Asha Rai, TNN | Mar 10, 2014, 06.40AM IST
BANGALORE: Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani formally joined the Congress party on Sunday as a primary member to contest from the Bangalore South parliamentary constituency in the Lok Sabha election. Nilekani later said it was time for his rival BJP's Ananth Kumar — to go. "There are times in business or politics when one has to go. I think time has come for him to go,"
Nilekani said without taking Ananth Kumar's name in response to queries about what he thought of his prospects over his rival who had been representing the seat since 1996, winning it five consecutive times.
"I don't see much upside in talking to you — you're neither good for notes (money) nor votes," a politician told Nandan Nilekani when he buttonholed the former with policy ideas when he was running Infosys.
Nilekani, still, might not be good for notes. But the same politician will see much upside in talking to him today as he's Congress' candidate against BJP heavyweight HN Ananth Kumar in a constituency the grand old party hasn't won in quarter of a century.
For a self-confessed marathon man, it's been a political sprint. From calling himself "quite unelectable" because being an entrepreneur made him a "long shot in politics," and an "easy target" for populist rhetoric, he's now one of Congress' star candidates.
Nilekani's shift to Delhi from Bangalore in 2009 looked like a set of random moves which pushed him closer to the inner power circles.
He landed at the UIDAI accidentally. Nilekani was offered a place at the Planning Commission. He told PM Manmohan Singh he was interested in heading the then little-known department mandated to give ID cards to Indians, a play which suited his technical background.
After negotiating the soft stuff that matters in Delhi: the right rank (cabinet in this case), right house in the right zone (Safdarjung), Nilekani quit the company he built with Narayana Murthy to be the face of India's software smarts. His aim was to make UID the tool for financial inclusion; the platform for delivery of populist government programmes directly to under-served millions. A man who rejected an offer to buy a Lutyens bunglow for a throwaway Rs 40 crore in the early 2000s because he didn't want people to second-guess his motive for wanting a house in Delhi, has in the same city, today, demonstrated enough political chutzpah to emerge as a viable LS candidate.
For Sonia and Rahul Gandhi, he ticks many boxes: He's in the Manmohan Singh mould — a technocrat and clean with no political base. He has good equations with their advisers. Business sees him as one of their own. He's a phenomenal networker with Bill Gates/Tom Friedman to Ratan Tata/tech reporter on speed dial.
He has the right kind of money in the current anticorruption environment acquired through a meritocratic education (IIT Mumbai) and a software enterprise (Infosys) which became a byword for ethical wealth creation. That he wants to give away large chunks of it helps. His wife Rohini (who runs NGOs involved in primary education and water) and he have given close to Rs 350 crore for initiatives to build a brilliant theatre space in Bangalore (Ranga Shankara) to funding a new urban studies university (Indian Institute for Human Settlements).
His children, students still, are not on the horizon. Daughter Janhavi is a doctoral student at Harvard University. Her husband, Jamshedpur-boy Shray Chandra, is an MBA student at Harvard Business School. Son Nihar is at the University of Wisconsin doing his master's in philosophy.
Nandan earlier joked Nihar was the only earning member of the family. He had taken up a teaching gig at his alma mater, The Valley School in Bangalore, after graduating from Yale. Nandan donates his salary to the PM's relief fund. Rohini runs NGOs and daughter and son-in-law are still studying, so Nihar's salary made him the only family member to hold a paying job.
Nilekani, who till he quit Infosys, had seen himself as an 'ideas man', wants to bring about large scale change. He's always believed Infosys was an idea. So was Aaadhar. Nobody really believed — other than him — that in less than five years over 600 million cards would be issued from almost a zero base.
While Aadhaar faced implementation issues and guerrilla attacks — primarily from Nilekani's own cabinet colleagues — in Bangalore, tech leaders are in awe of what he's pulled off. The scale of the project, the team he put together and the speed at which it was rolled out is unparalleled even in the private sector, say those tracking UID. Being offered an opportunity by Rahul to contest elections coalesced well with his desire to be a legitimate change agent by winning an election.
By the time news filtered out in mid-September 2013 about him contesting from South Bangalore against Ananth Kumar, work on his candidacy was on. A 60-member team code named Ajay was at work in a Bangalore suburb, polling voters, sampling constituents.
If the stardust that has rained down on Nilekani through his life were to hold for five more weeks, India might get a Pink Floyd fan with a weakness for dark chocolates and fondness for classics like Casablanca, as a new face in Parliament.
