The serious side of Mani S Aiyar

Has the lapsed Communist, maverick diplomat and itinerant columnist found his political metier?

Mani Shankar Aiyar

When he was told he was being given temporary charge of petroleum when the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government had just taken over, Mani Shankar Aiyar thought he was being set up for target practice.

Panchayati raj he was comfortable with, but to get the petroleum portfolio in the middle of the worst global crisis in decades was not an elevation. But an Aiyar has to do what an Aiyar has to do.

On Day One, when he landed up in the capital's Shastri Bhavan looking for his new office, he got lost in the corridors. Once he had found the large pad that was now his, the first thing he did was throw out the throng of reporters looking for a quotable quote.

The next thing he did was turn everything topsy-turvy. Bureaucrats and the powerful chieftains of the public sector oil giants were soon muttering swear words under their breath.

Aiyar then called journalists to lunch, to ask them what he should do. He heard all of them out, then dismissed the meeting by saying: "Now I know why none of you wins an election. Go back to your editorials while I go and make policy."

You get the picture. Aiyar is not your everyday oil minister. When you consider that his predecessors have been Satish Sharma, Kamal Nath, P Shiv Shankar, B Shankaranand and Ram Naik, you can't be surprised.

He began by turning his back on market-driven oil pricing, asserting government control at a time when OPEC (Organisation of Oil Producing Countries) was having a field day.

He then decided his target should not be the consumer but the finance minister, and demanded that oil duties be slashed. P Chidambaram was eventually forced to yield some ground, giving consumers some relief.

Being an unashamed Nehruvian, Aiyar then declared that he was not going to privatise any oil companies (as the NDA government had tried to do); instead, he would make them global behemoths, or "megamoths" (his word).

His dream, he says, is to see Indian Oil, ranked 139 in the Fortune 500 list, figure at number 34.

But before that happens, the Common Minimum Programme (CMP) requires him to extend an open invitation to domestic and international players to enter the oil economy, and he has to spend much of his time persuading them to do so "" "me, the most Left leaning member of the Cabinet", he says ruefully.

If you doubted whether he was making a difference, those doubts must have vanished at sight of the stunning group that he got together in Delhi this past week: oil grandees from every Asian producing and consuming country that counts.

In an amazing display of IFS panache, he has given oil diplomacy a new meaning.

And the headlines tell you the difference that he has made to the oil companies, who are now bidding for the biggest oil fields in the world. Suddenly, that seminar buzzword "energy security" seems like a workable idea.

Indeed, within a week of joining the ministry Aiyar had worked out that India couldn't have enough oil for its needs. So he found himself rushing to minister of external affairs, K Natwar Singh's office.

Singh announced that Talmiz Ahmad, formerly India's ambassador in Saudi Arabia, would be seconded to the ministry of petroleum. Aiyar had asked for Ahmad by name.

In the 1980s, as Aiyar points out, India was 50 per cent self-sufficient in crude and 100 per cent self-sufficient in natural gas.

Aiyar worked out that if India sustains 7-8 per cent economic growth over the next 15 years, the oil self-sufficiency ratio will dip to 15 per cent and gas to 50 per cent.

What was required was a fusion of political diplomacy with oil diplomacy. Talmiz Ahmad's joining was one element. Aiyar also set up a committee of retired bureaucrats, experts on specific, oil-bearing regions, to understand the diplomacy, politics and economics of these regions.

His first stop was Vienna for a meeting of OPEC. He launched a diplomatic blitzkrieg to help Indian PSUs get a platform that served their hard-nosed economic interests, sweetened by some diplomacy.

Northern and Western Africa have sweet crude. Preliminary talks began on transporting this by linking a new pipeline between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea.

Aiyar then visited Moscow to suggest an oil pipeline from Keyhan on the Mediterranean coast of Turkey through the Sinai peninsula to reach Caspian sea oil.

GAIL is already participating in the East Siberian pipeline aimed at bringing North Asian Russian oil to the Pacific Coast. If Aiyar's grand plans work, all the world's oil sources "" West Asian, Southeast Asian, Central Asian and African "" will at one or other point supply to India and Asia.

As for the domestic oil companies, Aiyar found that while they had the same owner (the government), their CEOs all had a conflicting ambition: to reach the top of the pyramid and pull the other guy down.

They were drawn from the same pool "" Indian Oil Corporation (IOC) management trainees in the mid-1960s "" who had scrambled their way to the top. But there isn't that much space at the top, provoking interpersonal rivalries.

"I found that the Indian work culture of individual brilliance meant an inordinate amount of time was spent on how to show up the other guy."

But the real challenge to PSUs was from Reliance, Cairns and others. Jamnagar, the largest refinery in the world, would in time be matched by IOC's potential refinery in Paradeep.

Apart from this, what existed was a set of obsolescent, small and segregated PSU refineries, most sited inland and, therefore, disempowered.

The writing was on the wall; determined efforts by private and international players to enter the sector would undermine PSU dominance, to which Aiyar is firmly committed.

Aiyar has suggested broad alternatives: massive mergers of oil companies to create the megamoths; bringing them into a self-supervisory system that involves goal-setting; and innovative management structures for greater synergy.

Aiyar has announced a committee headed by PSU expert V Krishnamurthy to advise him on how the "behemoth" would be organised. But government rules say no committee can be set up without the concurrence of the Prime Minister's Office.

Aiyar has been awaiting clearance of the proposal by the cabinet secretariat for two months now "" and it is no secret that Aiyar has clashed frequently with Manmohan Singh on economic reform.

But when the Manmohan Singh government created for the first time in India a ministry for panchayati raj, who the minister would be was a foregone conclusion.

Aiyar, described off the record by colleagues and friends as both belligerent and obnoxious, is dewy-eyed when it comes to panchayati raj.

He was largely responsible for igniting Rajiv Gandhi's interest that led to the passage of legislation ensuring the transfer of decision-making power and resources in the rural areas to panchayats, and mandating that at least a third of panchayat seats be reserved for women.

He's moved as quickly on panchayati raj as he has on petroleum. He convened a meeting of all CMs with the prime minister and followed it up with five rounds of meetings in various state capitals, culminating in a first-ever meeting of panchayat heads in Delhi's Vigyan Bhavan.

Aiyar's sense is that panchayati raj has transformed power relations in even the wider gender and caste sense. He points to a 23-year-old purdah-clad Muslim girl, widowed within weeks of her election.

When asked what her family thought of her presiding over a conclave in which men participated, she retorted: "What does it matter what they think, I am the one who got elected."

Aiyar has announced that a Council of Panchayati Raj Ministers of all states will be set up to ensure the implementation of recommendations.

Another committee of chief secretaries and panchayati raj secretaries will meet every month to work out implementation modalities. A small task force has been set up to develop an e-tracking system on fund utilisation.

Aiyar describes himself as a "man of very strong convictions" but "one who has an open mind". That's also how you describe an opportunist. And Mani Shankar Aiyar is making full use of the opportunity he has got.

For he is the dark horse who has now emerged as one of the most active, go-getting ministers in the Manmohan Singh Cabinet.

The authorised biography

It is easier to understand Aiyar if you know the story of his life. He is the eldest of three sons and a daughter of a chartered accountant who fled Madras in the midst of the anti-Brahmin movement in the 1940s, to Lahore "" only to flee religious persecution there and settle in Delhi.

In 1953, the plane in which his father was travelling crashed. Overnight, the family owned nothing; Aiyar was 12.

What saved the family from destitution was an insurance policy from the London Lancashire Insurance Company that got the family Rs 3 lakh.

Aiyar's mother moved to Dehra Dun where the boys had been studying in Doon School, and browbeat the headmaster into giving her a discount on the boys' education as they were now day scholars.

Overnight Aiyar became the poorest boy in the richest school: "This warped my psychology into turning me into the crypto-Communist that I am."

Aiyar studied economics at St Stephens College, and the remaining residues of the family's savings went into financing his further education in Cambridge. Like many Indians abroad, Aiyar struggled to come to terms with the Chinese attack in 1962.

Intuitively, he felt the Communist movement had something to answer for. He took the foreign service exam in India House the day Tawang fell, and was seventh on the merit list.

Three months later he got a telegram rejecting him from the service. It took Jawaharlal Nehru's intervention "" "I have heard good reports of Aiyar, he should be taken into the service" "" for him to be admitted into the IFS.

Aiyar's fondest memories are curiously not of the IFS but the events that made him leave the service "" when he was seconded to Rajiv Gandhi's PMO as "manager tour and travels", he says. He wrote about 1,000 speeches during this period, he says, and at the end of it he can't tell what idea began with Rajiv Gandhi and what was his because they all coalesced.

He met his wife Suneet Vir Singh at a declamation contest. Lady Irwin College had sent Suneet Vir Singh and the "delectable Claudine Sequeira" to represent them, the two girls chaperoned by Kamini Luthra "hovering over us like Banquo's ghost". That was in November, 1959.

Aiyar and Vir Singh met briefly in 1963 when he was trying to get into the IFS but lost touch after that, only to reconnect because Aiyar's youngest brother Mukund who was working in All India Radio picked her for AIR.

At AIR, Suneet became best friends with Gitanjali who, fate decreed, would be marrying Swaminathan, his other brother. It was as a family friend that Suneet came back into his life.

They were married on January 14, 1973, 13 years after they had first met. "I just wouldn't have got anywhere without her," says Aiyar. He attributes their relationship to the simple rule: that all successful marriages require one spouse and one mouse. He's the mouse, he says.

Mani's stings

Mani Shankar Aiyar is not an easy man to work for. He is generous with praise but is also a great believer in the power of public humiliation. He once said that was the only trait he had in common with former chief election commissioner T N Seshan: both believed in obnoxiousness as a management tool.

It doesn't help that he has rotten handwriting, so officers in his ministry frequently find themselves consulting each other on what a hieroglyphic on a file might mean.

Sometimes, when they are very perplexed, they also show these files to reporters covering his ministry "" which is a very good thing indeed, for the reporters!

He's put a quick stop to all that by invoking the fear of the Intelligence Bureau among officers, which seems like using a hammer to swat a fly. But Aiyar is big on using hammers where flyswatters will do.

Congressmen as secular as Aiyar watched with dismay the unfolding of the Savarkar drama when he attempted to provide a secular perspective to Savarkar's role in the freedom struggle by removing his plaque from an oil-company sponsored memorial in the Andamans.

Savarkar, virtually disowned by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh at one stage, got the kiss of life thanks to Aiyar's efforts.

But Aiyar has never claimed he's in politics to win friends. The countryside is littered with those he's attacked, reviled and laughed at.

About T N Seshan he once wrote: "Don't you think Seshan's pathetic attempt to become our Rashtrapatiji proves everything I have always said about the old fraud? First, he describes his IAS colleagues as 'prostitutes', forgetting that since he made it to cabinet secretary, that makes him the madam of the cat house! Now after getting the admiration of his fans by saying he will retire to his 'modest home' in Chennai immediately on attaining superannuation from the chief election commissionership, he is doing his damnedest to get into the most immodest palace in India."

On Sitaram Kesri, one of the Congress's most venerable presidents, he said: "Since Kesri is all of 31 years younger than the Congress, he certainly has it in him to rejuvenate the party."

And H D Deve Gowda is not a friend since Aiyar observed about him: "You got Deve Gowda wrong. He is not a humble farmer but a fumble harmer. He would not know a plough from a Gujral. If Stalin had been around, he would have known what to do with this kulak. Alas, since we don't have a Siberia, all we can do is banish the joker to the dustbin of history".

Any wonder that a riled Amar Singh is looking for Mani Shankar Aiyar, hatchet in hand?