Sam Pitroda, as a politician and policymaker, has always been the stupid person’s idea of a smart person. His recent Fitzpatrick-scale foray into the physiognomy of Indians, revealing a mind that is too stultified to express even the simplest ideas without gifting grenades to the ruling party, supplies yet more evidence of this fact. Hoping to sound high-minded and highbrow about India’s human variety, Pitroda succeeded instead in appearing like an unsettling apparition of Rahmat Ali, the crackpot who, in addition to inventing the word “Pakistan”, pitched India as an incongruous menagerie of incompatible “races”. It is scarcely surprising that this doddering methuselah continues to be revered as a mentor and preceptor by those who have presided over the debasement and destruction of the Congress party.
Pitroda’s reputation as the brains behind India’s telecom revolution—his shield and calling card for decades—is a triumph of marketing over fact. The valuable work he did in the 1980s to make telephones accessible to ordinary Indians by devising the STD booth was offset by his fanatical opposition to the 1987 pilot project to build in Bombay a cellular network financed by the World Bank and operated by Ericsson. The croesus from Chicago feigned horror at the thought of “car phones” in a country where “people were starving”. Accusing Western firms of seeking to barge into the Indian market through the “backdoor”, he conveniently forgot that his own US-based company had profited from exporting cellular technology to poor South American states.
At Pitroda’s behest, Rajiv Gandhi revoked the clearances given to the Ericsson project. Was Pitroda, who made a fortune as a private businessman in America, motivated by anti-capitalism—or did he wish, as some claimed at the time, to safeguard his own turf and protect other corporations? Whatever the truth, the victim of Pitroda’s campaign against the early introduction of cellular technology to India was the Indian consumer.
In her wonderfully insightful paper on the development of India’s telecommunications, Paula Chakravartty of the New York University cites an Indian official who credits Pitroda “for the failure of telecom development” in India. “He had,” the official notes, “nil knowledge about the Indian situation.” So what did Congress do with Pitdoa once it was returned to power? It named him chairperson of the National Knowledge Commission—the nominal leader of a body composed of such luminaries as Jayati Ghosh and André Beteille.
Also read: Corruption a blot on democracy. It’s fuelled by high price of elections—Sam Pitroda
Closeness to the dynasty
It is obscene that a man so detached from India—a man who shed his Indian citizenship before being hastily naturalised by another impulsive dynast—should occupy such a powerful position in a party that governed India for most of its republican history. The reason for this, as a Congress leader phrased it to me some years ago, is that Rahul Gandhi considers him a “father figure”. Pitroda is Rahul Gandhi’s manny on his foreign tours—always to be seen chaperoning him, sitting by his side, whispering ideas into his ears.
Rahul Gandhi and Pitroda are bound together by their vulnerabilities more than their strengths. Pitroda’s success as a businessman can convey the false impression of profound intellectual depth. His writings, speeches, and choices—two years ago, he addressed an organisation notorious for propagating anti-Semitic theories—contradict this. Rahul Gandhi’s hereditary position as the permanent head of the Congress party can, similarly, suggest a sage interior. His entire career is a negation of this possibility. Each sees in the other some aspect of himself. Such recognition can sometimes produce great strife. It can also kindle sincere affection.
This closeness explains why Mani Shankar Aiyar, who never turned his back on India and is one of the last unapologetic votaries of Nehruvian secularity, was humiliated and disgraced and suspended from Congress for speaking impudently about Prime Minister Narendra Modi—while Pitroda, despite inflicting infinitely greater harm on the electoral prospects of the party, has been spared suspension and granted the dignified option of voluntary resignation.
There is a surfeit of self-important dotards of Pitroda’s vintage overflowing with oddball ideas they believe to be radically original and urgently in need of adoption and implementation. Most such cranks are, with good reason, bereft of a platform. Pitroda doesn’t merely possess a podium; he has long enjoyed a shackled audience in the leadership of India’s oldest political party. The reason: His proximity to the dynasty that owns Congress.
Here is the most important fact about Pitroda: If the Congress were a democratic party, he would be a nonentity. All the lofty rhetoric that emanates from the lips of Pitroda and his protégé is ornamental. Despotism is the condition of their existence.
Kapil Komireddi is the author of “Malevolent Republic: A Short History of the New India”, which was recently published in a revised and expanded paperback edition. Follow him on Twitter and Telegram. Views are personal.
(Edited by Humra Laeeq)