Petroleum Minister Murli Deora’s actions, or at least Anil Ambani’s interpretation of them, may have got the government into all manner of embarrassment, but the greatest loss is undoubtedly Deora’s. Anil Ambani’s decision to openly accuse Deora of siding with elder brother Mukesh Ambani, in a sense, is a big defeat for everything Deora stands for. Deora, after all, is the man who played bridge with Ramnath Goenka even as the legendary Indian Express proprietor fought a pitched battle with Deora’s other friend, Dhirubhai Ambani — never once did Deora let their fight come in between his personal relations with either. And though Deora is quite open about his preference for Mukesh among the two brothers, this has not prevented Anil from walking into Deora’s house for dinner, and then asking Deora’s domestic help for a special cup of tea — as if he were at his own house.
Deora’s personal equations, of course, are legendary — when the Bathinda refinery wasn’t going anywhere and someone suggested L N Mittal be roped in, it was Deora the prime minister turned to since “he’s your friend”. This, of course, goes back to the days when Indira Gandhi was prime minister — several Congress heavyweights in the state wanted him out, but Deora stayed as the party’s chief fund-raiser. This time around, according to party sources, while there was a lot of jostling for portfolios, Deora’s name had already been finalised for petroleum.
One thing that has worked, apart from Deora being a very generous host — ‘once a Deora friend, always a Deora friend’ is his motto — is that he doesn’t take offence easily. Anil Ambani may have gone public with his view that Deora has rejected the Mukesh-owned Reliance Industries Limited contract with the Anil-owned Reliance Natural Resources Limited to help Mukesh, but he has said this to Deora on various occasions, in the latter’s dining room. “If my father was alive”, Ambani said in response to Deora’s statement that Dhirubhai was a very good friend, “he would have been the first to tell you that you are wrong”, recalls someone who met the two at Deora’s 65 Lodhi Estate house in the capital — Deora has not changed this house he had since the time he was an MP.
Though Deora is open about his friendship with top corporate honchos, even his detractors will not say Deora pursues his own line. Deora is known to be a loyalist and takes his line from the ‘high command’ and then defends it vigorously. So, when he became petroleum minister, he met Sonia Gandhi for some ‘guiding principles’ — don’t raise kerosene prices — and he has stuck to them since. If anything, Deora is seen as exceptionally subservient to the party chief. Once, he recalls, Indira Gandhi called him to meet a foreign visitor in the garden and she asked him for his view on something inconsequential. The prime minister, Deora later told friends, wanted him to give his opinion to dispel the notion that she was an autocrat, but Deora kept quiet — the PM was furious but Deora reasoned, “What if I gave the wrong answer?”
It is this loyalty and personal bond with everyone that ensured that, after the younger Ambani set the cat among the pigeons, Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee was pressed into Deora’s defence. It is also this that ensured Law Minister Veerappa Moily told the press that there were no differences in the government over Deora’s actions.
While Deora’s survived the political battle, for a man who counts everyone as a friend, losing even one can’t be an easy thing.
