi and stars and planets for Ishan. Downstairs, a sunken living room with glass doors led into a fenced-in backyard. The Thakurs took their morning coffee together in an open family area. Thakur had set up a home theater in the basement where he could watch American movies. Next to that was his home office, where he’d hung framed articles and photos, celebrating his work as a whistleblower.
Even as they moved in, Sonal and Thakur bickered. She felt alone and unappreciated in the effort she’d made. He felt restless and ill at ease in their new world of comfort. The question of why he’d chosen to intervene at Ranbaxy hovered over their marriage. “Ranbaxy employed twenty thousand people,” Sonal argued. “Why did you have to put me and the family through all of this?” She still felt keenly her lack of agency, even in the decision to get married at all, since it had been arranged by their parents.
Thakur’s answer never changed: “I couldn’t sleep at night if I didn’t do it.”
The children softened his rough edges, but too often he broke off moments with them to retreat to his office, where he wrote blog posts about drug quality and took calls from reporters with whom he’d cultivated relationships.
He fought with the workmen who came and went at his new home and complained about the low standards that permeated the country, at one point fearing that his office equipment was in peril due to their shoddy electrical work. As he tried to explain to the workmen the right way to install the equipment, Sonal observed to a visitor, “He’s trying to do it right, the American way in India.” For years the idea of America—with its exacting standards and promise of equal justice—had sustained Thakur. He’d spent months at a time away, using FaceTime to watch his kids grow up, because he believed that the U.S. system would expose the truth and protect patients. It had worked, to a point. But now, as he looked around his reclaimed country, the low standards gnawed at him. It was not just the wiring in his own home, but the disparate impact of India’s low standards on the nation’s poorest. “You can’t even go a mile outside your house,” he said, without seeing “how hard it is to make ends meet.” The workmen laboring over his new home biked miles to work each day. If they needed medicine, they would spend a day’s wages to buy it. The fact that their medicine was of the lowest quality and was barely regulated filled him with rage.
When he looked around his privileged redoubt, he felt little satisfaction. Instead, he felt troubled and drawn to a battle that lay before him. As he tried to explain to an acquaintance, “There is some level of onus on me to try and do something with public health. I am in this position that I know things. It’s a cop-out to say it’s not my problem.”
As Thakur pursued his quest to change the generic drug industry, a band of unlikely colleagues coalesced around him. One was Dr. Harry Lever, the Cleveland Clinic cardiologist. Joe Graedon, the host of NPR’s The People’s Pharmacy, became an ally, as did Roger Bate, an economist specializing in health policy at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative D.C. think tank. The men were joined by the Canadian lawyer and biologist Amir Attaran, who had been studying the failure of international law to address substandard medicine.
Before long, a paper published in the Journal of Clinical Lipidology caught their attention. From 2011 to 2013, one of its coauthors, Preston Mason, a Harvard-affiliated scientist, collected thirty-six samples of generic Lipitor from fifteen countries, manufactured by more than two dozen generic drug companies. When he tested the chemical composition of each, Mason was stunned by his findings: thirty-three of the samples had impurity levels high enough to render them ineffective. Even samples manufactured by the same company but sold in different countries contained widely different impurity levels—proof that some generic companies were making different versions of the same product, a high-quality drug for the West and a poor-quality one for low-income countries.
Before long, Mason had joined ranks with Thakur and his new colleagues. What started as a group of like-minded professionals connecting over email briefly became a formal advocacy group, the Safe Medicines Coalition. They tried to alert the public that America’s best public health bargain—low-cost drugs made overseas—had been dangerously compromised through negligent manufacturing and haphazard regulation.
The coalition held panel discussions, wrote editorials, aided journalists, and even spent whole days meeting with U.S. congressional staff. They organized Capitol Hill briefings that ranged from well attended to desolate. Separately, each member of the group had spent years teasing out pieces of the elaborate puzzle. At every opportunity, Thakur made the point that the incompetence and corruption of India’s regulators was not a distant problem, but one with a direct impact on the quality of U.S. drugs. Without a functioning local regulator to partner with, the FDA could get little purchase on the willful manufacturing of low-quality drugs by Indian companies.
The group’s efforts got a smattering of press coverage and even drew defensive attacks from the FDA. But with public fury fixed on ever-rising drug prices, their message—that the nation’s most affordable drugs were compromised—was unwelcome.
Thakur persisted. He contacted the nongovernmental organizations that purchased medicine in bulk for the world’s poorest patients: the Clinton Foundation, the Global Fund, the Gates Foundation, Doctors Without Borders. These organizations focused on the cost of medicine and the world’s access to it, but in Thakur’s view did not prioritize issues of quality in their purchasing. Thakur asked for meetings. Most did not respond. One operations officer at the Global Fund replied, and Thakur flew from New Delhi to Geneva at his own expense to meet with him. There, he urged the Global Fund to add language to its purchasing contracts stating that medicine had to be of a certain quality. Nothing came of the meeting.
On January 26, 2015, in New Delhi, India held its annual Republic Day Parade, a lavish event that showcased to the world the nation’s sophistication and military might. The gleaming display of missiles, tanks, Indian dancers, and military officers riding garlanded camels stretched for miles. The main message of the parade was not military, but commercial. Its centerpiece was a float bearing a spectacular metal lion made of thousands of turning cogs and gears. It bore the slogan “Make in India,” reflecting Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s signature effort to sell India as the world’s next engineering and manufacturing center. The message was aimed, in part, at the parade’s guest of honor, U.S. president Barack Obama.
The lion was the apex of a campaign that Modi had announced from the ramparts of Red Fort in New Delhi six months earlier called “Zero Defect, Zero Effect,” an effort to make the quality of India’s goods a point of patriotic pride. As Modi said at the event, “We should manufacture goods in such a way that they carry zero defect, that our exported goods are never returned to us.” By zero effect, he meant that the manufacturing should not have a negative impact on the environment. But just three days before the Republic Day Parade and the debut of the “Make in India” lion, Modi’s zero defect campaign suffered a serious blow. The European Medicines Agency, Europe’s top drug regulator, recommended suspending from the European market seven hundred drugs made by a wide array of manufacturers, which all had one thing in common. The data proving that they were bioequivalent had come from a single Indian company, GVK Biosciences, a contract research organization hired by drug makers to test their medicine on patients.
In May 2012, a former employee of GVK Biosciences had written to five inspection agencies around the world, including the U.S. FDA, alleging that the company had routinely manipulated data from patient blood tests to make the drugs appear bioequivalent. The allegations were so detailed and alarming, and implicated so many drugs on world markets, that six weeks later investigators from four regulatory agencies, including the U.S. FDA, visited the company’s clinical pharmacology unit in Hyderabad. Among them was a pioneering French investigator, Olivier LeBlaye, who, eight years earlier, had been the first to detect the fraud at Vimta Labs, the contract research organization used by Ranbaxy. His findings had sparked Dr. Kumar’s suspicions and set the Ranbaxy case in motion.
As LeBlaye inspected GVK, he suspected fraud but couldn’t prove it. Over the next two years, as he and French regulators scrutinized applications filed with GVK data, they found that electrocardiograms, which test patients’ heart rhythms, appeared identical and were likely falsified in nine different studies. LeBlaye laid out his findings in an explosive 2014 report. Though GVK officials tried to refute the allegations, European regulators sided with LeBlaye and drew an obvious conclusion: GVK’s willful falsification of some data made it impossible to trust any of its data.
As the scandal spiraled out of control, Indian government officials directed their ire not at GVK but at the whistleblower, Konduru Narayana Reddy, and ultimately at the European Union. By the time European regulators announced their decision to withdraw the seven hundred drugs, the whistleblower was sitting in a jail cell, having been accused by GVK of data theft, tampering and fabrication, breach of company trust, and threatening company staff.
The whistleblower Reddy had neither the aplomb nor the mental discipline of Dinesh Thakur. On his release, he sent meandering emails to dozens of investigators, politicians, and journalists around the world, alleging that his imprisonment had devastated his career, family, and livelihood. He had not found a protected pathway for making his allegations, in part because there wasn’t one in India. But he had not necessarily been wrong.
At the highest levels, the Indian government accused European regulators of ulterior motives. India’s top drug regulator, G. N. Singh, told an Indian newspaper there was a “bigger game being played out here”: Big Pharma companies, he claimed, had contrived the GVK incident to malign Indian generic drug makers. In this instance, the well-worn allegation made no sense. The companies hurt by the European Union’s decision were not just Indian companies but GVK’s clients around the world, the drug companies whose products had been pulled from the market. Nonetheless, the Indian government canceled upcoming negotiations with the European Union over a new free trade agreement, vowing not to reinstate talks until the ban on the drugs linked to GVK was lifted. Prime Minister Modi even personally lobbied German chancellor Angela Merkel to lift the ban.
As the conflict exploded, Thakur and his band of colleagues followed it closely. “Hold onto your hats! This is incredible,” Graedon emailed the group. Thakur was not surprised in the least. Instead of serving as a check on the pharmaceutical sector, Indian regulators were serving as its Praetorian Guard. Even less surprising was that the GVK company’s chairman, D. S. Brar, had been the managing director and CEO of Ranbaxy during its most feverish development, from 1999 through 2003. He had presided over the meeting in Boca Raton, when top company executives had decided to launch the company’s dangerous Sotret drug onto the U.S. market, despite knowing it was defective. Nonetheless, Brar, a titan of Indian industry, had emerged unscathed. He sat on corporate boards across the world, from the Wall Street investment firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts to the Indian subsidiary of Suzuki, the Japanese car company.
Later on, GVK’s CEO, Manni Kantipudi, lamented what he viewed as the unfairness of LeBlaye’s conclusions, but did not directly deny them, pointing instead to “a difference of opinion between auditors.” By mid-2016, GVK had shut down both of its laboratory units where LeBlaye had found his evidence and quietly left the business of bioequivalence testing.
Meanwhile, as the FDA barred over three dozen Indian drug plants from shipping their medicine to the United States, India’s drug regulators defended the industry.
With few allies in India’s government, Thakur studied the country’s broken regulatory system on his own. It was governed by a seventy-year-old law that divided oversight of drug approval and manufacturing between a central authority and thirty-six state and territory regulators, each of whom pursued enforcement differently. It seemed obvious to Thakur that only a new law, or a total overhaul of the existing one, could begin to fix the problems. Decades of parliamentary standing committee and expert reports had urged the same changes, but none had been heeded.
As Thakur consulted his newfound cohorts and evaluated his resources, he came to believe that reforming India’s regulatory system might be the best way not just to save India’s industry but to improve the entire world’s drug supply. If India overhauled its own standards and enforced them, then everyone in the world who bought India’s drugs would benefit. After failing to find like-minded partners inside of India’s government, he settled on a new path to his goal: he would get there by suing India.
Three days after the Republic Day Parade, the Thakur household in Gurgaon was abuzz with preparations for a long-planned housewarming party. Electricians and gardeners came and went. Caterers and florists made deliveries. Sonal’s closest friends cycled through the house to consult on outfits and food and practice a dance they had choreographed for the event.
Sonal viewed the party as a signal to her community that, after a long absence, the Thakur family was back. She had invited a wide swath of the World Spa residents, many of them top executives at the global companies that crowded Gurgaon. But as Sonal’s hopes for the event rose, Thakur’s spirits sank. It was not simply that he despised parties and always had. He also questioned the very notion of celebrating in their bubble of good fortune when all around them lay misery. Nonetheless, Thakur donned a crisp white tunic and matching pants, known as a kameez shalwar. Sonal wore a blue-green silk sari and sheer red scarf banded in gold. The caterers set out a lavish spread. In the garden, silk pillows adorned the risers and a small band set up at one end.
Guests began to arrive. The women wore sequins, jeweled dresses, and tunics of crushed velvet, their hair done perfectly. A photographer darted among them. As the party grew and Sonal and her friends danced in a circle, a striking woman made her way through the crowd. She was poised, with dark hair and red lips, and wore an impeccable white sari, edged in gold. It was Abha Pant, Ranbaxy’s former vice president for regulatory affairs. Thakur, as was typical, had not complained when he learned that Sonal had invited her. She was their neighbor and seemed to belong in their circle as much as anyone. Yet Thakur’s information had almost led to her indictment. Now she was a guest in Thakur’s elegant home, paid for with the proceeds from his blowing the whistle on the company she’d helped to oversee. Nonetheless, they chatted cordially. She readily joined in as he gave a tour of his home to a handful of guests.
In his basement office, he stood silently as Pant studied the walls: the 2014 medal from the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners for “Choosing Truth over Self”; the picture of Thakur on the cover of Fraud magazine under the headline “Fighting a Culture of Fraud”; the framed text of his Joe A. Callaway Award for Civic Courage; a photograph of him surrounded after the settlement by jubilant lawyers from Beato’s firm, who had all autographed the edges. She took it in silently. Upstairs, as the party extended late into the night, Thakur left his guests and retreated back into the basement.
Pant remained in the living room, sipping a glass of wine and chatting with a guest as she reflected on changes in the generic drug industry. She spoke of an important shift in FDA regulations. No longer did it matter who was first, second, or third in line in the FDA parking lot. Now any company that filed on a given day, regardless of the time stamp on their application, could be considered a “first filer” and share in the profits of a drug launch. This had taken a good deal of heat out of the market, with no more pitched tents or limousine campouts. Pant observed, “Too bad all the fun is gone.”
Throughout 2015, Thakur poured his frustrated energy into building a legal case against India and its dysfunctional regulatory system. He hired a team of lawyers, who submitted well over one hundred requests for information to government agencies, using India’s “right to information” law. It was a hunt-and-peck method, but Thakur believed that it was the best way to gather irrefutable proof that India’s regulators had failed to protect citizens. The queries turned up evidence of a corrupt and threadbare regulatory system, with entirely different standards and rationales across India’s thirty-six states and territories. Dangerous or barely effective drugs were approved for no rhyme or reason. Paperwork related to controversial decisions went missing. Even when foreign regulators found dangerous conditions in India’s plants, the Indian government either ignored those findings or assailed the regulators, rather than investigate themselves.
By January 2016, his lawyers were ready. They had crafted two lengthy petitions stating that the fragmented structure of India’s drug regulation system was not just broken but unconstitutional. They filed these with the Indian Supreme Court as public interest lawsuits, a legal mechanism that allows citizens to petition the nation’s highest court on matters of social justice. Now the court would need to decide whether to grant a hearing.
As local news programs and newspapers reported on the lawsuit, Sonal begged Thakur not to proceed and accused him of doing “whatever you want, without considering the impact it has on us.”
Thakur tried to defend himself, “Somebody’s got to do it.”
Even Thakur’s son, Ishan, now a teenager, demanded, “Why are you trying to do this? You’re going out there and drawing all the wrong kinds of attention.”
Thakur not only remained undeterred but, as he worked on the case, his energy and confidence seemed to come back. His frustrations ebbed. Friends noticed that he appeared more at ease and better rested. In that time, he often thought back to his grandmother, who had drilled into him the teachings of the Bhagavad Gita, the ancient Hindu text that called for selfless action. While reading to him and his siblings at night, she had emphasized that emotions—fear, excitement, anxiety, joy—while all part of life, were transitory. One’s responsibility or duty was a better guide for deciding what actions to take.
On the morning of March 10, 2016, a Thursday, Thakur awoke in his condo in Tampa, Florida, having traveled to the United States for meetings that he could not reschedule. He made coffee and opened the patio doors to a sweeping view of the Gulf of Mexico. He loved watching the birds swoop across the water. Sometimes, early in the mornings, he could even catch a glimpse of dolphins. That evening, he dozed off watching the primary debate among Republican presidential candidates, which was broadcast from nearby Miami.
As Thursday night fell in the United States, Friday morning was beginning in New Delhi. It was a day that would shape up to be a referendum on Thakur’s ability to create even modest change in India. His lawyers would appear before a small bench of Supreme Court justices and petition them to grant a hearing in the case of Dinesh S. Thakur v. Union of India. Already, India’s chief drug regulator, G. N. Singh, whose agency was a defendant in the lawsuit, had publicly attacked Thakur, telling Reuters, “We welcome whistleblowers, we have got great respect, but their intentions should be genuine, should be nationalistic. . . . I don’t have any comment on this guy.” Still, Thakur had to admit that he felt an inkling of hope.
In New Delhi on Friday morning, Prashant Reddy, a vigorous intellectual property lawyer, ascended the steep steps of India’s Supreme Court, flanked by several other attorneys. Thakur had spared no expense. In addition to Reddy, his team included one of India’s most accomplished constitutional lawyers, senior advocate Raju Ramachandran. His lawyers would have only a brief opportunity to convince two Supreme Court justices that they should grant Thakur’s lawsuit a hearing.
Courtroom 1 was crowded. Reporters from every major Indian newspaper were there to see whether Thakur would prevail. The two black-robed justices stared down sharply at the team of lawyers as they began.
“An overseas citizen has come all the way to challenge a rule. What is your locus?” the chief justice asked.
“Locus” referred to Thakur’s “standing,” or right to bring a case—in essence, the question of where he belonged. It was an issue that the lawyers had anticipated. Ramachandran explained that the Indian constitution did not restrict the nationality of who could bring a public interest lawsuit. Nonetheless, their client paid taxes in India, and so was entitled to judicial relief.
A justice then questioned whether the suit was an effort to seek publicity: “You are coming with academic issues when people are languishing in jails. Our hands are full.”
“That is very uncharitable,” Ramachandran objected, explaining that the matters in the petition were of critical concern, life and death. Within fifteen minutes, however, it was over. The justices refused to grant a hearing.
Prashant Reddy called Thakur. It was 2:00 a.m. in Tampa when Thakur picked up. Reddy broke the devastating news: the justices had blocked them from proceeding. Thakur got up in the darkness. He made coffee and sat down at his computer. He began to type out a passionate blog post to explain why he had undertaken the lawsuit. He described India’s regulatory system as a “spectacular failure” that had done little to safeguard the public health of the nation’s and the world’s most vulnerable people. He savaged the excuses routinely offered by India’s regulators and manufacturers:
Unfortunately, no one yet has been able to point out where in Indian law does it say that it is ok to cheat, to destroy results from tests that fail, repeat tests until you get the result that you want, release substandard product knowingly to the market. . . . If the largest and most respected members of the Indian pharma industry function in this manner, what confidence do you have in the ability of the small and medium size companies to do things right? Is anyone bothered about this?
After four cups of coffee, he posted what he’d written, with the headline “A Sincere Attempt to Improve the Quality of Medicine for People around the World.” Then he called Sonal, hoping for some comfort. She was simply glad it was over and reminded him, “I told you not to do this.” He said little in response. Later, he learned that the drug industry’s main lobbying group, the Indian Pharmaceutical Alliance, was jubilant.
In the months that followed, the darkness did not lift. Two years of work and about $250,000 in legal expenses had come to naught. He could no longer explain his crusade to his wife, and often he could barely explain it to himself. His efforts had been overpowered by the forces against reform and those in favor of inertia. His family, once an emotional anchor, seemed to be coming apart. It might have been logical for him to feel some sort of regret: for taking the job at Ranbaxy, for feeling forced to make a choice over the right path to take, for becoming a whistleblower, for starting a process that had torn his family to shreds while he continued the fight long after he’d had to. But regret was never part of the heartbreak he felt. As he told an acquaintance, “Why would I regret something that I knew was true and correct and right?” As days went by, he returned again to his grandmother’s teachings—he must discharge what he viewed as his responsibility, knowing that the outcome was not entirely in his hands. This meant that he would have to accept the high court’s decision and focus instead on what to do next.
Less than two weeks later, he sent an email to the joint secretary of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, K. L. Sharma, introducing himself and, in effect, starting all over again: “From what little I have read, you seem to have a good sense of right and wrong when it comes to public health and I am writing today to seek an appointment to come and see you in Delhi at your office.”