Internet fraudsters get to son of former PM I K Gujral, but he gets away relatively lightly

4 min readJun 18, 2026 02:28 PM IST

Former Rajya Sabha MP Naresh Gujral, son of former Prime Minister I K Gujral, was targeted in a sophisticated WhatsApp impersonation scam in which fraudsters allegedly siphoned off Rs 7.8 crore from his textile company before Delhi Police froze Rs 4 crore. (File Photo)

Late last week, a senior official at the financial division of a textile company owned by Naresh Gujral, a former Member of Parliament and the son of former Prime Minister I K Gujral, received a WhatsApp message from an unknown number. The display picture (DP) was that of his boss, the former Rajya Sabha MP Naresh Gujral.

The WhatsApp message instructed the official to make a large electronic transfer of money to a particular bank account. “He (the official) was asked to transfer around Rs 1.5 crore through RTGS to an account whose details were given to him,” a police officer said. Real-time Gross Settlement (RTGS) is a way to urgently make high-value transactions between bank accounts.

But the sender of the message was not Naresh Gujral. It was someone who had used his profile picture, and made an effort to sound like him over WhatsApp, the police officer said. However, this thought apparently never crossed the mind of the company official.

So over the next four days, three more transactions were requested by the alleged fraudster, and the company official complied each time. In the end, a total Rs 7.8 crore had been transferred to the account of the alleged fraudster, police officers said.

Alarm bells did go off in Gujral’s bank, though, and they decided to check with the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of the company if the transfers were legit.

“The bank called the CFO of Mr Gujral’s company as they were alarmed by the huge transactions. But the CFO, who apparently assumed that the instructions were from Mr Gujral, allowed the RTGS transfers from the company’s account,” a source said.

It was only on June 16 that the official who had been in touch with the alleged fraudster got suspicions. The official contacted Diksha, the daughter of the 78-year-old former MP, and told her about the money that “her father” had been instructing him to transfer.

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“Diksha, who was alarmed to know that her father had suddenly come to be in need of so much money, asked him about the transactions. Naresh Gujral told her that he had never contacted the official or asked for these transfers to be made,” the source said.

It was then that the family suspected a fraud and contacted the police. An e-FIR was registered on June 16.

The specialised Intelligence Fusion and Strategic Operations (IFSO) unit of the Delhi Police took up the case and tracked down the account to which the transfers had been made. Surprisingly, they found that the bulk of the transferred money was still sitting there. This was unusual because the pattern in Internet financial fraud has been that the cheated money disappears quickly, often within minutes.

“Rs 4 crore was traced and was frozen. Usually by this point, the money is either cashed out or is converted to crypto. But it was still flowing in the banking system,” said the source.

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Naresh Gujral, whose father I K Gujral (1919-2012) was Prime Minister of India for 11 months from April 1997 to March 1998, trained to be a chartered accountant and became a businessman with interests in textiles and apparel manufacturing. He was a Rajya Sabha MP from Punjab from 2007 to 2022, and is a senior leader of the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD). He is the nephew of the celebrated late artist Satish Gujral.

A source said that one of the reasons for the quick recovery of a chunk of the allegedly defrauded amount was that red flags were raised quickly by the bank as well as by the Gujral family and the company’s employees.

“Usually in cases of fraud against senior citizens, it is seen that because they sometimes live away from their children or are too scared or confused to tell bank officials about what’s happening, there is no one to help them out. In this case, both the bank and the victim’s daughter were actively involved in the finances of the company,” the source said.