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Nandan Nilekani, once of Infosys and now of the Unique Identity Authority of India, has a delicate relationship with the headlines. On the one hand, you don't write a best-selling book about policy and decide to head one of the largest and most controversial projects the Indian government has ever undertaken if you are publicity shy.
On the other hand, Nilekani is more than smart enough to know that he's an outsider in the incestuous world of capital-city politics. The more he's in the headlines, the more attention he will draw from established figures - and the tougher his job will be as many, even in the government he serves, would like nothing more than to see him fail.
When Nilekani quit the board of directors of Infosys in 2009, he ended a 28-year association. Nilekani was one of the two most prominent of the original band of brothers who set up Infosys in 1981- the other, N R Narayana Murthy, has now returned to Infosys to steer it through bad times. Nilekani held various posts at the Bangalore-based information-technology giant, including a stint as CEO that started in 2002.
He ended as chairman of the board - but quit later to move to the city of white Ambassadors and Lutyens' bungalows to struggle within the system for the UID project. So comprehensively did he burn his bridges that he carefully avoids saying anything quotable or even mildly interesting about Infosys' affairs now.
When he made that transition in 2009, he had signalled his desire to be part of something "transformative" -a word he uses often for UID- already. His best-selling book, Imagining India, came out in end 2008, when the run-up to the 2009 general elections had already begun. When this correspondent met him shortly after the book was released, he was full of ideas, and bursting with energy-with straight talk about the flaws and cronyism of Indian capitalism, and the damage done to workers by archaic labour laws.
The financial crisis had just hit, but he was already warning that India's 8 per cent growth was based not on reform, but on easy liquidity, and that the country would struggle without it. Reform, he insisted then, needed to be presented better, as a matter of access for the common worker. In the four-plus years he's worked single-mindedly on UID, some of that energy's been lost- but presumably the ideas still matter to him.
There's no question that the UID project has not been easy. Nilekani's a pretty good salesman, but selling Aadhaar has been hard. There are multiple interest groups to be juggled-state-level politicians worried that discretion will be lost, activists were fearful that this would be the first step towards cash transfers.
Privacy advocates have made his life particularly difficult; he made many efforts to reach out to them, but those who believed UID was an unbearable intrusion by the state into the private domain were never going to be convinced by anything he had to say.
Then there were the internal battles he had to fight. Eyebrows were raised when he was given the rank of a Cabinet minister, although the Unique Identity Authority of India, which he headed, was nominally under the Planning Commission- which has its own head, also of Cabinet rank.
Things weren't easy even within the Planning Commission; the department's secretary questioned the Authority's finances and asked for an independent financial advisor to supervise them and the finance ministry rejected its various financial demands, even in the days when funding was plentiful.
But most epic was the long battle with the home ministry, then headed by P Chidambaram, over the National Population Register. The latter, the relic of an effort by the National Democratic Alliance government to enumerate all Indian citizens - born of the fear of limitless Bangladeshi migration -was headquartered at the home ministry.
The turf wars between the National Population Register and UID delayed Aadhaar for months. But Nilekani wisely kept his mouth shut about the problems in public. He made a few compromises-but, in hindsight, it certainly looks like he won that battle hands down.
However much Nilekani was attached to the idea of UID, he was never going to shepherd it forever. It is the idea of transformation that excites him, he says in his book. The heavy lifting of the idea behind Aadhaar is done. And perhaps that's why the reports now come in that Nilekani might be the Congress' nominee for Bangalore South.
He's certainly iconic in the techie world, and just enough of a middle-class icon to help the Congress elsewhere as well. But the question remains: If the United Progressive Alliance comes back in 2014, what will Nilekani be given? Perhaps only the Gandhis know the answer.
