I don't know if cars are a passion with Jagdish Khattar, but food and publicity are not. So when I invite the head of India's largest car company to lunch with Business Standard, he demurs. "My batch-mates already think I get too much publicity." Batch-mates? Khattar left the IAS when he joined Maruti Udyog some nine years ago, but clearly he is still part of the brotherhood.
Corporate chieftains outrank secretaries to the government, I tell him. It seems to work. So where would he like to eat? Come and share my food in the office, he counters with the kind of offer you expect from someone in the Planning Commission. I try to entice him with the new joints in town.
How about Masala Art, the new fusion place at the Taj Palace? Okay, he says, but makes it clear that he's being dragged out of the way as it's all of 15 minutes from his downtown office. But it turns out that though the restaurant had a soft launch a week earlier, it's still to formally open (fortunately so, because the food is a disappointment). I debate suggesting Brix at the Grand Hyatt, which offers delectable fare but is even further out, and decide it would be futile.
The only interesting option that's close enough to the Maruti head office seems to be San Gimignano, the Italian addition to the Imperial's increasingly choice fare. Okay, Khattar says with the faint air of a man who wonders why food is so important.
He calls up on the morning of the appointed day to say he might be a few minutes late. The 1965 batch of the UP IAS is meeting in the defence secretary's office! But when I reach, on the dot of 1.15, he is already there in the open air section, surprisingly dapper in the Japanese-style company uniform, and smoking a Mild Seven. Japanese in his cigarettes too? May be I should have offered a sushi joint, I tell myself.
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How about some wine? More reluctance. We settle on the cabernet sauvignon, which he barely sips through the meal, and is reluctant to explore the joys of the menu. No, no starters please.
Eventually he settles on a pasta in carbonara sauce (which he barely touches), while I opt for the grilled salmon. His trim figure is now easily explained, and in any case he walks 365 days a year, come rain or shine.
Somehow, the IAS seems a more inviting subject than Maruti, so I ask about his days in the government and why he decided to leave. It turns out that when the Mandal issue of extending reservations to the Other Backward Castes blew up in everyone's face a decade ago, Khattar was disillusioned about staying on, despite having had a very interesting career till then.
Looking around for options, he made a list of where people had got after they left the service, and the man who stood out as a post-service success story was, of course, another UP cadre man, the managing director of Maruti Udyog, R C Bhargava. Come and see me, Bhargava said when Khattar called. And by the time they met later in the day, Bhargava had already checked out on Khattar with three seniors in the service. From there to appointment as the heir apparent didn't take too long. It was a good insight into the workings of the brotherhood.
Once you've got him talking of his days in the government, conversation is no problem at all. He recalls his days as private secretary to Uma Shankar Dikshit when he was home minister. Before long, though, Indira Gandhi relegated Dikshit to being a minister without portfolio, and the minister told his private secretary: there's no work for you here, you better look around for another job. Khattar found a perch in the steel ministry, where he is proud of two achievements.
One, he opened up India's pig iron industry. How? By spotting a chink in the regulation that reserved steel-making for the public sector. Khattar argued that since pig iron wasn't steel, it could be thrown open to private enterprise. By such sleight of hand is reform achieved in India!
When he tried reform by the front door, it got nowhere of course. That was when he recommended that the steel ministry was doing nothing useful, and should be wound up. I'm not surprised that no one listened to him. For when I suggested the same thing to Naveen Patnaik, when he was steel minister before he went to Orissa, Patnaik was shocked at the idea.
But Khattar's happiest days were with the Tea Board in London, where he had been sent to market Indian tea. He found out very quickly that a lot of inferior tea from all over the world was being marketed as Indian tea, and even Darjeeling tea. When he complained, no one took heed; indeed, the duplicitous British establishment threw the book at him.
So he decided to take the battle to the open market, educating the English public that more Darjeeling tea was being sold in Britain than was produced in Darjeeling. He then roped in the cricket icons of the time