[color=hsl(0, 0%, 0%)]BW Businessworld is publishing a rejoinder by Dr Danish Khan — journalist, historian, and Oxford-trained scholar of South Asian mercantile communities — in response to our investigation, [color=hsl(0, 0%, 0%)]“A Geneva-Based Secret Ruler of Pakistan Controls India’s Banking Roots.”
[color=hsl(0, 0%, 0%)]Dr Khan argues that the Aga Khan Development Network and affiliated institutions must be understood through the longer history of the Khoja Nizari Ismaili community, its diasporic trading networks, and its global philanthropic footprint, rather than through the lens of geopolitical suspicion.
[color=hsl(0, 0%, 0%)]We are publishing his entire response in the interest of editorial fairness and open public debate. Below it is Businessworld's respone.
[color=hsl(0, 0%, 0%)]Dr. Khan Writes…
[color=hsl(0, 0%, 0%)]Beyond Conspiracy: The Aga Khan Network, Khoja History and a Global Tradition of Philanthropy
[color=hsl(0, 0%, 0%)]This piece is in response to an article titled ‘A Geneva-Based Secret Ruler of Pakistan Controls India’s Banking Roots’ by Palak Shah published in Business World on 17 April 2026. It presents the Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN) and the Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development (AKFED) as shadowy transnational actors whose presence in Pakistan and India should be read primarily through the lens of covert influence, financial leverage, and national security suspicion. Such a portrayal is not only analytically weak; it is historically uninformed. It strips away the social, religious, and diasporic foundations of the institutions it seeks to sensationalise, replacing over a century of documented philanthropy and development work with innuendo. Any serious assessment of the Aga Khan network must begin not with conspiracy, but with history.
[color=hsl(0, 0%, 0%)]The institutions associated with the Aga Khan emerge from the history of the Khoja Nizari Ismaili Muslim community, a mercantile and diasporic group whose roots in South Asia stretch back centuries. The Khojas developed as trading communities across western India, especially in Gujarat, Kutch, Sindh, Bombay and Kathiawar, long before the modern nation-states of India and Pakistan existed. Their commercial networks linked the Indian Ocean world — from East Africa to Muscat, Zanzibar, Karachi, Bombay and beyond. Like many trading diasporas, they combined enterprise with communal philanthropy, education, and welfare institutions.
[color=hsl(0, 0%, 0%)]The Aga Khans are the hereditary Imams of the Nizari Ismailis and, from the nineteenth century onward, increasingly important global leaders of a dispersed community. Aga Khan I moved from Iran to India in the 1840s after political conflict in Persia, eventually settling in colonial Bombay under British rule. There, the Aga Khan leadership became deeply intertwined with South Asian social reform, institution-building, and community organisation. To describe the modern AKDN merely as a “Geneva-registered network” is therefore misleading. It is the contemporary institutional expression of a transnational religious community whose South Asian connections long predate Switzerland, Pakistan, or modern corporate regulation.
[color=hsl(0, 0%, 0%)]The article also ignores the long and substantial philanthropic footprint of the Aga Khan institutions in India. The Aga Khan Development Network and its affiliates have operated schools, health centres, conservation projects, and rural development programmes across India for decades. The Aga Khan Rural Support Programme (India) has worked in Gujarat, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra on watershed management, women’s empowerment, agricultural livelihoods, sanitation, and community resilience. These are not covert operations; they are publicly documented development programmes often undertaken in partnership with state governments, civil society actors, and international donors.
[color=hsl(0, 0%, 0%)]The Aga Khan Trust for Culture has restored some of South Asia’s most significant heritage sites. In Delhi, the restoration of Humayun's Tomb and the wider Nizamuddin urban renewal project has been globally recognised as a model of conservation linked to social development. Parks, schools, sanitation systems, craft revival programmes and urban renewal were integrated into heritage preservation. Such initiatives demonstrate a philosophy of development that combines culture, livelihoods, and dignity. To frame this presence simply as “embedded in India’s heartlands” in a sinister sense is to ignore visible and celebrated public work.
[color=hsl(0, 0%, 0%)]Undeniably, the imprint of the Aga Khan does run deep. Just to give one example, it was the Aga Khan Palace in Pune where Mahatma Gandhi was imprisoned along with Kasturba Gandhi and his secretary Mahadev Desai during the Quit India movement. The edifice itself was constructed with a noble motive. In the 1890s when the areas around Pune were struck with famine, the Aga Khan III started this project which provided employment to thousands of poor villagers. Kasturba Gandhi and Desai died in the Aga Khan Palace and the compound has their samadhi. Aga Khan IV donated the palace to the people of India and it is now a museum attracting tourists.
[color=hsl(0, 0%, 0%)]Beyond India, the same pattern is evident globally. Aga Khan institutions have built universities, hospitals, teacher training centres, insurance companies, media outlets, microfinance institutions, and disaster-relief programmes across East Africa, Central Asia, Afghanistan, Syria, and elsewhere. Aga Khan University, founded in Karachi and now operating across multiple countries, is among the most respected higher education and medical institutions in the Muslim world. Aga Khan Health Services serves vulnerable populations in areas where state capacity is weak. These are development interventions widely studied by scholars and recognised by governments and multilateral agencies.
[color=hsl(0, 0%, 0%)]The transcontinental spread of the community is equally important. Khoja Ismailis migrated over generations to East Africa, Britain, Canada, Portugal, France, the Gulf, and North America. Their institutions followed them, creating a global network of welfare, education, and philanthropy financed through communal giving, investment returns, and partnerships. The movement of the Aga Khan leadership from India to Europe—eventually to Lisbon—reflects the global dispersion of the community and the need for an international administrative centre, not evidence of geopolitical intrigue.
[color=hsl(0, 0%, 0%)]The article’s attempt to convert shareholdings in banks or ownership of hotels into proof of “co-sovereignty” also misunderstands development finance. AKFED was designed precisely to invest in sectors that many private actors avoid in fragile or low-income settings: banking, telecommunications, tourism, infrastructure and industry. The logic is developmental capitalism—using commercially viable enterprises to generate employment, tax revenues and long-term sustainability. One may critique specific investments or governance decisions, as one can with any large institution, but this is entirely different from alleging hidden control over sovereign states.
[color=hsl(0, 0%, 0%)]Similarly, citing regulatory penalties involving a commercial bank does not by itself establish malign intent across an entire global network. Large financial institutions across the world—including major Western banks—have faced anti-money laundering fines, sanctions breaches, or compliance failures. The relevant response is stronger regulation, transparency, and remediation, not guilt by association or civilisational suspicion.
[color=hsl(0, 0%, 0%)]Most troublingly, the article adopts a vocabulary in which diaspora presence itself becomes suspect: transnational links are cast as threats, philanthropy as infiltration, and minority institutions as strategic danger. This is a familiar and dangerous trope. Many diaspora communities — Armenian, Parsi, Gujarati, Lebanese, Chinese, Sikh, or Ismaili — operate across borders, invest in multiple countries, and sustain layered loyalties. Their transnational character is often a source of economic vitality and bridge-building, not subversion.
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[color=hsl(0, 0%, 0%)]A serious discussion of India’s financial regulation, foreign investment screening, or data protection standards is legitimate. But it should be conducted through evidence-based policy analysis, not sensational claims about a community network “quietly running” nations. The Aga Khan institutions are best understood not as hidden sovereigns, but as products of a long diasporic history in which commerce, mobility, faith and philanthropy intersect across continents. Any critique that ignores that history explains very little — and distorts a great deal.
[color=hsl(0, 0%, 0%)]Dr Danish Khan studied History at the University of Oxford and has researched Gujarati Muslim trading communities, including Bohras, Khojas and Memons. His forthcoming book, Muslim Capitalism: A Legal and Political History of Colonial Bombay, will be published by Cambridge University Press later this year.
[color=hsl(0, 0%, 0%)]Response Ends.
[color=hsl(0, 0%, 0%)]Read Below the BW response to the response — on why history, however rich, is not a substitute for accountability.
[color=hsl(0, 0%, 0%)]Dr Khan's Rejoinder Is Beautifully Written. It Also Answers Absolutely Nothing.
[color=hsl(0, 0%, 0%)]We are grateful to Dr Danish Khan — Oxford DPhil, two decades in journalism, forthcoming Cambridge University Press title — for his rejoinder. It is elegantly written.
[color=hsl(0, 0%, 0%)]The history of the Khoja community is genuinely interesting. The restoration of Humayun's Tomb is genuinely commendable. The Aga Khan Palace story involving Mahatma Gandhi is genuinely moving.
[color=hsl(0, 0%, 0%)]It is also, from the first paragraph to the last, a complete non-answer to the questions our investigation actually raised.
[color=hsl(0, 0%, 0%)]Dr Khan has done what the most skilled defenders of powerful institutions always do when faced with specific, documented questions: he has changed the subject to a more comfortable one. The subject he changed it to — the humanitarian legacy of the Khoja community and the philanthropic history of the Aga Khan network — is a legitimate and important subject. It is simply not the subject we were writing about.
[color=hsl(0, 0%, 0%)]Let us be precise about what was asked
[color=hsl(0, 0%, 0%)]Our investigation raised four documented questions. Not allegations. Not conspiracy theories. Questions, grounded in public records.
[color=hsl(0, 0%, 0%)]First: AKFED holds promoter status in DCB Bank, a scheduled Indian bank with 469 branches across twenty-one Indian states. AKFED simultaneously controls 51% of Habib Bank Limited — Pakistan's largest bank. In 2017, HBL paid $225 million to settle US enforcement findings that included facilitating billions of dollars in transactions for Al Rajhi Bank, a Saudi institution with reported links to Al Qaeda, without adequate anti-money laundering controls. Did India's Reserve Bank conduct a formal fit-and-proper review of AKFED's continued promoter status after this? Dr Khan does not address this question. Not once. Not in passing.
[color=hsl(0, 0%, 0%)]Second: AKFED is registered in Geneva. Its beneficial ownership and funding sources are not publicly disclosed. India's evolving national security framework requires transparency about who ultimately sits behind foreign institutional investors in sensitive sectors. Has this been applied to AKFED? Dr Khan does not address this question either.
[color=hsl(0, 0%, 0%)]Third: The Pakistani government failed to clear the dues of the Serena Hotel — owned by AKFED — after hosting the highest-level US–Iran talks since 1979, with the Aga Khan network stepping in to settle the costs. This was not a metaphor. It was a documented event, reported across multiple international outlets, which illustrated AKFED's structural load-bearing role in the Pakistani state. What does an institution that settles a nuclear state's diplomatic hosting bills do, structurally, in India's banking system? Dr Khan does not address this question.
[color=hsl(0, 0%, 0%)]Fourth: The HBL compliance failures were systemic, with significant deficiencies noted in ten consecutive examination cycles since 2006, entirely during the period of AKFED's management control. What governance responsibility does AKFED, as the 51% controlling shareholder with the right to appoint the chairman and the majority of the board, bear for a decade of documented violations that included transactions for an identified terrorist, an international arms dealer, and a Chinese weapons manufacturer under sanctions? Dr Khan does not address this question.
[color=hsl(0, 0%, 0%)]Dr Khan has given us seven hundred words about the Khoja diaspora, the Humayun's Tomb restoration, and Kasturba Gandhi's final days in Pune. He has given us zero words about $225 million, Al Rajhi Bank, ten consecutive examination failures, or what AKFED's governance responsibility was for any of it.
[color=hsl(0, 0%, 0%)]On The Method of His Argument
[color=hsl(0, 0%, 0%)]Dr Khan accuses our article of being "analytically weak" and "historically uninformed." He does not demonstrate either claim. He simply asserts them — the academic's version of saying "this is wrong" without showing what is wrong or why. For a DPhil from Oxford, this is a surprisingly unrigorous approach to criticism.
[color=hsl(0, 0%, 0%)]He then pivots to a technique familiar to anyone who has watched powerful institutions defend themselves: he frames specific questions about documented institutional behaviour as generalised suspicion of an ethnic and religious community.
[color=hsl(0, 0%, 0%)]He writes that our article "adopts a vocabulary in which diaspora presence itself becomes suspect." It does not. It asks specific questions about a specific institution's specific regulatory record and its specific dual positioning across two hostile neighbouring states.
[color=hsl(0, 0%, 0%)]The leap from "AKFED's controlled subsidiary paid $225 million for terrorism financing compliance failures" to "you are victimising the Ismaili community" is not an argument. It is a rhetorical shield, and not a particularly subtle one.
[color=hsl(0, 0%, 0%)]He cites the Padma Vibhushan. We note that the Padma Vibhushan was awarded in 2015. The HBL consent order was in 2017. Awards are given on the basis of what governments know at the time. They are not retroactive certificates of institutional clean conduct.
[color=hsl(0, 0%, 0%)]He tells us that "large financial institutions across the world — including major Western banks — have faced anti-money laundering fines." This is true. It is also completely beside the point. When HSBC paid its AML fine, nobody suggested that HSBC's promoter status in a scheduled Indian bank should be exempt from review on the grounds that Western banks sometimes have compliance failures. The argument that "others have done it too" is not a defence. In a courtroom, it would be laughed out. In an academic rejoinder, it should be equally unwelcome.
[color=hsl(0, 0%, 0%)]What a serious rejoinder would have looked like
[color=hsl(0, 0%, 0%)]A serious response to our investigation would have addressed the documented facts. It would have explained whether AKFED notified RBI of the HBL enforcement action. It would have described what governance steps AKFED took, as controlling shareholder, in response to ten years of compliance failures at its bank.
[color=hsl(0, 0%, 0%)]It would have clarified whether AKFED's beneficial ownership structure has been disclosed to Indian regulators and, if so, when and to whom. It would have engaged with the specific finding that HBL allowed transactions by an identified terrorist, an international arms dealer, and a Chinese weapons manufacturer under sanctions to flow through its New York branch without screening.
[color=hsl(0, 0%, 0%)]Instead, we received the history of the Khoja community. Which is, again, genuinely interesting. It is simply not journalism. It is advocacy dressed in scholarly footnotes.
[color=hsl(0, 0%, 0%)]The four questions Dr Khan's rejoinder does not answer
[color=hsl(0, 0%, 0%)]1. Did RBI formally review AKFED's promoter fitness after the $225M HBL enforcement action in 2017?
[color=hsl(0, 0%, 0%)]2. Is AKFED's beneficial ownership disclosed to Indian regulatory authorities, and if so, who sits behind the Geneva structure?
[color=hsl(0, 0%, 0%)]3. What governance accountability does AKFED bear, as 51% controlling shareholder, for ten consecutive years of documented HBL compliance failures?
[color=hsl(0, 0%, 0%)]4. Should an institution that functions as a structural underwriter of the Pakistani state — settling its diplomatic hosting bills, controlling its banking system, running its northern territory telecoms — simultaneously hold promoter status in a regulated Indian bank without any formal national security review?
[color=hsl(0, 0%, 0%)]The article remains live on Businessworld's website. The questions it raises remain unanswered — including, now, by Dr Khan's rejoinder.
[color=hsl(0, 0%, 0%)]We welcome a response that engages with any of the four questions above. We will publish it in full, with the same prominence as this reply.
[color=hsl(0, 0%, 0%)]The offer stands. The questions remain open. |
