"YPF is an avenue for building consensus"

Q & A/ Praful Patel

In this interview to Aditi Phadnis, he explains how the YPF will help young parliamentarians chill out. Excerpts:

How did this forum come about?
Well, there were several of us who were young, first-time members of Parliament "" P N Siva, Mohan Rao, Jay Panda, Ravishankar Prasad, Rajiv Shukla, to name a few "" all new to Delhi and the House, lonely, afraid and diffident.

I have been in the Lok Sabha thrice and now I am in the Rajya Sabha so I don't count as a new parliamentarian, but I know the feeling.

All these fresh, young, energetic faces used to sit in the back benches and considered banding themselves together, calling themselves the Back Benchers' Club.

But I explained to them that while being a back-bencher was fine, calling yourself a club would mean people wouldn't take you seriously. So we decided, why not band ourselves as a Young Parliamentarians' Forum?

Young parliamentarians with an upper age limit of 55?
In Indian politics, 55 is still young. I was 44 when I mooted the idea. I am 46 now. It has taken time. But it is an idea whose time has come.

Many of those in our group were MPs who've become ministers "" Shahnawaz Hussain, Rajiv Pratap Rudy, Ravishankar Prasad....

But anyone can be a member of the YPF "" in fact, even if you've ceased to be an MP, you don't lose membership of the YPF. We see ourselves as an opinion-making forum in Parliament.

The idea is: if 10 people from different parties sit in a room and talk about India's problems, they can still reach a consensus on national issues.

You only have to see the events of the past two days and the debate on the no-confidence motion to see how many parties spoke and how all of them spoke with India in mind, but different Indias.

Fractured mandates are going to be the trend for the present and the future. And the more avenues you have for building a consensus, the better.

We see the YPF as precisely such an avenue for building consensus. The first rule is going to be that we're going to put contentious issues aside.

It is the same faces everywhere. There is an Indo-British Parliamentarians' Forum, an Indo-US one, an Indo-German one.... So, join a forum and see the world?
Nobody pays for us. Nobody gives us anything free. But there has to be a core that starts things. There are lots of diverse people who are a part of the other forums. The YPF is one among them.

So apart from serving Kashmiri or Maharashtrian or Chettinad food at dinner parties, what else are you going to do together?
We plan to have round tables. Sam Pitroda started the telecom revolution.

But he also left it all in disgust. His experiences are valuable for all of us to hear. We also want to invite individual leaders of parties.

Space technology, information technology, telecom...these things affect our daily lives. I would like to get the health minister with a team of top bureaucrats to talk to us about the politics of HIV/AIDS, for example.

But so many such fora already exist for the benefit of MPs. There are standing committees and consultative committees. And yet nobody attends the meetings. All the young MPs raise issues of labour law reform. But an average of three MPs attend annual meetings of the Consultative Committee on Labour where the top bureaucracy and the minister are on hand to be grilled by MPs. What is going to be different about this exercise?
Standing committees and so on have a long gestation period. They are highly structured forums. We don't want our forum to be so rigidly hierarchical and structured.

I want to make use of research by CII [Confederation of Indian Industry] and Ficci [Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry], for instance, for a paper on a particular subject.

We are going to have a small secretariat with a president "" not one guy for life, but a rotating president every year "" who will handle the agenda. There will be a chair and a co-chair.

This too will revolve. The president will have the limited role of coordinating activities. We don't want our forum to become examples of the typical politician who never wants to let go of anything.

What happens when the young parliamentarian superannuates? Does he have to leave the YPF?
He leaves. He doesn't have to hang on. In Indian politics 55 is not old. In any case, the idea of YPF is not to define it by age but by people who have a modern vision for India.

We have to get out of the typical rustic mindset of poverty and more poverty with no solution for how to end it. The classical response is: do rupaiye mein chaval de do, teen rupaiye mein gehoon dey do, tanker mein paani dey do, bas (give rice at Rs 2 a kg, wheat at Rs 3 a kg, send a tanker of water, that's it). Beyond this, we don't discuss how to get out of it.

The leadership is passing on into younger hands. Our scope is not to define which party rules India but on how many issues we can create consensus on subjects which affect the nation.

If people get wind of the fact that you're going to work as a pressure group, you're going to be prevented from working. This is what happened to the Backward Class MPs forum, or the women who got together across party lines for the women's reservation bill....
We are a pressure group for the good of India. We're not going to discuss Babri Masjid or Ayodhya "" all our parties have a position on it and we don't want to go into that. But there are other things that can be discussed together.

Are the Left MPs going to join?
We're not a club of capitalists that my friends from the Left can't join. We're a club, that's all.

What do you do at your meetings?
We laugh, talk, crack jokes, send SMSs, even mimic our seniors, let our hair down. It is like a breath of fresh air....

What was the last joke you cracked at your meeting?
(Thinks then grins) what would you call a fat girl waiting at a bus stop?

I don't know. What?
Moti-waiting.