But, there’s a question that Mr Khambata’s letter missed asking: Would the events leading up to September 17 have happened if Ratan Tata, who was chairman of Tata Trusts — the largest shareholder of Tata Sons with a 66 per cent stake — for over 30 years and a trustee for 60 years, had been around?
February 2026 is when the rift between Tata Trusts and Tata Sons became public for the first time. It’s been more than eight months since Bombay House — headquarters of Tata Sons — has remained unsure and unsettled. On February 24, at a Tata Sons board meeting, Noel Tata questioned N Chandrasekaran on the financials of certain companies, including Air India. Noel, with a 1 per cent share in Tata Sons and chairman of Tata Trusts since October 11, 2024 (two days after his half-brother Ratan Tata died), was resisting a third term for Mr Chandrasekaran. At that time, Noel was 15 months into the role as a nominee director of Tata Trusts on the Tata Sons board.
Incidentally, Noel became the first person in more than a decade to be both Tata Trusts chairman and a member of the Tata Sons board. Tata Sons amended its Articles of Association (AoA) in 2022 to mandate that the chairman of Tata Sons and the chairman of Tata Trusts cannot be the same person, to prevent excessive concentration of power in one individual. Ratan Tata was the last one to hold both the positions simultaneously until his retirement in 2012.
During the February 2026 board meeting, Mr Chandrasekaran, who had by then clocked nine years as Tata Sons chairman, wanted the directors to put on hold the deliberations on his third term until a consensus emerged. It never did in the months that followed, culminating in the September 17 board meeting, where Noel opposed the resolution on Mr Chandrasekaran’s reappointment. Not too long ago, in July 2025, Tata Trusts had unanimously passed a resolution backing a five-year third term for Mr Chandrasekaran as executive chairman of Tata Sons to ensure continuity at a time when the group was investing in new businesses. Both items in the Tata Trusts resolution of July 2025 — Mr Chandrasekaran’s third term and the listing of Tata Sons — were taken up by the Tata Sons board on September 17, 2026 — the day of “infamy” as Mr Khambata put it. Both have remained subjects of intense dispute.
Mr Chandrasekaran’s second term comes to an end on February 20, 2027, and while the Tata Sons board approved a third term for him on September 17, the future still hangs in the balance. The letter that he wrote to the Tata Sons board on August 12, 2026, stating that he would not seek reappointment as chairman of Tata Sons due to a lack of unanimous support, suggesting Noel’s opposition, may have added to the complexity of the situation. More so, because he acceded to the Tata Sons board resolution a month later on September 17 granting him a third term despite a lack of unanimous support. The age of retirement, at 65 years, for Tata group executives has also been a thorny issue. Mr Chandrasekaran will turn 65 in June 2028, that’s 16 months into his third term, if it happens. Ratan Tata had stepped down as executive chairman of Tata Sons when he turned 65 in 2002 and then continued as non-executive chairman for another 10 years with several major deals struck during the latter stint.
As for the listing of Tata Sons, the July 2025 resolution of Tata Trusts had decided that all efforts should be made to ensure that the holding company remained privately held. The September 2026 Tata Sons board meeting decided to go ahead with a stock exchange listing of Tata Sons, after the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) rejected its application made in 2024 to deregister itself as a core investment company. The RBI letter dated September 11— six days before the September 17 Tata Sons board meeting — changed the trajectory of things, making stock market listing mandatory for the company. To put things in context, the RBI had placed Tata Sons, among others, on the list of upper-layer non-banking financial company in September 2022, mandating a listing within three years. Tata Sons cleared all its debt and applied to the RBI in March 2024 for deregistration and, therefore, an exemption from listing. The RBI reply — a rejection came 30 months after the Tata Sons application. While Noel Tata has proposed a restructuring of Tata Sons to avoid a listing, the status of that proposal in the regulatory ecosystem is hazy.
In the sequence of things, while Tata Sons versus Tata Trusts has dominated the India Inc conversation in the last few months, the in-fighting within Tata Trusts, a tax-exempt charitable organisation, had started within months of Ratan Tata’s passing. Negative voting for routine renewals became a regular occurrence, resulting in disputes as well as intervention of the authorities ranging from the Maharashtra Charity Commissioner to ministers.
The current impasse has come a decade after the boardroom coup steered by Ratan Tata to remove Cyrus Mistry as the chairman of Tata Sons on October 24, 2016. Whether or not October 24, 2016, was a day of ‘infamy’ too, Tata Trusts under Ratan Tata was seen as an organisation that stood together. That changed soon after his death, leading to the turmoil of September.
 "Tata Trusts, Bombay House")