In India between the 1960s and the early 1990s, it was essential to know a few phrases if you wanted to do business. When you heard “aapka kaam ho jayega” (your work will be done), no matter how much you might have had to pay, you smiled, returned to the office to tell your boss that it was all clear on the India project and knocked back a healthy Scotch-and-soda or two in the evening to celebrate.
Of course, clearances would never happen automatically. But they were always civil, polite and the work always got done. The rules were made by the facilitators. Mumbai was where the rulemakers lived. The head rulemaker was a man called Rajni Patel: a legend of his time who knew everybody and whose capacity to raise money for political causes was the stuff of Jeffery Archer novels.
One of Patel’s younger colleagues was a man called Murli Deora. In the 1970s, the feud between businessmen Ramnath Goenka and Dhirubhai Ambani was at its height. They hated each other but met each other quite civilly at Deora’s house for a game of bridge. Deora told journalist Pritish Nandy in an interview: “I settled that feud at my house. Both very close friends of mine. Ramnath Goenka used to tell me, I admire you that you did not leave Dhirubhai when V P Singh was going after his blood. I never leave, I always stand by my friends, wherever they are, rich or poor doesn’t matter. When Ramnath Goenka was fighting a war with Rajiv Gandhi, he used to come to my house and play bridge every evening. You must stand by people, that’s what humanity is all about.”
To be a political fund-raiser, you needed to have a high level of credibility and your record of delivering on promises had to be 100 per cent. Deora never made promises he could not keep. But he was very, very successful at keeping promises he did make. He was president of the Bombay Regional Congress Committee (BRCC) for 18 years. Nothing moved in Bombay without Deora’s say. He represented South Bombay (that has, on average, half-a-dozen dollar millionaires per square kilometer) several times in the Lower House. What could you give a constituency that had people who had everything? So Deora launched a campaign – that he funded fully – against tobacco. He also focused on charity: free eye camps, an ambulance service, computer training institutes and so on. Deora has absolutely no enemies and is fond of citing his version of Dale Carnegie: public life’s greatest virtue is to influence people and win friends.
But this amiable facilitator was also shrewd. When in the early 1990s, India’s controlled-economy regime began being dismantled, Deora slowly began to reinvent himself. Former leader of the opposition in the Upper House, Jaswant Singh always refers to Deora as the “honourable MP for Manhattan” — a reference to all the friends and supporters Deora has in the US. How much of the US investment that came to India in the mid-1990s came because of the potential of the Indian market; and how much because of the last-mile comfort provided by Murli Deora can never be quantified.
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For obvious reasons, Deora neither sought nor was given a berth in a Congress government in Delhi: he was just too good at what he did in Bombay and needed too much there. He is one of the few who was catapulted straight to the Cabinet when he was made minister for petroleum for the first time in his political career by Manmohan Singh in 2006.
However, his record as a minister is somewhat mixed. He replaced Mani Shankar Aiyar and seemed to have trouble adjusting to the limelight. Soon after he became minister, the opposition in the Rajya Sabha watched, first politely and then impatiently, as Deora struggled to assemble facts to answer a simple question.
Manohar Joshi, who asked the question, repeated it in Hindi, and when he didn’t get an answer, offered helpfully to ask it in Marathi — or Gujarati, if the minister had trouble comprehending that language.
Then, in a reshuffle, he was moved to the ministry of corporate affairs. Here, people expected that as a businessman, he would take steps that were business-friendly. Deora surprised these people. The merger and acquisition rules notified in consultation with the Competition Commission of India (CCI) last month, cut the cost of doing deals but creeping acquisitions were not made fully exempt from regulation like Security Exchange Board of India (Sebi) rules. A lack of synchronicity between the CCI and Sebi could lead to other problems.
But it was a legacy of a previous move as petroleum minister that moved Deora to hand in his resignation – to the Congress president, mind you, not the prime minister – as minister. The Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) is working on a report about whether the state lost money as a result of the sanction of Krishna-Godavari gas basins during Deora’s tenure. Deora says he asked the CAG to look into the matter. But leaks that the CAG might indicate the deal was not kosher has prompted Deora to resign. There is no clarity on his current standing — whether he is or isn’t a minister.
But being a minister is largely irrelevant for Deora. He will always have influence, even if he doesn’t have power.