Rahul Gandhi tries ways to break the ice with industry

Part of resolve to make himself more publicly visible, expose thinking; PM to also speak at CII AGM on Thursday

In keeping with his new role in the Congress party, Rahul Gandhi, vice-president and possible prime ministerial candidate of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) in the 2014 elections, will address the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) on Thursday, as part of its Annual General Meeting (AGM).

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who has not ruled out a third term for himself if the party does well in the 2014 elections, is to also speak at the venue.

CII sources say Gandhi gave his assent to speak last week. This is about the time that party leaders had acknowledged that if the Congress got more than 150 seats, Gandhi would be the choice for PM. They also indicated that Gandhi, who has addressed barely a couple of national press conferences since he became an MP nine years earlier, will increasingly become more visible and subject himself to questioning. The CII interaction is the first in this series, likely to be followed by a press conference some weeks later. Gandhi has, so far, addressed no industry gathering.

In the past, CII AGMs have been used by political leaders to spell out  their economic and commercial agenda. Rahul’s mother and present Congress president Sonia Gandhi had addressed one in 1998 and again in 2002, while the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led NDA coalition was in power. As she’d almost spelt out her party’s election manifesto in 2002, it considerably annoyed the BJP leadership. At the AGM in 2002, Vajpayee used his CII address to warn the Congress half a dozen times that it was dreaming if it thought it would displace the BJP in 2004. “Politicians are not expected to know the art of doing business but if there is one thing that we should learn from you (businessmen), it does not make business sense to count one’s chickens before they are hatched,” he’d said.

Adding: “If invitations to inaugurate and conclude conferences could make them speculate about an impeding change in the direction of political winds, such people seem to think that chambers of commerce and industry have more powers to make and unmake governments than the people of India.”

It was in 2003 that the CII hosted Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi, who got into an argument with industrialists Rahul Bajaj and Jamshyd Godrej, who tried to grill him on the law and order situation in Gujarat. The CM retorted that the meet was not the forum for such issues and stayed away from subsequent meetings. This time, too, Modi is not attending the CII meet. Instead, BJP leaders Arun Jaitley, Ravishankar Prasad and Raman Singh (who is chief minister of Chhattisgarh) will address the industry body.

HIGH CHAMBER

• Rahul Gandhi to address an industry body for the first time
• Gandhi agreed to do so even as party leaders indicated plan to position him as the prime ministerial candidate
• Plan involves progressively spelling out details of policy thinking, be open to questioning
• Prime Minister, BJP seniors to also speak at the ClI AGM, part of long tradition at this venue
• Sonia, Vajpayee had made rival presentations, when latter was PM in 2002