Three days ago, in his first media interaction as Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s sherpa for the G20 Leaders’ Summit in Brisbane on November 15-16, Suresh Prabhu said in a lighter vein that the question of him joining the Council of Ministers could be included in the G20 agenda if the media so desired. Prabhu, 61, a chartered accountant, said this with a wry smile, masking whatever information he had of the weekend’s Cabinet expansion.
Prabhu, who has got Railways, is not just another addition to Modi’s Council of Ministers. Given his intellectual bandwidth, a non-political persona, and the trust reposed by the Prime Minister, he brings more than his weight in the government.
Having decided to severe ties with the Shiv Sena, Modi could not have got the Sena to part with a Rajya Sabha seat for Prabhu. The Prime Minister also felt that attaching ministerial strings would rob Prabhu of his flexibility to advise him on a variety of critical issues, from energy and climate change to physical infrastructure and the economy.
Finally though, Modi decided to add depth and weight to his team by roping in Prabhu and Goa Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar. Prabhu, who had once said in an interview that he would rather quit politics than change parties, was convinced by Modi to join the BJP. After 18 years with the Sena, he formally joined the BJP on Sunday, ahead of the swearing-in ceremony.
A person close to Prabhu said Modi trusted him and the former banker — Prabhu was chairman of Saraswat Bank, one of the largest cooperative banks in Maharashtra — would be his sounding board on complex issues related to energy, infrastructure and climate change.
The Modi government had earlier appointed him as the head of an advisory group for integrated development of power, coal and renewable energy. Subsequently, Prabhu was made the sherpa to brief and assist the PM on India’s stand on global issues at the G20 summit, and given Cabinet rank. He was also tipped to head the “think-tank plus” — the Planning Commission in its new avatar.
Prabhu has been close to Modi since the days when the latter was the Gujarat Chief Minister. In fact, after the Wharton India Economic Forum, a student-run India-centric conference hosted by the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, withdrew its invitation to Modi as a keynote speaker in 2013, Prabhu cancelled his speaking programme as a mark of protest. That showed his proximity to Modi.
Prabhu’s biggest strength, as also his drawback in a party like Shiv Sena, was his clean image and unwillingness to shed his integrity at the altar of politics. In August 2002, Sena chief Bal Thackeray pulled him out of then Prime Minister A B Vajpayee’s Cabinet without stating any reasons. Prabhu was then the Union Power Minister.
Prabhu won the Lok Sabha elections thrice since 1996, but lost continued…
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