New Delhi: A consultative committee set up by the Congress about a fortnight ago to help the party tide over this dry Covid political period is widely being seen as Rahul Gandhi’s attempt at breaking free from the old guard and creating his own triple-A rating of aides, allies and accomplices.
A quick look at the team allows you one quick conclusion: This is at least the sixth resurrection of Jairam Ramesh. Having survived bosses as diverse as P.V. Narasimha Rao, Sonia Gandhi, Sitaram Kesri and Manmohan Singh, Ramesh is now taking his place just outside the photo-op of the Congress party’s First Leader.
Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and former finance minister P. Chidambaram are the only two usual suspects deserving of both age and respect in this team. Senior leaders like Ghulam Nabi Azad, Mallikarjun Kharge as well as powerful party treasurer Ahmed Patel are missing. Meanwhile, A.K. Antony, who was by Sonia Gandhi’s side all through UPA-2, has been dropped like a hot potato in the dustbin of history.
Instead, there are faithful retainers like Randeep Surjewala, who has lost his last two elections, K.C. Venugopal, who won twice from Alappuzha but didn’t contest in 2019, and data head Praveen Chakravarty, who remains innocent of any poll.
At least newbies like former TV anchor Supriya Shrinate have tried their hand in the people’s pulpit, even if she lost from Uttar Pradesh; Gourav Vallabh lost from Jharkhand but survives, because he is able to speak louder than the BJP’s Sambit Patra; and Rohan Gupta is said to deserve a chance.
Only Anandpur Sahib MP Manish Tewari, besides Rahul himself, is a card-carrying member of the Lok Sabha in this Covid committee.
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IIT alum carves his niche in politics
Certainly, the rise and rise of Jairam Ramesh is unusual. It has been 30 years since he worked in former PM V.P. Singh’s office; he served under the then finance minister Manmohan Singh during the P.V. Narasimha Rao regime in the early 1990s, when the twosome opened up India to the world; as an adviser to P. Chidambaram, who quit the mother party and co-founded the Tamil Maanila Congress in 1996; under Sonia Gandhi’s bête noire and party president Sitaram Kesri in 1997; as a member of Sonia Gandhi’s powerful National Advisory Council, a super-Cabinet of sorts to Manmohan Singh’s council of ministers in 2004, where he served as junior minister of commerce & power (which meant that Ramesh found himself on both sides of the fence at the same time); and as the junior minister for environment & forests as well as rural development after the UPA came to power for the second time in 2009.
His worst critics concede that Ramesh has won over his diametrically different bosses with distinct charm, extraordinary hard work and an exceptional intellect. Even his fawning admirers admit that Jairam Ramesh is all things to all people.
His presence in Rahul Gandhi’s inner Covid circle today is testament to his ability to regularly please the boss, even if he is smart enough to know that Rahul will one day be party president without fully earning his stripes.
“He brings solid research-based analysis and perspective to anything he puts his mind to. For all his follies and mischief, every party needs a Jairam Ramesh,” a fellow Congressman told ThePrint on condition of anonymity.
The mischief is not hard to find. Turns out that the idea of creating a committee that would, in real time, respond to the Modi government’s management of this unprecedented health crisis actually came from Shashi Tharoor, three-time MP from Thiruvananthapuram.
It seems Tharoor had been pushing the party to respond to the Covid-19 outbreak since February and sending briefs and notes to both Rahul and interim Congress president Sonia Gandhi.
Like Ramesh, Tharoor is incredibly articulate, widely acknowledged as arrogant, and has access to global influentials. But he has been relegated to heading the party’s All India Professionals Committee, an organisation neither fish nor fowl. He doesn’t find himself in Rahul Gandhi’s current Covid circle.
To another Congressman — like Ramesh, English-speaking, sharp and urbane — who also didn’t make the Covid cut, Ramesh offered consolation with a line from the Bhagvad Gita: “Do your duty without the expectation of reward.”
Once known as the “Aishwarya Rai of the Congress party”, probably because of the care he must take to preserve his blow-dried, salt-and-pepper mane, Jairam Ramesh has certainly not allowed his good looks to come in the way of climbing the political ladder.
In fact, he has shown a steely determination in squelching the ambitions of his fellow Congressmen underfoot, leveraging mentors like Manmohan Singh and P. Chidambaram to gain access to the innards of the Congress, and then turning on them with a gymnast’s dexterity, all the while writing speeches and parsing manifestos with considerable insight and context.
Congress MP Rajeev Gowda, who was convenor of the party’s manifesto committee for the 2019 elections, told ThePrint, “Jairam has a strong commitment to the party’s ideology. We worked very closely together and his guidance was invaluable. He has decades of experience with how the Delhi ecosystem works. He can be trusted to deliver.”
Except, Gowda was not invited to become a member of Rahul’s Covid circle.
Jairam Ramesh refused to talk to ThePrint for this story, but he has not always been so discreet. In a 2000 interview with Man’s World, four years before he became Rajya Sabha MP for the first time, he said, “I am realistic enough to know that the Congress party is not going to nominate me to the Rajya Sabha. I am not ‘Scheduled Caste’, ‘woman’, ‘Muslim’, ‘backward’ or anything else. I don’t have a godfather or godmother. Tomorrow, if I were to join the BJP, my chances of nomination would probably be much brighter.”
The son of an IIT professor who was captivated by the ideas of Jawaharlal Nehru has come a long way since. He never joined the BJP, but also realised that he could only make a difference in the Congress if he got an entry into its charmed circle. En route to joining politics full-time, he educated himself at IIT-Bombay, Carnegie-Mellon University in the US, and even started a PhD at MIT.
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On a roll
The idea of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) was the perfect way to inveigle himself into Sonia Gandhi’s penumbra, never mind if his one-time guru Manmohan Singh at first believed it was precious money thrown into a bottomless scheme that was not thought through properly.
But when urban India, buoyed by unprecedented economic growth, helped tip the scales for a second Congress win in 2009, Ramesh was rewarded with the ministry for environment, a subject close to Sonia and her mother-in-law’s heart (He often quoted Indira Gandhi’s invocation from the Atharva Veda at an environmental conference in Stockholm, her blocking of the Silent Valley project in Kerala, and her friendship with ornithologist Salim Ali).
Jairam Ramesh was on a roll. He could do no wrong.
So, in 2010, he picked a fight with 8-time Congress MP and the then road transport minister Kamal Nath by banning the widening of a highway inside the Pench tiger reserve and disallowing any construction in the Pench and Satpura forests that ran through Chhindwara, the latter’s beloved pocket borough in Madhya Pradesh.
Several colleagues in the Cabinet were not particularly amused. Civil aviation minister Praful Patel charged Ramesh with being “overly obsessive about environmental issues” because he refused to clear the Navi Mumbai airport.
It was only four months later, after Manmohan Singh wielded a stick, that Ramesh did climb down his mangroves-will-be-destroyed hobby horse. Patel got his airport at Navi Mumbai.
Coal minister Sriprakash Jaiswal had a grouse as well, as he accused Ramesh of holding up environmental clearances for coal projects inside forest reserves.
These disagreements were galvanised in August 2010 when Ramesh cancelled the Stage II forest clearance for the Vedanta aluminium project in the Niyamgiri hills of Odisha’s Kalahandi district — with a little help from none other than Congress heir-apparent Rahul Gandhi, who was beginning to behave a bit like the protagonist in the Hollywood film Avatar, and anthropologist Verrier Elwin, his grandfather’s best friend, all rolled into one.
“Some say the decision to temporarily withdraw clearance to Vedanta is anti-development. It’s not. Here the voice of tribals was being suppressed,” Rahul said in Lanjigarh, a stunning hillside packed with virgin forest as well as millions of tonnes of bauxite, the potential raw material for the Vedanta project.
“Now there are two Hindustans, one of the rich whose voice reaches everywhere; the other of the poor, whose voice is seldom heard. When I say I will be your sipahi (soldier) in Delhi, my job is not done, it’s just the beginning,” he added.
The country was transfixed with this open insurrection at the heart of government. Rahul Gandhi and Jairam Ramesh vs Manmohan Singh, Kamal Nath, Sriprakash Jaiswal and Naveen Patnaik, in the court of the people. Something had to give.
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A higher calling — Mother Nature & the Gandhis
The Odisha Chief Minister had been best friends with Ramesh in the drawing rooms of Delhi — although to be fair to Ramesh, he remains a teetotaller — but there was no meeting ground over Vedanta.
Patnaik was determined to bring “development” and all the advantages that came with it — jobs and rising income and, therefore, economic growth and fuller state coffers. His former friend was determined to sabotage this project.
Who could stop Rahul Gandhi, meanwhile? The removal of poverty had become a subject close to his heart, a noble cause, except he and his prime minister had radically different ideas on how to get there.
As Rahul told former RBI governor Raghuram Rajan last week during their online conversation on how to combat Covid, “You know, I like Gandhiji’s words, just go to the back of the line and see what’s going on at the back of the line.”
Except, Rahul never really returned to the back of the line to attend to issues that had made his heart bleed in the first place. His excursion to Lanjigarh in 2010, sporting a very attractive Che Guevara beard, was readymade for TV, but then he came down that hillside and went back into seclusion.
He would emerge for his next outing in May 2011 when he was detained in the Bhatta-Parsaul villages just outside Delhi, for protesting against the erstwhile Mayawati government’s large-scale land acquisitions in Uttar Pradesh.
Naturally, the “sipahi’s sipahi”, aka Jairam Ramesh, filled in. But Ramesh was already becoming too outspoken for his own government’s good, clearly believing he should pay obeisance to a higher calling, both Mother Nature and the Gandhi family, rather than the government he served.
Within the year, he would lose his job as environment minister, but it was not a punishment. He was promoted to Manmohan Singh’s cabinet in 2011 and made rural development minister. It was like an unseen hand was guiding his trajectory towards the top.
His quarrel-picking abilities were certainly unstoppable. In July 2011, weeks after the Anna Hazare-led movement against corruption became all the rage, Ramesh scrapped with then finance minister Pranab Mukherjee, telling him at a Cabinet meeting that the inclusion of the PM would enhance the image of the Lokpal. Mukherjee “snapped back”, telling the rural development minister that the image of the government didn’t depend on the PM’s inclusion but on the work that it did.
The way the political deck was stacked, Ramesh probably knew it was safe to attack Manmohan Singh, his one-time mentor. Differences between Mukherjee, the safest pair of hands within the party, and the Gandhis went back to 1984, when Indira Gandhi was assassinated, even though Sonia Gandhi knew there was no one as politically savvy and, therefore indispensable, in the dispensation.
Ramesh would not only have nothing to lose, he might even have further gained the trust of the Gandhis. Only two months before, Rahul Gandhi, by now clean-shaven, had been detained in Bhatta-Parsaul. Buoyed by Rahul’s interests again, Ramesh would make the Land Acquisition Bill the centrepiece of his and his party’s politics. It would be passed two years later, but not without deep-seated differences and open rivalry that had become a hallmark of UPA-2.
The consent clause was the breakpoint. From PM Manmohan Singh to finance minister P. Chidambaram, the Congress was split down the middle over Ramesh’s first draft that consent of the owners would be needed to acquire or buy land. A compromise would be found that restricted consent to the private purchase of land. Jairam Ramesh would survive.
The government and the Congress were not as fortunate. Scandal upon scandal — from Rs 1.76 lakh crore allegedly lost in the 2G scam to the alleged cash-for-votes scam, the Adarsh housing scam and the coal scam — further battered Manmohan Singh’s reputation for integrity. Economic growth was a major casualty.
The party was decimated in the 2014 polls by the BJP’s Narendra Modi, seen as a saviour by people waiting to be delivered from this unholy mess. And Rahul Gandhi seemed unable to decide whether he should dig in his heels or travel abroad.
With little else to do, Jairam Ramesh wandered off into the Teen Murti Library and began to write a book a year. From 2015 to 2019 he had written seven, including biographies of Indira Gandhi, her guru and mentor P.N. Haksar and V.K. Krishna Menon.
Noticeably, all his subjects were closely related to the Nehru-Gandhi family.
As for the further marginalisation of the Congress in 2019, it has hardly affected Ramesh’s personal position — he was elected to the Rajya Sabha in 2016 from Karnataka, while a second claimant, P. Chidambaram, was moved to Maharashtra. He has lost none of the scathing wit he reserves for lesser mortals, including his colleagues.
When Shashi Tharoor suggested the Congress hold elections (the last one was held in 1998), including to the Congress Working Committee, so as to rejuvenate inner-party democracy, Ramesh said, “I am totally at a loss to understand why Tharoor has made such a suggestion.”
By occasionally praising the PM, Ramesh knows he will unsettle a majority of Congressmen. But he makes up fast, tweeting that “Modi mahals” as part of the Rs 60,000 crore redevelopment of the Central Vista in the heart of Lutyens’ Delhi can wait, especially when cost-cutting is rife during this Covid crisis.
For the moment, being a member of Rahul Gandhi’s Covid committee certainly helps, as the limelight is guaranteed. Moreover, it’s only a matter of time before Gandhi makes it to the top party job again. When that happens, Ramesh will be powerfully placed to play aide, ally and accomplice at the same time, looking to clear his dear leader’s path of thorns that might hurt him.
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Seriously in this party of jokers does it matter which joker is on top?
I like how this article is trying to make him a hero of sorts. I didnt know The Wire too was involved in such kind of show baazi. This is the same guy who didnt stop konkan minings because “a lots of money is involved” . Its a shame. This guys decision led to diplacement of hundreds of animals and the destruction of many regions in the konkan.
Good choice. ”
“Having survived bosses as diverse”.Is it survived or served?
The chances of Congress party gaining the the majority in Loksabha or any substantial number of seats in Loksabha to influence government formation in any coming elections ,are as bright as the chances of British Crown again capturing New Delhi. So every one who has been , who is with the party is just wasting his time, wasting his talent, jeopardizing his future , his political career. It is just O.Kay for some old men of India s past to remain there and talk of nostalgia . Journalists who are clever at cultivating beneficial ties with THE POWER THAT BE , also need to look for new pastures. It is law of nature DEAD NEVER COME BACK TO LIFE. Congress has been our past. journalists should leave the task of evaluations to HISTORIANS who are trained to do so. As are the different school of political THOUGHT , we shall get A flood of report cards in many colours— golden, Black, Grey . White-washed, ORIGINALS, DUPLICATES., BASED ON RECORDS, OR JUST CREATION OF CREATIVE MINDS.
Soniaji must have okayed this write-up can you confirm.
OLD PROVERB:
” One cannot stand in two boats”.
Will this work for long? Shashi Tharoor is himself an example that it won’t. And Rahul’s choices cannot be any indication of anything except blind loyalty and, ” Who abuses and ridicules Modi the best” .
If Jairam is all that smart, then he should have realized by now that he has been backing the wrong horse all this time, unless, of course, his objective is to remain relevant,no matter how insignificantly, in the the corridors of Lutyen’s Delhi. Congress has imploded and the little that remained has been pushed over the cliff by the uncanny “raw wisdom” of people who have never seen the inside of a classroom but have graduated in the university of “hard knocks.”
P.V. Narasimha Rao, Sonia Gandhi, Sitaram Kesri and Manmohan Singh, Ramesh , PC these are ALL Old guard but you are to fool us again because you are Paid by Congress?Congress will never come back while there is a Gandhi leading the pack.New young blood nis the only answer but because of in fighting and corruption and trying to appease the Muslim vote, they are doom to failure.Keep accepting payment from the Congress party and you will get somewhere?
Mr. Ramesh you are wasting your talent with Pappu and his useless gang.
India needs your talent and intelligence. Come over to the right side.
At a critical stage, as environment minister, he created hurdles for the Navi Mumbai airport. It is still not ready.