Last year, when Dinesh Trivedi as railway minister tried to take some pragmatic steps, his party boss Mamata Banerjee wanted him out, and the PM obliged her. As his successor presented an election-oriented budget today, here we revisit our interview with Trivedi last year.

That summer of 1969 was memorable for Dinesh Trivedi, the former railway minister and member of parliament from Barrackpore, West Bengal. Fresh out of college, he had enrolled himself into the air wing of National Cadet Corps (NCC), Kolkata, and was going to take his first flight into the sky as a paraglider.

As he took off and gained altitude, he was soon thousands of feet above the ground. The experience was ethereal. Soaring into the sky and competing with birds fluttering their wings without any care, his mind was uncluttered. He experienced a unique kind of freedom which was unfettered.

Days after he was sacked as railway minister, he says his mind is as uncluttered as it was during that flight in the summer of 1969. “That experience of freedom has stayed with me, and it guides my every step,” he says, sitting in the living room of his official 4 Lodhi Estate residence in New Delhi.

It was the same sense of unfettered freedom that emboldened him to stand up in parliament and do what no railway minister has dared to do in recent times. He not only proposed fare hikes, which he termed as crucial for the health of the railways and safety of the passengers, but also stoically defended his decision after the uproar from the opposition parties. 

It’s not that he was not aware of the consequences. He very much knew that his party Trinamool Congress (TMC) and its mercurial and populist boss Mamata Banerjee would never agree to the proposals and would indeed put a question mark over his political career. 

“A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do,” he says, explaining the rationale for his politically suicidal move.

“This was the need of the hour. This is what the nation required. As railway minister, the boss of the state-run behemoth, I was expected to resurrect it from its deathbed.”

It was not a decision he had taken in a hurry though. It was done after a series of consultations and deliberations. Trivedi had also formed two committees—one on modernisation and another on safety headed by Sam Pitroda and Anil Kakodkar, respectively.  

While the Kakodkar committee recommended an outlay of '1 lakh crore, the Pitroda committee submitted its plans for the modernisation of railways at a cost of Rs 5.6 lakh crore.

Combining these two recommendations with the Vision 2020 document which aimed at catapulting Indian Railways into the forefront of the world railways, Trivedi pitched for the fare hikes with the conviction of an evangelist before the planning commission and the prime minister and managed to convert them both to his cause.

“I have a scientific mind and it works on logic and methods,” he says.

Trivedi’s faith in logic and methods stems from his degree in MBA and then years spent heading his own logistics company in Kolkata. Though he loved flying and wanted to become an air force pilot, Trivedi, after his education at St Xavier’s, Kolkata, enrolled for MBA in Texas, USA.

After his MBA in 1974, he worked in Chicago for two years for Dexter Corporation, earning a salary that was very high even by the American standards. Fat salary and easy life notwithstanding, he was very clear, he did not want to settle there. He came back to India in 1976 and started his own air freight company.

Born to Gujarati parents—Hiralal and Urmila Trivedi, entrepreneurial skills and enterprise came naturally to him.  Soon his company was doing very well. “It is very easy to run a company. All you need to do is institutionalise a culture of discipline and professionalism into it,” he says.

When Trivedi became railway minister in 2011, he wanted to use his experience in running his logistics company and introduce the same kind of discipline and professionalism he had incorporated in his own company.

“I knew the importance of railways as the largest public transport in the country and I was also aware of the urgency of its overhaul.”

Inheriting a cash starved railways where more than 95% of what it earns from operations, freight and passenger fares is spent to merely keep trains running, leaving little for investment and safety measures, he was also acutely aware of the need to hike fares.

“What my fellow parliamentarians failed to understand is that the decrepit state of the railways with very poor safety records directly impacts the safety of the common man whose cause they espouse. If you look at the record of railway accidents, it’s the likes of Ashram Express and Shramjeevi Express that derail the most and not Rajdhanis and Shatabdis,” he says, explaining why the common man would benefit the most by the fare hikes.

Trivedi’s belief that the common man would support him in his effort to modernise the railways was not misplaced. After his budget speech which announced the fare hikes, there were no reports of any protests in the country. Even the railway employees’ union supported the move. 

The former railway minister also had faith in the prime minister and Congress party members. After all, the prime minister had publicly praised his budget.

But unlike the common man that cheered for his forward-looking budget that would bring in the “generational change” in the railways, the prime minister and fellow MPs failed him. As the news about his exit from the railway ministry became public on March 19, a hushed silence descended in parliament. This “conspiracy of silence” saddened Trivedi the most.

“Though everyone in parliament was aware that my budget was the budget that would give a lifeline to the ailing railways and that my sacking was unwarranted, there was not one voice of protest,” he says. 

But then, Trivedi should have known better. Indian politics, seeped in realpolitik as it is, is not ready yet to lap up reason over expediency. The man who along with managing his business also ran a consumer protection centre to help the needy, was perhaps ahead of his times. Those famous words, “Nation comes first, family second and party third,” Trivedi so unflinchingly uttered on TV channels after the furore over his budget proposals had no precedent in Indian politics and would perhaps remain unheard of in the future.   

While Trivedi may have offered his head on a platter and lost a plum ministerial position, he knows he has made the right move. “My fundamentals are clear and I know what I have done,” he says with the confidence so uncharacteristic of a politician who has not only lost his job but also earned the ire of his party and its chief. There is a reason for this confidence. He knows that the popular opinion, the opinion of the masses is in his favour. He is the common man’s hero, a martyr who bit the bullet in the national interest.  For a politician who has a limited mass appeal, this was godsend. 

There is another reason why Trivedi is unflustered. Given the unpredictability of his party chief Mamata Banerjee and her hugely populist moves, his sustenance in TMC seemed untenable in the long run.

Again, although he was the founding member of the TMC (the party was formed in 1998), Trivedi always felt more comfortable in the company of Congressmen in Delhi then his own party men in Kolkata. His association with the Congress began in late 1980s when he had joined the party, smitten as he was by Rajiv Gandhi’s idea of modern India. He briefly aligned himself with VP Singh in 1990, only to come back to the Congress. With the going getting tough in TMC, he has the option of jumping the ship again in favour of his former party.   

However, he has not given any indication of severing ties with TMC so far. “I was given the railway ministry by my leader, and it was taken away by my leader. And as a disciplined soldier, I abide by what my party tells me to do,” he says.

As the future remains uncertain and his own plan of action vague, he takes recourse to the teachings of Bhagvad Gita, placed prominently on one of the shelves in his living room, to sum up his state of mind.

“A man should do his karma and not worry about its result,” he says.

(This interview was published in the April 1-15 issue of Governance Now last year)