As the dust settles on the Capital's corridors of power, some find a place in the new Establishment while others jockey desperately for patronage
As the dust settles on the Capital's corridors of power, some find a place in the new Establishment while others jockey desperately for patronage.
Uma Bharti, the new water resources minister, appeared a bit lost in the corridors of Parliament. She was expecting someone from her staff to meet her, but clearly there had been a mix-up. Finding her at a loose end, several Members of Parliament and their hangers-on began to shower her with pleasantries. As she tried to extricate herself from the melee, she found her path blocked by none other than poet and playwright Javed Akhtar, who with folded hands, said: "Aap to hamein bhool gayein (You've forgotten me)." Bharti smiled, much like a winner, then replied: "Aapko koi bhool sakta hai (How can anyone forget you)?" Unfazed, Akhtar tried to ask for a meeting, all the while holding on to his bag so that it wouldn't fall off his shoulder. But Bharti was already leaving, politely promising to meet very soon.
As the old order changeth and the BJP's 282 MPs in the Lok Sabha begin to taste the varied flavours that power brings, it is actually the club of nominated Congress MPs in the Rajya Sabha that makes the margins come alive. Akhtar who proudly wears his left-of-centre ideology on his sleeve, former newspaper editor H.K. Dua as well as Supreme Court lawyer KTS Tulsi are seen frequenting Finance Minister Arun Jaitley's chambers in Parliament. N.K. Singh, who recently switched from Nitish Kumar's Janata Dal (United) to BJP, sometimes stops by. Sometimes, lunch is arranged courtesy of Trinamool Congress member of the Rajya Sabha K.D. Singh, proprietor of the Republic of Chicken restaurant chain.
UPA's former minister of state for parliamentary affairs Rajeev Shukla, who shares a passion for cricket with Jaitley, often drops in. The politics of the day is probably on the menu. In the sound and fury of lobbying for a "committee" of one's choice or a good address in the Capital (preferably with a front lawn and servant quarters at the back), chairmen of House committees such as Kirit Somaiya and V.P. Singh Badnore and Parliamentary Affairs Minister M. Venkaiah Naidu are besieged by the adulation of the throng.
AIADMK MP M. Thambidurai is keenly aware that his party's informal support to the Modi Government could get him deputy speaker's post or the chairmanship of a powerful committee. Telugu superstar K. Chiranjeevi, who has allegedly spent large sums of money in "doing up" his Lutyens' bungalow in his former incarnation as tourism minister in the UPA government, is angling to keep the same house.
The four in Modi's core group
But before one mixes up the froth with the real thing, it would be imperative to recognise that after 10 long years, India's most powerful address once again has an occupant befitting its reputation. At 7 Race Course Road (RCR) in the heart of the Capital, Prime Minister Narendra Modi leads a group of five every few days to take stock of the most important developments taking place in and around the country. Besides Modi, the group consists of his most trusted colleague Arun Jaitley, BJP President and Modi's alter ego Amit Shah, Home Minister Rajnath Singh as well as chief RSS conduit and Transport Minister Nitin Gadkari.
Over dhoklas and tea, this caucus plots the dimensions of a new idea of India, reinventing the shibboleths that once sought to definitely define the new country in 1947. If Jawaharlal Nehru had the RSS banned in the wake of Mahatma Gandhi's assassination, well, 67 years later, it is time to roll back that taint. The Indian Council of Historical Research is supposed to help in reshaping the stories of this ancient land through new chief Y. Sudershan Rao, who is deeply interested in dating the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. Old ideologues such as Deendayal Upadhyaya-invoked by Modi during his acceptance speech to the BJP parliamentary board in the Central Hall of Parliament-may soon be resurrected, alongside icons the Nehru-Gandhis forgot, like Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel.
More prosaic discussion might revolve around the naming of new governors. Will Arun Jaitley speak to Ram Naik? Could Nitin Gadkari discuss the matter with Kalyan Singh? And yes, the medium of conversation is Hindi. After a full decade of the intimate and familiar, there's a new gig in town.
Sonia Gandhi's handloom saris, which included hand-me-downs from Indira Gandhi's wardrobe which, in turn, had been handpicked by the impeccably tasteful Pupul Jayakar, have given way. External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj, who is not even a member of Modi's inner circle, wears a no-nonsense jacket with her saris, Human Resource Development Minister Smriti Irani wears power loom and Commerce Minister Nirmala Sitharaman- well, she doesn't really care, as long as her acerbic and usually forthright remarks make it to tonight's TV news. In fact, the only person in the Prime Minister's circle who really cares about his clothes is Modi himself, with his starched kurtas and matching sandals. At the BRICS summit in Brazil recently, the Prime Minister stood out in a powder-blue bandhgala that Rajiv Gandhi would have been proud of.
The New Austerity
After a full decade of luscious mango parties during the monsoon, the BJP era seems markedly abstemious. Information and Broadcasting Minister Prakash Javadekar threw a dinner recently, but packed it with journalists from Maharashtra.
Jaitley is probably the only minister with the charm and irreverence to throw a power-packed party which doesn't serve only Rooh Afza. But unlike the good old days of the UPA as well as Atal Bihari Vajpayee's NDA, the lobbies of Delhi's five-star hotels are bereft of newbies making power statements in starched white linen or designer khadi. In fact, rumour is that the lobbies are being watched, just in case the BJP's newly elected want to check out the fancier sights in town.
In any case, this lot seems far more rooted in Virudhunagar or Sikar, or Khargone and like to return to their constituencies on the weekend. Unlike Sonia's friends and courtiers who dabbled in art and heritage architecture, whether Rupika Chawla or Sunita Kohli, the BJP's self-styled connoisseurs of the good life are still missing from public view. Unlike Jitin Prasada or Praful Patel or Sachin Pilot, or Salman Khurshid, who seem comfortable in the several salons of Delhi, many new occupants of the 16th Lok Sabha have brought with them a whiff of the heat and dust of another country called the countryside. And as for Sonia's pre-eminent National Advisory Council, which had acquired the character of a parallel power circuit, Modi isn't about to outsource power to anyone outside his Cabinet.
Certainly, Atalji liked literature and music, sending writers such as Dinanath Mishra and Vidya Niwas Mishra to the Rajya Sabha, while singers like Jagjit Singh and Lata Mangeshkar were known to have performed for him. Modi, on the other hand, remains an enigma, although an English translation of his poems appeared in the run-up to the elections. Actor Salman Khan wished him luck ahead of the polls, but it was Aamir Khan who stole a march over everybody else in the Hindi film industry by calling on the Prime Minister. Still Modi seems to like Bharatanatyam, having taken time out to watch dancer Mythili Prakash in the Capital in the run-up to the General Election.
In the Vajpayee era, champagne and caviar were common treats on the prime minister's special flights across the world. During Manmohan Singh's travels abroad, champagne and caviar were still available, except the press couldn't share it with ministers travelling up front. In Modi's age, journalists have simply been prohibited from clambering aboard.
In fact, two months on, the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) doesn't even have a media adviser. The media will be told what it wants to know-in due time.
That phrase "need to know" could soon become the Modi Government new strapline, a buzzword for all seasons. At his regular caucus meetings, for example, Cabinet colleagues are invited to participate on a "need to know" basis, as was the case recently when Sushma Swaraj was asked to join in a conversation focused on the future of Delhi. With the six-month deadline of lieutenant governor's (LG) rule in the city-state soon to end in August, India's most powerful people weighed the pros and cons of either staking claim to form the next government or allowing fresh elections to be held. It was here that the decision to stake claim was formulated and a plan of action chalked out for the BJP's 32 legislators meeting with Lieutenant-Governor Najeeb Jung. It was here that the idea not to hold fresh elections in Delhi was discussed and dropped.
The inner circle
Clearly, Jaitley, Modi's eyes and ears in the Government, in Parliament, in the judiciary and everywhere else, is de facto Number Two in the administration, even though Rajnath is second to the Prime Minister in the formal pecking order.
In Modi's durbar, Jaitley is the only one who has been able to cast his net far and wide. Several of his long-time best friends in law have made it to the top jobs in the judiciary, starting with Mukul Rohatgi as the attorney-general and Ranjit Kumar as solicitor-general ending with four Additional Solicitor-Generals Pinky Anand, Maninder Singh, Neeraj Kishan Kaul and P.S. Narasimha.
In the Government as well, Jaitley's proteges have been awarded plum portfolios. The redoubtable but acerbic Sitharaman who got independent charge of the commerce portfolio, has travelled with Vice-President Hamid Ansari to China and joined the PM on his trip to the BRICS summit in Brazil.
Piyush Goyal, minister of state (independent charge) for power, coal, new & renewable energy, and a former BJP treasurer, as well as Dharmendra Pradhan, minister of state for petroleum and natural gas, are two Jaitley acolytes intent on carving their names in the annals of BJPdom. Soon after he took charge, Goyal took a leaf out of his mentor's book, reaching across the aisle and speaking to Biju Janata Dal MPs to resolve local political issues that ended up freeing as much as 1,500 MW power from the Mahanadi Coalfields of Odisha.
Checks and balances
But Modi has also balanced his proximity to Jaitley by making Rajnath the only other member of the powerful Appointments Committee of the Cabinet. Still, Rajnath has made way for Amit Shah, Modi's aide extraordinaire who, one suspects, would prefer to be known as someone who is fond of 'poha' with a generous squeeze of lemon, middle India's favourite fast food.
Soon after he became BJP president, Shah went to meet the RSS elders in Nagpur, including Sarsanghchalak Mohan Bhagwat, requesting them to continue RSS' support to the BJP, especially in the coming Assembly elections in Maharashtra, Jharkhand, Haryana and Jammu & Kashmir. Suresh Soni, the RSS joint general secretary, remains the influential liaison between the BJP and the Sangh, which has loaned two new leaders, Ram Madhav and Shiv Prakash, to BJP. Madhav has already sat through a meeting of leaders of the poll-bound states. While RSS bigwigs Bhaiyaji Joshi and Dattatreya Hosabale, who chipped in during the elections, refocus on their other Sangh duties, Joint General Secretary Krishna Gopal, who was also part of the trio, is likely to continue the coordination job with the party. As for Vinay Sahasrabuddhe who, though not an RSS officebearer, is the director-general of the Rambhau Mhalgi Prabodhini, an RSSinspired training institute for BJP cadres, he will be influential in policymaking through his assignment as adviser in Nitin Gadkari's staff.
But the RSS influence, since the elections, has been most visible in the manner in which the Sangh's student organisation, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) passed a resolution against Delhi University's four-year undergraduate programme (FYUP) during its national executive meeting in Mangalore in May. ABVP leaders Sunil Ambekar and Rohit Chahal presented this resolution to the Prime Minister, soon after which the FYUP course was scrapped.
Some of the gossip has also centred on the supposed influence of the 38-year-old Smriti Irani, the erstwhile doyenne of "saas-bahu" television whose career has witnessed a meteoric rise. Is Smriti Irani a protege of Amit Shah or does she have the direct ear of the Prime Minister himself? It is said she can get to meet the PM sooner than most. Incidentally, like Rajnath, she too chose a private secretary who had served in the personal staff of a UPA minister, Beni Prasad Verma. While Rajnath has given up his private secretary, she continues to retain hers even though formal orders have not come.
At the Modi Government's swearing-in ceremony at the Rashtrapati Bhavan forecourt on May 26, Irani's name was announced much ahead of seven-time MP Maneka Gandhi (she reportedly doesn't like her portfolio at all), the woman and child development minister, or senior BJP leader Najma Heptulla, the token Muslim in the Cabinet who has predictably got the minority affairs ministry edging out Shahnawaz Hussain and Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi.
Sushma Swaraj's star in the Modi Cabinet is at an interesting juncture. She speaks to Modi personally, whether it is on Japan or Sri Lanka or China- although she was miffed that the PMO leaked the cancellation of Modi's visit to Japan to the media before she was told about it. In fact, Modi has ticked off Prakash Javadekar for not getting out the news as well and as quickly as the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) spokesperson S. Akbaruddin. When Javadekar tried to defend himself by saying that the I&B page also had several thousand followers, Modi responded: "I know how 'followers' are made. Having a few thousand 'followers' doesn't mean anything."
Question is, how does Swaraj compare in Modi's books with National Security Adviser Ajit Doval? A former and formidable Intelligence Bureau chief, the problem with Doval is that he is out of whack by about a decade, since he retired in 2005. He seems to have overcome the only serious blow to his reputation, which was his inability to capture hijackers of the IC 814 plane that ended up in Kandahar in 1999, with the successful operation to get 46 Indian nurses back home from Iraq.
But few people know that it is actually Swaraj who heads the Iraq crisis cell, not Doval. Doval may have travelled to Baghdad, but Swaraj pulled the strings from Delhi, speaking to influential figures in West Asia. Perhaps this is the classic MEA vs PMO power struggle, and perhaps this will only be resolved by that well-worn cliche, only time will tell.
The hand that hands down Modi's hand-picked bureaucrats, from Principal Secretary Nripendra Misra to Cabinet Secretary Ajit Seth, are expected to be the medium through which he wants to shape the country. Seth, appointed by Manmohan Singh, is on extension, but could be more powerful now. A move to transfer Financial Services Secretary Gurdial Singh Sandhu as urban development secretary was scotched by Seth, who ensured Shankar Aggarwal was posted instead. He was the one who dug up the order detailing the five-year limit for an officer to serve as a minister's private secretary. This was eventually invoked against several who had served in the personal staff of UPA ministers and therefore could not stay on with the current crop. This was how someone as powerful as Rajnath had to give up his private secretary. The word is that Seth was getting back at the home minister for overruling him and not granting an extension to former NATGRID head Raghu Raman.
Then there is Additional Principal Secretary P.K. Mishra, a Gujarat-cadre officer who hand-held Modi when he first became Gujarat chief minister. Another Gujarat-cadre officer, A.K. Sharma, has been given the responsibility of handling most of the infrastructure sector. He has been meeting industrialists such as Sumit Mazumder, vice-chairman and MD of Tractors India Limited and Ajit Gulabchand, CMD, Hindustan Construction Company, as well as Vinayak Chatterjee, CMD, Feedback Infra, to explain the Government's agenda and discuss the challenges in the infrastructure sector.
The influence that Sharma wields can be ascertained from the fact that he wants Ranjan Thakur, former personal secretary to Congress minister Ambika Soni, as the new director-general of Doordarshan, despite objections from Javadekar. The matter is now in the PMO and Sharma is apparently forcing a rethink by all sides. As for Modi's meeting with Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg, it was fixed by Hiren Joshi, who along with Pratik Doshi-both now in the PMO-handles the PM's presence on social media.
Government means business Certainly, the highlight of the Modi Government's social calendar has been the engagement ceremony of Amit Shah's son, Jay, in Gandhinagar on July 13. Modi himself couldn't make it as he was flying to the BRICS summit, but most of his council of ministers chartered a plane to attend. The who's who was in attendance, including journalists like Swapan Dasgupta, Rajya Sabha MP Parimal Nathwani, said to be close to industrialist Mukesh Ambani (Ambani himself wasn't present) and of course the old-new favourite in town, Gautam Adani, the head of the $9.3 billion Adani Group with interests ranging from coal trading, coal mining, oil and gas exploration to ports and power.
Adani is certainly the most powerful businessman in Modi's era. When Modi was formally named the BJP's prime ministerial candidate for the elections last September, shares for Adani Power soared 170 per cent. In the Modi era, Adani seems everywhere at the same time. He acquired Dhamra port in Odisha from L&T and Tata Steel the day the results came in, May 16. On July 16, his controversial Mundra SEZ was given environmental clearance.
Only the week before, the finance minister had declared several tax holidays in his Budget and said that "effective steps would be taken to operationalise SEZs and revive investors' interests to develop better infrastructure". Does the fact that Adani's star is high these days mean that Ambani's is relatively down? Fact is that Ambani hasn't met the Prime Minister yet, itself an event of gigantic proportion. Moreover, the Government has refused to hike the price of gas from $4.2 to $8.4 per million metric BTU as recommended by the previous C. Rangarajan Committee, a move which would have considerably benefited the Ambanis.
Cyrus Mistry of the $97 billion Tata Group is one of those who has met the Prime Minister, proof of a relationship that goes back to the days Mistry was head of the Shapoorji Pallonji construction group which had bagged several projects in Gujarat. Then there is Tulsi Tanti, a diehard campaigner for green energy and chairman of the embattled wind energy firm Suzlon (which has accumulated a debt of Rs 12,700 crore), who was called by Modi to accompany him to the BRICS summit and even speak at the BRICS Business Forum.
In the waiting room
Then there are those waiting for the Prime Minister's phone call, to be given the odd Rajya Sabha seat (evidently they will be available only a year and a half from now) or the chairmanship of a cultural institution or perhaps even the vice-chancellorship of a university. People like Arvind Panagariya, professor of economics at Columbia University in New York, who pushed "Brand Modi" in the run-up to the polls, former Union minister Arun Shourie, a reformer in the Modi mould, Swapan Dasgupta as well as N.K. Singh. Former home secretary R.K. Singh, who contested the polls from Arrah in Bihar, is eyeing the vicechairmanship of the National Disaster Management Authority, a Cabinet-rank post, but he may have to wait agonisingly long now that the home ministry wants to restructure NDMA as recommended earlier by a committee headed by P.K. Mishra, who is now in the PMO.
Among the MPs, Rajiv Pratap Rudy, who toppled Lalu Prasad's wife Rabri from Saran in Bihar, is leading the charge. Whether it was to get himself to open the Lok Sabha discussion on the President's Speech or being the first BJP speaker to defend the TRAI amendment regularising the appointment of Modi's principal secretary, he is trying every trick in the book to claw his way into the durbar. Modi's durbar.
With Ravish Tiwari, Rahul Tripathi, Kumar Anshuman, M.G. Arun and Jatin Gandhi
Follow the writer on Twitter @jomalhotra
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