Tycoon-turned-Parliamentarian Rajeev Chandrasekhar wants to be the new poster boy for Indian politics, he tells Kishore Singh over two meetings.
advocacy, from advocate, n./1 a person who publicly supports or recommends a particular case or policy. 2 a person who pleads a case on someone else’s behalf.
It’s in the air these days, the championing of advocacy as a means to rights, to information. The Presidential debates in America are another reason people are rooting for dialogue, for discussion on all matters that directly or indirectly affect them, their environment, their city, country, continent. “It’s slow,” says Rajeev Chandrasekhar, “it’s painstaking, but you have to go out and convince people about your point of view.”
Rajeev Chandrasekhar? The Silicon Valley techie-turned-Bangalore entrepreneur who made a controversial exit from the business of telecom when he sold BPL Mobile to Essar-Hutch? What’s he doing a SWOT analysis on advocacy for instead of spending the $1.2 billion on something ridiculously expensive?
Well you might ask, but Chandrasekhar’s hardly in the market for the perks of wealth — lthough his passions include racing and flying and, somewhat less glamorously, reading. “I’m a voracious reader,” he confesses, “I gobble up…I devour books.” A former fiction addict, his chosen bedside reading now consists of biographies and history. “I’m reading, ironically, The Age of Turbulence by Alan Greenspan,” he says, Greenspan himself a reviled person on current appearances across TV screens around the world.
What not many people know is that Chandrasekhar is both highly organised, and a workaholic, no matter how much he denies it. “One reason I sold the telecom business was to spend more time with the kids” — he has two daughters aged nine and eight — but that lasted only eight months. While he stoked his entrepreneurial streak with Jupiter Capital where he mentors venture development, management and investment in companies focusing on infrastructure and technology, media and aviation, he spends as little as “one or two hours, of 50 working hours, on business”. The rest? “At Ficci,” he says, of which he is currently president, “and on my political career.”
He’s just returned from Parliament, having shared a dosa in the canteen there, and has now ordered grilled fish at The Oberoi’s members-only Belvedere Club, where we’re meeting for lunch. The meeting, curiously, is at his behest, aimed at reporting on his interest in — you guessed it — advocacy. “Politics,” he explains, “and politicians, can destroy entrepreneurship in a youngster,” speaking perhaps from experience, though it was a politician, the late Rajesh Pilot, who wooed him back to India from Intel when he was still, he says, “an idealist”. In his years in business he was “exposed to the good, bad and ugly side of politics” and his takeaway from it was something not too many businessmen would admit: “I saw it was important for people like me to be in politics.”
Though that move to the Rajya Sabha wasn’t calibrated — while he was considering NGOs as his logical step in the direction of responsible governance, Deve Gowda offered him a seat in Parliament and a politician was born — Chandrasekhar says he’s only sure that “I was not built to run a steady company, the kick is in creating things. Money,” he says, having made rather a lot of it, “does not drive me.”
His current drivers — he says he works in five-year phases, not unlike the government — are urban (re)development, creating institutions of national importance (“a few unpoliticised institutions that we can leave behind for the next generation”), acting as a roving ombudsman for the telecom sector, and advocating a common minimum programme for political parties “with an eye on the elections”.
This last, perhaps the most important to him, is what gets him excited, and which, with Ficci as the forum, is where he’s putting in his energies — when he isn’t planning for a new Bangalore, but about that later. “I’d like to play a role where political ideologies notwithstanding, economic and governance ideologies can merge,” he says, a catalytic think tank where, from December on, he’d like to run a programme of small conferences “to bring together people from different political parties”, the success of which will be measured “if in their manifesto, political parties include all or part of what we’re saying; if they ignore us, we’ve failed”.
“One of the biggest fallacies,” Chandrasekhar speaks from between his fingers — a habit developed perhaps from whispering asides — “is that older politicians don’t get it. Some of the brightest people I’ve met,” he reiterates, “are in politics. Their brightness is of a different kind. I’ve learnt of Dalit Muslims, for instance, from a resident expert in Parliament, issues I had no glimmer of. I’ve learnt of the plight of agriculturists from Sharad Joshi. The real issues and shining examples of knowledge reside in Parliament.”
Chandrasekhar says he is seeking to create think tanks for building “cohesiveness across political aisles”, starting from Delhi, in his attempt to build a strong centre for India’s quasi-federal form of governance. Else, “increasingly states will start to say: ‘Why should I speak to Delhi?’ Which is why you need a more cohesive form of government, if only to protect this whole idea of India.”
But in at least one aspect Chandrasekhar is a regionalist, and that is as the head of a task force that is addressing the urban chaos of Bangalore. “The mandate,” he says, “is simple: Fix the Bangalore problem.” Constituted by the governor, the task force, which meets every Friday, is looking at the city’s “comprehensive planning, from the poor onwards”. It is perhaps for this that Chandrasekhar is now leaving, cutting into our second meeting in as many days. “If you define the problem, the solution isn’t rocket science,” he’s upbeat about it.
“One of the issues is the urban poor,” Chandrasekhar says of the city — though he might be speaking for all the metros — “who are rarely factored into urban development issues. Governments spend millions on the rural poor, but the urban poor remain off the radar.”
What depresses him is that “despite the IT czars of the city, Bangalore’s per capita revenue per citizen is among the lowest in the country. Yet, people want a world class city, a world class neighbourhood.” To paraphrase him then, if the problem is known, what’s holding up the solution? “We’re coming up with a blueprint by January 2009,” he assures, “for a private-public partnership that will partner with actual agencies for a solution. My vision is to have a civic agency for Bangalore that will be like the civic agency in New York,” he says, and once the paperwork is done, “we’ll look to the deficit funding, to what the government can spend and how to mobilise the gap in the finance.”
The agenda is to carve doable milestones every six months all the way to 2020, and to ensure that members of the task force (among them Kiran Mazumdar Shaw and Dr Devi Shetty) adhere to a code of conduct that seeks disclosure of interest when rooting for infrastructure solutions to the city.
There are other mini-agendas running around his head at all times. “Why don’t you give the Padma award to bureaucrats?” he asks fiercely at one point, “Where’s their motivation?” And: “If we don’t fix the problem of local government, of public spending (where only 14 paise of every rupee spent filters down), of building institutions, we are far from being a superpower.”
In the time between our two meetings, he’s got together a group of young Parliamentarians to hear out retired senior ex-servicemen, to understand the implications of the sixth pay commission on the services — a special area of interest since his father was in the air force. “It’s,” he reinforces, “called advocacy.”
But is he ready for the roil of elected politics? “I’m considering it,” he says, “for the greater credibility of the Lok Sabha. Even though you can’t remain independent there, I will at least try directly elected politics.”
You know his agenda and his next five-year plan, now join hands on the debate as well.
