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Upon arrival, the visitor requested his host to invest Rs 10,000 Eleven years on, Jairam Ramesh calls that refusal the ‘‘the Though Jairam’s only known connection with Andhra Pradesh |
Typical of the man, the journey from Karnataka to Andhra Pradesh has
taken him halfway across the world, from Powai to Pittsburgh.
Jairam spent his formative years at IIT Powai, where his father taught
civil engineering. Life was straitlaced. Jairam wanted to study physics
at St Stephen’s, Delhi. A stern parent said, ‘‘Nothing
doing. Sit the IIT exam.’’ So it was the mechanical engineering
class of IIT Powai that he entered in 1970. He hated it. In his second
year, he discovered Paul Samuelson, wrote to Gunnar Myrdal, hero-worshipped
Vikram Sarabhai for marrying science to a larger social calling.
It was all mentally elevating. It was also, as Jairam confesses, a girlfriend-repellent.
The nerd reached America in 1975, for an MS in public management at
Carnegie-Mellon, Pittsburgh. He enrolled at MIT for a PhD programme
that combined technology and policy, before taking a break from academia
to join the World Bank in 1978.
‘‘That’s
when I discovered the world outside,’’ he remembers. The
PhD was junked. In December 1979, a chance meeting with Lovraj Kumar
brought him back from Washington, as adviser to Kumar at the Bureau
of Industrial Costs and Prices. The marathon had begun.
Jairam worked the system. He moved with Kumar to the petroleum ministry,
writing an appreciated energy projections report in 1983. By 1985, he
was in the industry ministry, where he wrote a paper on delicensing
that was the template for the 1991 deregulation. The godfather graph
grew — from Manmohan Singh at the Planning Commission to Sam Pitroda
at C-DOT to, in February 1991, entry into the Congress as part of Rajiv
Gandhi’s think-tank. By June, Pranab Mukherjee and he were giving
P.V. Narasimha Rao tutorials in economics.
As OSD in the Rao PMO, Jairam drew up a 100-day programme of ‘‘big
bang’’ reforms. On day 102, Rao said ‘‘thank
you’’ and shunted him back to the Planning Commission. It
took the United Front to rehabilitate him as finance minister P. Chidamabaram’s
adviser in 1996.
In December 1997, he rejoined the Congress, graduating from economic
wonk to Sonia Gandhi’s speechwriter to all-purpose spokesman to,
in 2004, election manager. While unquestionably talented, Jairam has
his detractors in the party, those ever suspicious of the frequency
with which he gets himself quoted in the press.
The man’s ability to rationalise almost anything with a suitably
Brahminical intellectual argument sometimes makes him an exasperating
interlocutor. When he says he is ‘‘a devout Hindu, staunchly
secular, with an abiding faith in the Buddha’’, you do wonder
where philosophy ends and wordplay begins.
Others see Jairam as a bit of a boss-hopper, climbing up the value chain
of mentors. There is the view that his current renunciation of government
office — ‘‘I have no more peaks to conquer … The
Congress needs Promode Dasgupta type apparatchiks’’ —
is early positioning for Rahul Gandhi’s first cabinet, if and
when it is formed.
Outside Lutyens’ Delhi, Jairam is the telegenic politico, one
of the pun-a-minute sound bite sorcerers who took over news channels
in the late 1990s. Any favourite sparring partner? ‘‘Actually,
it was (K.N.) Govindacharya. He used to tell me, sotto voce in Tamil,
he saw merit in what I said. I used to tell him, sotto voce in Tamil,
I saw merit in what he said. You could call it the Iyengar brotherhood.’’
Ah these southie Brahmins …
(Originally
published in The Indian Express)
Copyright The Indian Express. All Rights Reserved.
