Shyamal Majumdar: The keeper of the flame

LUNCH WITH BS: Mani Shankar Aiyar

Mani Shankar Aiyar

In 1973 "" soon after he was back from his honeymoon "" Mani Shankar Aiyar's friends decided to organise a small get-together of his Doon School batchmates.

After he greeted them and settled down, one of his close friends came up to him and said: "Mani, you haven't noticed two of our invitees," and pointed at a couple who were sitting quietly in a corner.

They were Rajiv and Sonia Gandhi. Recounting the incident 31 years later, Aiyar looks amused, and says this only shows how little he knew Rajiv at that point.

This, despite the fact that Rajiv had canvassed with all the Indians at Cambridge to vote for him in the elections for the Union presidentship.

Our short walk from The Imperial's lobby to the Spice Route restaurant has taken much longer than it should have, as Aiyar is first stopped by a journalist who keeps complimenting him for his "wonderful work in the ministry", and then by somebody who said he was the chief electoral officer when Aiyar fought the elections as an Independent candidate.

Yet another "" possibly a retired bureaucrat "" tried his best to hijack my guest and invited Aiyar to shift to his table. Thankfully, Aiyar told him that he wouldn't like to deprive himself of the opportunity to have a lunch hosted by Business Standard. The petroleum and panchayati raj minister is clearly in great demand.

We had chosen Spice Route as Aiyar was only interested in having Thai food. He has recently turned vegetarian "strictly on his doctor's advice" and finds Thai vegetarian fare closest to a non-veg meal.

"I wish you had invited me for lunch just a month back. I would have loved to have a juicy mutton steak at Spice Route," says Aiyar, looking wistfully at the menu. He orders a lime juice and a vegetarian soup, before resuming his account of his days with Rajiv "" the topic clearly closest to his heart.

One reason why his relationship with Rajiv survived, Aiyar says, was that he was never part of the former prime minister's close circle of friends.

"I always addressed Rajiv as Sir and my relationship with him was similar to that of a bureaucrat and a prime minister. When a friend becomes a boss, it leads to complications. Look at the Aruns (Arun Nehru and Arun Singh)," he says.

He remembers a famous play that he saw in London as something that best describes his equations with Rajiv. The play revolved around the relationship between a corporate boss and his personal secretary.

The last scene shows a person whose face has two shades: one half looks like the boss while the other resembles the secretary. "In the end, their identities merged," Aiyar says.

His relationship with Sonia is also quite formal. Mrs Gandhi has come to his house only once or twice and that, too, because of work regarding the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation.

That, of course, didn't prevent him from rejoining the Congress at the same time (5.30 p m, he tells me) when Sonia took over as the Congress president.

Aiyar is obviously enjoying the soup as he picks up the bowl with both hands and polishes it off. For the main course, he orders Thai sticky noodles, which looks the same as a vegetable hakka noodle.

I try to steer the conversation away from Rajiv, but Aiyar is unstoppable.

He recounts the days when he was sent on deputation to the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) under Rajiv and how some bureaucrats gave him one of the largest rooms in the PMO, but no work.

But, he says, he is grateful to the bureaucrats for two reasons: one, the room allotted to him was the one occupied by Jawaharlal Nehru ("I actually sat in Panditji's chair from 1985 to 1989"), and two, after a long wait, he was given what the bureaucrats thought was the most insipid job "" that of manager, tours and travels.

The job gave him an opportunity that he "seized with both hands". Aiyar got to spend much more time with Rajiv and Sonia than the bureaucrats led by P C Alexander. "Those trips together brought us close," he says. He soon became Rajiv's speechwriter, resigned from the Indian Foreign Service in 1989 after 26 years of service and contested elections.

One of the best gifts in his life has been a watch presented to him by Rajiv. The watch, brought out by the government in Nehru's centenary year, had Nehru's face inscribed on it.

Rajiv told him: "Mani, your speeches show that you read my granddad's books all the time. Now, you can look at him all the time."

The time for our lunch, however, was running out fast, and I asked him about his vociferous opposition to the reforms path steered by Manmohan Singh in the 1990s. Aiyar orders fresh fruits and says the reforms process initiated in 1991 was quintessentially socialist.

However, the reformers themselves did not see it that way. The word "socialism" was virtually abolished from the Congress Party's vocabulary those days, and in coining the term "new economic policy" there was an implied rejection of the old.

He is happy that the balance of articulation has finally tilted towards those within the party who neither regret nor reject the socialist path charted since Independence.

The fresh fruit, I thought, was the best part of the lunch, and Aiyar looks relaxed. The 7 to 8 per cent GDP growth that people are talking about these days is peanuts compared to what the Congress achieved during the Nehru era.

"During Nehru's time the growth rate had touched 5 per cent compared to 0.72 per cent growth when the British left India. If we were really as good as those in the Nehru era, our growth rate should have been at least 17 to 18 per cent now," he says without batting an eyelid.

Veer Savarkar is, of course, a topic he is keen to talk about and says the entire party is behind him on this. For instance, Sonia Gandhi had united the entire Opposition in boycotting the function to unveil the portrait of Savarkar in Parliament. Even Pandit Nehru got Savarkar arrested after Mahatma Gandhi's assassination.

Our lunch is over, but Aiyar is in no hurry to leave. He says he is proud to have got the portfolio of panchayati raj. It is a great tragedy, he says, that with the death of Nehru his panchayati raj system also died, or more accurately speaking, progressively disintegrated.

"It was not until Rajiv Gandhi in 1987 that we got the revival of panchayati raj to the point where it became the central plank of his domestic programme. I was deeply associated with it, and would like to continue his good work."

He has also started enjoying his role as a petroleum minister, and thinks his experience in foreign diplomacy would come in quite handy. The only thing that disturbs him is the inclination of public sector companies to rush into areas where there is no synergy of operations. Also, the competition among them in the domestic market can be quite ridiculous. For instance, first Indian Oil negotiates with Haldia Petrochemicals for an equity tie-up.

Just before the deal is finally settled, GAIL gets into the act and offers a competitive bid. "No one benefits from this kind of strange competitive spirit," Aiyar says.

He, however, is quite firm in his conviction that petroleum products prices cannot be allowed to be driven solely by international prices. "Experts often tell me that I should take politics out of economics. My point is: who will take politics out of polity?"

But won't he have to give up one of his portfolios? Prompt comes the reply: "I have no problem with the executioner's axe."

As we walk back to the portico where his car is waiting, Aiyar talks about his passion for secularism: he is a Tamil Brahmin refugee from Pakistan, married to a non-Hindu and enjoyed having beef.

A proud father, he remembers how at the height of the Ayodhya crisis, one of his three daughters (who is now in Harvard on a five-year scholarship) gave a talk in her school castigating the blind followers of the so-called Hindutva. "Secularism, you see, is in the Aiyar family genes," he says.