Shekhar Suman's Week: Nana Patekar's Empty Chair and the ED Raid Question

There is a chair that was meant for Nana Patekar. It will stay empty, and Shekhar Suman has decided that is the point.

Patekar died on 8 October at his home in Goa. He was 75. He was supposed to be the final guest of the first season of Shekhar Tonite, the late-night show Suman started on YouTube in May. Two days later, Suman said there would be no finale. No replacement guest, no tribute episode stitched together from someone else's time. Just a season that ends one conversation short.

The detail that stays with me is this: a few days before he died, Patekar had rung Suman to congratulate him on the show and to say he wanted to come on. Then the call never turned into a booking, because there was no time left.

The two men go back to Tadap, a 1990 film they made together that was finished and never released. Suman said as much in his video tribute, where he called Patekar "fearless, brave, honest". So now there are two finished things between them that nobody will ever see. You do not need a screenwriter for that.

And then, on Tuesday, the conversation turned completely.

In a video interview published on 13 October, Suman was asked about the Enforcement Directorate searches in July at the premises of Kalanee Impex, a company linked to Shekhar Tonite's producer, Dharmesh Sangani. Officials have described it as a case under the Foreign Exchange Management Act over alleged foreign exchange violations.

Suman did not take the bait people were offering him. He said he did not know why the ED came, that he had not asked Sangani, and that he did not believe it had anything to do with his jokes.

"I don't think Modi is so weak."

His argument, roughly, was that a government with that much power has bigger worries than a talk show of his size. He admitted people would look at the timing and put two and two together. He also pointed out that Sangani is a businessman with other interests, and said Sangani had called him after the searches and told him to keep going.

The jokes people have in mind are real enough. In June, Suman told a story on the show about an arrogant king who smashes a magic mirror for showing him his faults, after which his courtiers decide that anyone holding up a mirror is an enemy. Suman later said the king was Donald Trump. A lot of viewers heard someone closer to home, and the Congress shared the clip and asked who the king was.

It is worth remembering who is saying all this. Suman joined the BJP in 2024. He says BJP politicians have called him to praise the show, and some have come to his home. He describes Shekhar Tonite as pro-people rather than anti-anyone, and he compares it to Movers & Shakers, where he poked fun at Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh when they were prime minister.

What I keep coming back to

Both halves of this week are about the same question: what a talk show is allowed to be.

One answer came from grief. A host decided that some chairs should not be refilled, that an absence can be part of the show. The other answer came under pressure. A host decided, in public, to give the most generous reading possible to a raid on the man paying for his show. Whether that is conviction or caution, none of us can know from the outside, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

What I do know is that the late-night satire Shekhar Suman built on television in the 1990s now lives on YouTube, created and directed by his son Adhyayan, and that a lot of people are watching it more closely this week than they were last week.

Season 1 ends without its last episode. If there is a Season 2, it will be watched for two things: who sits in that chair, and whether the king comes back.