Mani Shankar Aiyar
It is heartening to see someone of Mani Shankar Aiyar’s caliber pull himself out of near irrelevance and oblivion to emerge as one of India’s most compelling contrarians.
The Commonwealth Games may or may nor succeed but they can claim at least one impressive success even before the rubble from the construction of stadia has been cleared. In a sense Aiyar’s public career has risen so shiningly from that debris. It may not sound like it but I am being very sincere.
During my days in New Delhi in the late 1980s and 1990s I had my share of encounters with Mani and each one of them was memorable for passion with which he spoke about everything. He gave you the sense that in anything that he said his words were meticulously weighed, precisely measured and efficiently delivered. And yet he made it sound as if he had just conjured it all up in his mind right in front of you.
The most fascinating thing about Mani is that the more he feels marginalized and jettisoned by his own party, the more compelling he becomes. It is almost as if he is daring the party to expel him even though he is not saying anything that the Congress Party can seriously disagree with. What he is displaying these days is audacity that comes from having no fear because one has nothing to lose.
If I were his image consultant, I would urge him to continue on the trajectory that he is currently on, either by design or default or a combination of the two. His very public opposition to the Commonwealth Games for some very legitimate reasons has given him so much traction within the class of Indians that he would rather not have anything to do with, namely the middle class.
Mani should consciously cast himself in the role of an eternal public contrarian/curmudgeon and then build on the consequent credibility to offer solutions to large national problems the way he sees them.
I was particularly struck by his concluding remarks on Barkha Dutt’s show ‘We the People’ on the theme ‘Is the real India forgotten?’ on NDTV last night. The way he offered a pattern in how in the sixth decade of all major industrial/economic revolutions around the world the countries concerned witnessed a historic unraveling speaks of his ability to powerfully illustrate his perspective which inevitably runs counter to the popular opinion. The role of a public contrarian is not to make people agree with him or her but to seriously provoke so that the resultant debate, disagreement and the churning that goes with it would help find new ways and solutions.
Way to go, Mani.