Mehboob Jeelani’s portrait of the 42-year-old Congressman and head of Jindal Steel and Power Limited does all the careful homework of the well-rounded profile. He talks to the man himself, his mother, his college professor in the US, his main environmentalist adversary, an unnamed Coal India senior official. And it comes with colourful anecdotes – of coal towns covered with soot and polo matches of the rich and beautiful with “vintage handbags, tiny, fluffy dogs and big Cuban cigars.” And in a reporter’s dream moment different worlds collide when burly farmers in white dhotis and kurtas rush onto the polo field to meet Jindal, the polo player on his brown pony.
But more than the story of the ups and downs of one politician-industrialist what jumps out in the story is that Jindal is an accidental Congressman. When the young Jindal scion was first thinking of dabbling in politics he wondered which party he should join and he turned to Sunil Kumar, a veteran journalist in Chaattisgarh for advice. Both the BJP and the Congress were offering him tickets. He didn’t know which to choose.
Jeelani takes up the story here in Kumar’s voice: He asked me, ‘Sunilji, which one should I choose?’ I told him that between the two, there was not a great choice. I said that I considered the BJP to be a communal party, so you should not go to BJP and you should go to Congress. He still asked me, ‘But Sunilji, which party is going to win the elections?’ I told him that I didn’t know the answer.” “He had a very open mind,” Kumar continued. “He wasn’t allergic to the BJP, and he had no great liking for the Congress.”
This is telling. It shows that for the very rich and powerful, the parties are not repositories of ideology but means to an end. He is wooed by both and ambivalent about both. And he knows as long as he backs the winning horse, he can make the system work in his favour. Now that Jindal is having to fend off accusations in the Coalgate scam, the BJP is surely thrilled he didn’t choose them. A veteran Congress leader in Haryana complains that Jindal will give the Congress a bad name while at the same time he cozies up to BJP chief ministers like Chhattisgarh’s Raman Singh to the point that they don’t know if he is an MP from Haryana or from Chattisgarh.
Ultimately it’s not about Congress or BJP, it’s about money and the Old Boys Network. So despite that high profile Zee TV sting and reverse sting when Jeelani meets Zee’s Subhash Chandra’s father, Nand Kishore Goenka he dismisses the whole controversy as a “silly fight between brothers.” After all, they are both old families from Hisar who have known each other for many years and part of the same temple trust. After the blow-up Jindal’s mother called Chandra’s father and that was that. “It’s like the way kids usually fight in their childhood,” Goenka said. “It’s the same thing.”
Except this isn’t about your turn at the sandbox or a slide in the playground. It’s about allocation of entire coal blocks. In a way it lends credence to Arvind Kejriwal’s rants about how one party is as compromised as another because each of them wants to woo the likes of Jindal. Jindal is driven to one party, not because he cares about its ideology or opposes the other. He is just concerned about winning. And yes, at some level, even he carefully avoids all committees that deal with coal or iron ore, he cannot help but join the party who will be friendly to his business interests. And when he gets into trouble mommy falls back on the Hisar connection to smooth things over. So the entire Coalgate affair becomes reduced to a Hisar schoolboy hissy fit.
Kejriwal wants to be the alternative to this kind of power play that’s part an parcel of politics in India. The amusing irony is, he is also from Hisar himself. Someone should analyse what’s in the water there. Hisar could well be the Petri dish in which to study what Caravan calls in its headline The Price of Power.
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