When news filtered out after the Cabinet meeting on November 25 that Defence Minister A K Antony and Rural Development Minister Jairam Ramesh were the only two people in the room who said they had doubts about foreign direct investment (FDI) in retail, everyone was a bit surprised.
Antony? Well, OK: on its “supporters of economic reform” list, the finance ministry has him down as a “doubtful”. But Ramesh? The original reformer? A member of a group of liberalisers in 1991 that had members you could count on two hands (namely Manmohan Singh, P Chidambaram, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, A N Verma, Suresh Mathur and Rakesh Mohan)? The man who helped the government dismantle maximum regulations and controls ?
People shook their heads sadly. The kindest thing they could say was that Ramesh had turned a “conscientious objector”. His adversaries said he had let ambition get the better of him and was being used by various other interests to undermine the authority of the prime minister yet again.
The fact is, it is Antony and Ramesh who stand vindicated today. Both had differences on the issue of FDI per se; Ramesh had said he would be happier if the FDI limit was brought down to 49 per cent. But both were far more concerned about the timing; they said the government would be better advised to postpone the decision — not long, just two weeks, until after the Parliament session.
If the Cabinet had listened to Ramesh instead of turning on him, India might not have become the spectacle it is today and the prime minister’s image might not have taken the battering it has. “India shouldn’t raise people’s hopes of FDI and then in a week say, ‘we’re only joking’,” Jim O’Neil, chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, said at a Reuters investors conference the same week. “India’s inability to raise its share of global FDI is very disappointing,” he added.
Ramesh isn’t saying a word. He pleasantly, but firmly, resisted all queries on the subject. The thing is, the charmed circle of political managers in the government is not ready to let him in yet. It is a fact that although he was given his first party position in 1997 by then party president, Sitaram Kesri, the first time Ramesh really played a political role was in 2004, when he helped put together the manifesto of the Congress — which forever wedded the party conceptually to aam aadmi. It was an ad team for the Congress, but without the mod cons — it moved to temporary quarters at South Avenue offered by Ambika Soni, where it came up with the slogan: “Congress ka haath; Aam Aadmi kay saath”, which became the brand differentiator in the 2004 general elections. The Ramesh-led Aam Aadmi team didn’t mind working in a cramped flat, they didn’t mind the limited parking, they didn’t even miss the gizmos, computers, deep sofas and cappuccino machines — all standard equipment in the office of any self-respecting advertising agency. But what they did object to was the single, shared toilet. And Ramesh and the others would use the loos at the Claridges or Ashok Hotel nearby.
But that was the least of the problems; the Congress’ self-perception was that it was headed nowhere. “If in 1998 the Congress was a deep discount bond, in 2004 there was no prospect of a successful IPO,” Ramesh quipped. Not a single person in the Congress was ready to give the Congress more than 80 seats. It got 159.
The 2004 elections proved Ramesh understood what the people wanted from the Congress. The 2009 elections, in which the party got 206 seats, should have reinforced this to those who consider themselves the strategists of the party. It did not.
So, how has Ramesh survived in politics so long, when his colleagues believe he knows very little about politics or elections ?Mainly because he has a powerful backer: Sonia Gandhi.
It was Gandhi who propelled him to play a bigger role in politics, ensuring he got a nomination to the Rajya Sabha, and then, in 2006, a ministership. Gandhi has realised that there is a place in the party for all kinds of people: party hacks, worker bees for its ideas factory, even draft animals (a pun! geddit?). Ramesh has been deployed as one and then the other.
It is clear that the FDI-in-retail episode hasn’t really won Ramesh too many friends in the party. He is upset but philosophical. In a profession in which the margin of error is very small and every mistake is subject to magnification to the power of 1,000, you are ruled wrong even when you’re right. His philosophy, he once explained, is: Mein zindagi ka saath nibhata chala gaya/har fikr ko dhuen mein udata chala gaya/barbadiyon ka jashn manata chala gaya/har fikr ko dhuen mein udata chala gaya…. [I went along with life / I blew away all my worries in smoke / I kept celebrating my tragedies.]
