GREEN SIGNALS
Jairam Ramesh
Oxford University Press;
605 pages; Rs 850
This is not really a book. It is a personal record room. Yet Green Signals is worth docking in your cupboard if you are trying to figure out how the suave, intelligent and light-footed Rajya Sabha Member of Parliament Jairam Ramesh occupied one of the thorniest chairs in the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) Cabinet and developed in the process a high profile both for himself and for the ministry he supervised — environment.
To refresh memories: Mr Ramesh was the minister of state with independent charge of the environment ministry for about 25 months. Several of his Cabinet and party colleagues believed he was too independent. UPA Prime Minister Manmohan Singh kicked him out and up — to become the Cabinet minister for rural development.
Mr Ramesh’s book doesn’t talk of this or any of the other juicy bits about his tenure. He says the book only documents what is in the written record. But, really, it’s only a hasty compilation of what Mr Ramesh wrote as environment minister. He appears to have written much more than what appeared in the media — and that was a lot.
Mr Ramesh, who has managed to hover around the Gandhi power circuit for more than a decade, carved a larger constituency for himself through the environment ministry. With the Congress party in a wreck, he is earning good interest off that investment by being a broad-stroke global South politician who can speak environment and livelihood jargon in English for the Anglo-Saxon world. The other politician from India to break into this global niche was Suresh Prabhu. That is, before Mr Prabhu turned into a pro-market reform minister for the current National Democratic Alliance. Both imbibed a ripe idea and developed the right language at the right time.
So the book is a substratum on which Mr Ramesh can display his credentials as a worthy global South enviro-politician. It is, to be a sure, a rather thick base made up of all the letters he wrote, the speeches he gave and speaking orders he passed as environment minister. They are clubbed into 10 chapters touching most of the subjects and issues that made Mr Ramesh the Green Man, and environment the Union government’s hot potato.
During his tenure Mr Ramesh invented a technique that let him sometimes skirt around, very often use and sometimes bend laws, rules and regulations to do what he thought was best — pass detailed speaking orders. For many reasons and most parts this method was much better than the opaqueness that reigns now and reigned in the ministry during much of the UPA tenures. But sometimes it worked to shield legally and ethically dubious decisions by bluster and obfuscation. For example, the legal reasons he deployed to reject Vedanta’s application for bauxite mining in Odisha were used as justification for clearing the Posco steel plant and Polavaram dam. All these orders and more are stitched into the 605 pages of Green Signals.
But, that’s only half the picture for anyone wishing to understand how Mr Ramesh managed to make controversial or at times self-contradictory decisions and also how he could couch his decisions and intentions in transparent sophistry. To understand it all one would need to see how the government records for these clearances were created and how the opposing or supporting forces – political and otherwise – worked in favour or against Mr Ramesh.
The ex-minister clearly doesn’t think his political future is as dull or dismal as Rahul Gandhi’s leadership of the Congress party. So he has decided to not share those controversies that can be partly traced in the government’s records and could have been more sharply brought out by what he calls the UPA’s “oral history”.
Now that we are sure there is no obvious controversy to be found in this bland book, what does one look for? The best parts of the books are the well-researched and crafted essays and speeches Mr Ramesh gave as minister. They are a pleasure to read. He excels in his ideation and play, recalling of history and cross referencing of events. Take his essay referencing Isaiah Berlin’s essay the “The Hedgehog and the Fox” where he nearly declares himself a fox — which knows many small things compared to the hedgehog who knows one big thing.
The cerebral diet is good but Mr Ramesh’s book sanitises the debate on environment and development of all the attendant dirt. It covers with daisies the muck of dirty deals and compromises with corporate interests, political nexus and lobbyists in the power corridors, vociferous NGOs and suppressed rural protests, court intrigues and legal ploys that made environment part of the political discourse in India. Mr Ramesh sees his future as an insider. One’s guess is Ramesh has too long and bright a political career ahead for readers to wait for him to reveal more than what Green Signals does. Get it to update your records and wait for the muck to be revealed from other sources.
