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It is fashionable these days to talk about the need for educated people to forsake their comfortable upper middle class backgrounds and to join politics. The guest on Vir Sanghvi's 'Off the Record' this week is a man who made that jump 35 years ago abandoning his comfortable family business, his Doon school background and throwing himself into the hurly-burly of street level Indian politics and though he faced considerable adversity in the early years, he stuck at it building up one of the safest seats in the country and soon becoming one of the India's best-known ministers. The guest as you probably guessed is Kamal Nath.

 

Here is a verbatim transcript of Vir Sanghvi's interview with Kamal Nath.

 

Q: You had a pretty tough time around 1977-1978 after you joined politics. Did you think of giving it up?

 

A: Those were the bad years when Mrs Indira Gandhi lost and I had joined the Youth Congress. It was exciting from a point of view that you are demonstrating all the time and when you are in opposition, that is the easiest politics.

I thought the most difficult years were when I came into parliament for the first time in 1980 where I found that I was surrounded by those who I couldn't relate to - a much elder generation. We had stalwarts like B. Jag Jeevan Ram and many others who had been in parliament for so many years and they would look at me and look at some of us of that age group (and think) that these are the chokras who have come in and who were the mis-fits in the Indian parliamentary system. That was very discouraging.

 

Q: You joined politics, you were seen as being part of the Sanjay Gandhi gang. Most senior politicians who have been in parliament for decades, many of them who were associated with the freedom struggle looked at you guys as irresponsible chokras to use your term. How does that feel?

 

A: At that time one felt very discouraged and one felt that they felt that we were out of tune.

 

Q: You were out of tune, weren't you from the politics as it was then?

 

A: Yes and I think that was the transformation which took place. Because when we came into politics, other political parties also decided to give younger people an opportunity in parliament. Congress set a trend by giving it to us and those others saw that it was not merely we getting used to them it was also them getting used to us. So they got used to us, we got used to them and other political parties started also encouraging their youth wings. That transformation took place.

 

Q: Another time you could have given up was in 1981 when Sanjay Gandhi - who was the reason you joined politics - died tragically and people assumed that all of you afterwards were going to be marginalized but far from being marginalized a year after Sanjay's death, you were actually fine in the party, you got along with Mrs Gandhi, your position seemed under no kind of threat. Was that surprising?

 

A: It wasn't surprising and I thought that, Sanjay Gandhi - of course I joined politics because of him - and Mrs. Indira Gandhi gave us the opportunity to continue and I think if she hadn't got assassinated, maybe one would have thought that. Then came Rajiv and I had the advantage that Rajiv was also with me in school and he was much senior to me, so we had again that affability and it was a distressful time I must say like suddenly seeing you without an anchor.

 

Q: People saying all these Sanjay guys are out now and that era is over, you must be aware people said that?

 

A: Yes.

 

Q: Some of them went with Menaka Gandhi into oblivion but you didn't do that?

 

A:  No; I thought that Menaka was not doing the appropriate thing and there was no question. I don't think Sanjay would have approved what she was doing.

 

Q: You became a minister in 1991 and you became Environment Minister which in those days was considered as an out of the way ministry, nobody realized what it was about, you brought it to center stage, you made it a major ministry, you made environment a passion, you went off to Sao Paulo, you became friends with Al Gore, you had lots and lots to do with the international environmental movement then. Was that a new challenge for you because this is not something that one had associated with the guy who disrupted commissions of enquiry?

 

A: Yes it was because here you were engaging with the global community, there was the Earth Summit in which the Climate Change Treaty was signed which set the tone and then the Kyoto Protocol, I presided over all that and I took the stand of developing countries. In fact that was the first time when we could manage from India developing countries forming a block - a block which was respected and heard.

 

Q: Many people would say that you carried the same policies forward when you were Commerce Minister, again to the extent that there was a north-south divide in terms of global capitalism or global economics, you stood up for the Third World, you stood up from the interest of developing countries when it came to tariffs and things like that, is that a valid perception?

 

A: Sometimes I am criticized that I didn't let the World Trade Organization (WTO) round conclude. I don't chuck the blame and I don't take the blame because I think that the global economic architecture had undergone a big change between the early 2000 when you saw the massive economic activity moving from the Atlantic Ocean to the South-China seas and the Indian Ocean, it had to be the structure of trade had changed. This was something which needed to be recognized and we see this today. I said at that time 'we see that we want a liberalisation and you see the Western countries turning more protective because in the last decade, one of the most important things which has happened is globalisation and at the heart of globalisation lies global competitiveness and you found Western countries aren't competitive'. That is why you could see the massive in-roads made by China and by other Asian countries even by India. They found that they were not competitive and yet they were trumpeting globalisation, they wanted a globalisation without being globally competitive. I said we want globalisation being globally competitive. There has to be equity in trade, you cannot talk of free trade without talking of fair trade.