Nistula Hebbar: The minister for bureaucrats

BACKSTAGE

Regime changes have unexpected effects. What is "out" suddenly becomes "in", what is forbidden becomes desirable and those who were pariahs become the privileged. So it is with the new government, where faces and names not seen or heard for over a decade have come in from the cold.

As the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) takes charge and proceeds to fill important positions in the public domain with people it trusts, the man entrusted with the task "" Minister of State for Personnel Suresh Pachouri "" has to perform a dual function "" combining the political agenda of the government with the discretion of a bureaucrat.

Those who know Pachouri (and there are not many who can truly claim to) say that it has been a casting coup for the new government to bring in the low-profile Rajya Sabha member from Madhya Pradesh as "the minister for bureaucrats".

Because of his sense of history, Pachouri has been given the job of recall "" assessing whether old Congress loyalists in the bureaucracy are still with the party and, if they are, putting them in important places. The Congress has been out of power for so long that the bureaucracy has lost touch with it. Pachouri's task is to pick up where the party left off.

An engineer by education, Pachouri was a fiery student leader at Bhopal's M A City College when he was noticed by Rajiv Gandhi and brought into the Rajya Sabha in 1984. It was a good time to be a young Congressman. Gandhi wanted educated, young people to energise the party.

However, it was when Gandhi put him and D P Rai in charge of training Congress workers in political work that he came into his own. The angry young man of the university campus was replaced by a soft-spoken, low-profile politician, who did meticulous research, kept copious records and became indispensable to the party in the Upper House of Parliament.

In his tenure as a Rajya Sabha member, Pachouri was at first identified with S S Ahluwalia's "shouting brigade". But gradually Ahluwalia appropriated that position and took it to the BJP. Pachouri still speaks loudly in the Rajya Sabha, but outside the House is reserved to the point of taciturnity.

It is being said that whenever the Congress organisational reshuffle takes place, Pachouri will be the busiest partyman around, his notes on various issues and records of party history much in demand with past and present AICC general secretaries and MPs, especially during parliamentary debates.

Just when this transformation occurred is a mystery to most, but nobody denies that it has made Pachouri rise above other young leaders introduced by Gandhi at that time "" Tariq Anwar and Aslam Sher Khan, for instance "" who later fell by the wayside.

This is Pachouri's fourth stint in the Upper House, enough to get him his second job in the government, that of minister of state for parlimentary affairs.

Pachouri's maiden experience in electoral politics was when he was given a ticket from Bhopal in the 1999 Lok Sabha election, where he took on and lost to Uma Bharati. The experience had one positive fallout, though: it convinced both the party and Pachouri himself that, like Ahmad Patel, Pachouri's skills are more in tune with backroom manoeuvring than the heat and dust of elections.

The new assignment given to Pachouri will test his skill, discretion and, most importantly, his ability as a manager of the "steel frame of India" to the hilt. He may have started out on a gammy leg, because of the removal of Cabinet Secretary Kamal Pande, a move that has not gone down well in the bureaucracy. But this is just the beginning.

Long referred to as a yuva neta (young leader), the 40-something Pachouri once confessed to being embarrassed by this reference to his long-past youth. Perhaps the weight of his new responsibility will also be his coming of age.