Aditi Phadnis: Keeping a low profile

PLAIN POLITICS/ Ahmad Patel is a lesson in how to survive while staying away from the limelight

Ahmad Patel

What does it take to be a really successful politician ? Judging by the examples before us, you have to be like Ahmad Patel.

How much grassroot support Patel has in his home state of Gujarat is a moot question. No one from the state considers him a mass leader.

Maybe this is because he is too soft spoken, too humble, too ready to listen to people's problems...but neither assertive nor tough enough to take on the system.

So in the faction-ridden politics of Gujarat, Patel loses out. There is no significant faction in the Gujarat Congress that claims to be the Ahmad Patel group.

Possibly as a consequence, Patel was nowhere in evidence in the Gujarat Congress leading from the front as was expected, for example, when the Gujarat riots happened. He moved to Delhi during that period.

But mass appeal is not the only thing that makes a politician successful. Look at Mamata Banerjee.

Today she can call a public meeting and easily collect a crowd of over 500,000. But her party has been wiped out in West Bengal, her colleagues are no longer her supporters because they are fed up of her capricious ways, and well... she's simply wasted away all the goodwill that came her way when she launched the Trinamul Congress.

But this is where Patel differs significantly from Mamata. He may not be a fantastic orator or a charismatic crowd puller. But when it comes to the Congress organisation in the states, there is no one who knows more than Patel.

This comes from a sense of history "" he has been an organisation man since the days of Rajiv Gandhi's prime ministership and refused offers of ministership at least thrice including the plum cabinet portfolio of communication offered to him by P V Narasimha Rao "" and the recognition that his political strength derives from the party.

Just to understand his seniority in the party, he was a contemporary of Arjun Singh and Oscar Fernandes when Gandhi took over in 1984 and the three were appointed parliamentary secretaries. Patel was well-liked mainly because of his soft-spokenness and his ability to impart dignity to Congress workers.

"What does a party worker want? He just wants the party to understand how the world looks from where he's standing, wants to be heard and appreciated. Ahmadbhai does this so well that in a party where people mostly want to get ahead by dint of stepping on the heads of each other, here is a man who actually has the time to listen to you and tell you you're on the right track" said a party worker.

Patel is a man of few words. You can't ever tell what he is thinking, an excellent quality in a politician. It will be hard to find a Congressman in whose defence Patel might have offered to step down, when against the wall.

But the man, who is reported to have never done anything for anyone, was the one who got the highest number of votes in the Calcutta sesion of the Congress when, under the presidentship of Sitaram Kesri the party held organisational elections for the first time in several decades.

The counting during those elections stretched over two days and Patel who was contesting for membership of the Congress Working Committee, bested his nearest rival by a huge margin of several hundred votes. This was when stalwarts like Tariq Anwar, Madhavrao Scindia, Sharad Pawar and Ghulam Nabi Azad were also in the fray.

Significantly, although Patel was not overly fond of P V Narasimha Rao, he did not join the rebellion against him led by N D Tewari, Sheila Dikshit and Rangarajan Kumaramangalam.

This group, which formed the Congress T, expected Sonia Gandhi to join it. She didn't. Neither did Patel, who all this time, was working behind the scenes to build Jawahar Bhavan that houses the Rajiv Gandhi foundation as the monument in homage to the leader.

Patel supervised the construction, he organised the funds and he set up the infrastructure for the building. Little wonder then, that he came in close contact with Sonia Gandhi and has stayed close to her. As Gandhi's political secretary, Patel is the sounding board for the Congress President on several contentious issues.

One of these was deciding the issue of the Karnataka chiefministership. As general secretary in charge of Karnataka, Patel had to walk a political minefield. The result was not a shock to the Congress "" the party had been expecting it. But the decision to make Dharam Singh the chief minister instead of Mallikarjun Kharge, who has now become home minister, was Patel's.

Dharam Singh had been PCC chief five years ago when the party rode to power in the state, but because of pressure from certain quarters, S M Krishna got the job then and Dharam Singh was made PWD minister. To deny him the post of chief minister now would have been an injustice to him.

Patel exercises his power very, very discreetly. Minister for Personnel, Suresh Pachouri, owes his rise to Patel's endeavours. Similarly, leaders like Satyajit Gaekwad (Maharashtra), Shakil Ahmad (Bihar) and Anil Bharadwaj (Delhi) may be virtual nonentities in the party, but have maintained a relationship with Patel.

His outstanding quality is: he never questions the boss, simply because he has no personal axe to grind. He leads an austere life, reads the namaz thrice a day and is known to be scrupulously honest. So if he doesn't stand up for his supporters, and doesn't go out of his way to oblige them, no one really minds.

It is not that Patel doesn't have enemies in the party. Arjun Singh will go to great lengths to ensure his proximity to Sonia Gandhi is curtailed. There is a school of thought in the Congress that believes Pranab Mukherjee's appointment as defence minister, not home minister, was influenced by Patel's views on the subject.

Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit may have thought it was because of her that the party won the assembly elections in 2003. But she was made to wait to become chief minister, just as a reminder that others contributed to the victory as well, on the basis of advice, believed to have been tendered by Patel.

Patel will probably never become a minister "" simply because he chooses to stay in the party. He would rather people remember him as a good but ineffectual person, than as a good but ambitious politician.