The Many Lives of Sam Pitroda

IT IS UNCLEAR whether Satyanarayan Gangaram ‘Sam’ Pitroda, born to a Gujarati family in Raj-era Odisha, sees himself as looking like a Chinese or an Arab. But he is a textbook case of exceptionally successful myth-making, subject marketing and political PR. From the Indira Gandhi era onward, mythicising narratives by the Congress leadership padded his reputation—Pitroda returned to India from Chicago in 1984 at the invitation of the then prime minister—until he transmogrified into the ‘Father of the Indian Telecom Revolution’. Today, despite all the hype around him, the octogenarian Pitroda has less recall in the public mind as a telecom titan than for his foot-in-the-mouth remarks and controversial statements, many of which have been a source of embarrassment to Congress’ first family.

But Pitroda remained close to three generations of the Nehru-Gandhi family and ensconced in its innermost circle of policy advisers and strategists. Considered close to Rahul Gandhi today, as with his father and former Prime Min­ister Rajiv Gandhi, Pitroda has devoted himself to booking seminar halls at foreign universities and interactions with not-too-busy deans and politicians.

It was hardly surprising that despite his many goof-ups, Pitroda was only benched for a brief period each time. This time, too, it was clear that after the Lok Sabha polls and a cooling-off period for the intense criticism his seem­ingly racist remarks invited during the campaign, ‘Uncle’ Pitroda would be resuscitated politically at the earliest. Sam Pitroda has had many lives, thanks to the Nehru-Gandhi family. In an interview immediately after his return as head of the Indian Overseas Congress (IOC) after the General Election, and a better-than-before performance of the party, the defiant octogenarian asserted, “I am 80 years old, I don’t need a job. I resigned at the time; I was not sacked from my job, as you put it… I have made it my mission to carry the message of India’s democracy to the world and will continue to do it.”

His serial faux pas over decades were too many, though, to be brushed quietly under the carpet every time. In the run-up to the 2024 polls, for instance, Pitroda told the Statesman, “We could hold together a country as diverse as India, where people on East look like Chinese, people on West look like Arab, peo­ple on North look like maybe White and people in South look like Africans [sic].” That triggered a political firestorm, with the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its allies going for his jugu­lar and that of Congress leader and MP Rahul Gandhi. Pitroda was slammed as racist and his remarks odious, to say the least. An irate Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman posted on X: “I am from the South and I look Indian.” The storm that raged on the politi­cal front forced Pitroda’s resignation as the head of IOC, which usually hosts interactions between the likes of Rahul Gandhi and lesser academia and political lightweights in the US and Europe, making much ado at home about nothing abroad.

This wasn’t a one-off blooper from Pitroda in recent times. Earlier, he was also trolled for his remarks about the American inheritance tax which allows the state to grab a chunk of inherited wealth and only a part of it to be transferred to heirs. The implica­tion was that it was an ‘interesting’ tax that could help in wealth redistribution in a nation with high poverty like India. No soon­er had that slipped from Pitroda’s mouth than Congress leader Jairam Ramesh was forced to publicly gulp it down, hastily distancing the party from any such interpretation.

Folklore of the Nehru-Gandhi era has it that Pitroda, after moving to India, was distressed by what he had to go through to call his family in Chi­cago and was determined to transform the telecom sector, leading to his set­ting up the Centre for Development of Telematics (C-DoT). The walls between the official and the personal were thin in Indira Gandhi’s time and Rajiv Gandhi, then a Congress general secretary, sat in on government meet­ings on changes desperately needed in the telecommunications sector. That was the start of a partnership that fuelled decades of party and estab­lishment myths about the so-called dynamic duo that revolutionised Indian telecom and built the launchpad for the late 20th-century modernisation and India’s technological leaps forward.

When Rajiv Gandhi became prime minister, Pitroda was made head of five technological missions, including the telecom mission, and installed in the then stately Akbar Hotel, next to the Ashok, and had the eyes and ears of the prime minister at all times. His second coming happened during Manmohan Singh’s tenure as prime minister, as head of the National Knowledge Com­mission. When then Human Resource Development Minister Arjun Singh announced caste-based reservations in higher education, two of the commission’s members, André Beteille and Pratap Bhanu Mehta, resigned in protest.

Pitroda didn’t bat an eyelid. The legend of the high priest of Indian telecom revolution spun around Pitroda, who was by then known to all in Congress as extremely close to generations of Nehru-Gandhis, grew stronger at that time. It was fortified in no mean way later by Pitroda’s own book, The March of Mobile Money, in which he unapologetically took all the credit for India’s telecom revolution and its dramatic transformation of the mobile phone space.

That myth-making was burnished more recently by Rahul Gandhi at public rallies during the Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh state elections. At one, he proclaimed that Rajiv Gandhi was the genius who rang in the mobile phone revolution to trans­form the lives of ordinary people in India; at another he hailed Pitroda as an icon of the Badaai (carpenter) caste who reached for the stars, literally, and grasped them. The crafting of the duo as the legendary icons of the Indian telecom sector cleverly whitewashed key facts: the private sector and not the govern­ment at the time fuelled the rapid growth of the sector, mobile telephony and not landlines and calling booths energised this transformation, and the 1999 New Telecom Policy (NTP) coined by the Vajpayee government a decade after Rajiv Gandhi left office paved the way for BSNL as service provider.

Directly contradicting Pitroda’s boast about his telecom triumphs, economist Arvind Panagariya in his book, India: The Emerging Giant, asserted that it was Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s NTP, and not any magic wand waved by the Pitroda-Rajiv Gandhi duo, that had revolutionised the telecom sector in India. Vajpayee took the hard decision of corporatising BSNL and of separating policy (under DoT) from service providing. If anything, Congress’ Telecom Titan had bombed Ericsson’s plans to bring mobile telephony to Bombay in 1987 under World Bank funding, Panagariya wrote, contending that “luxury car phones” were “obscene” in India where there was significant poverty and starvation. With that, according to Panagariya, Pitroda may well have stymied that faster route to revolutionising tele density at the time because it weakened his own work at C-DoT, which envisioned rapid growth through gov­ernment-provided landlines and call booths.

Spinning tall tales about his own role in the telecom revolution in India, among its most significant successes, and revelling in them is clearly not Pitroda’s only talent. Embarrassing close political friends repeatedly is another gift he has. In 2019, during the Lok Sabha polls when Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that directions on the anti-Sikh riots of 1984 came from Rajiv Gandhi’s office, Pitroda’s reaction to the media was: “If the riots happened, they happened. What’s the issue on this now?” In 2023, he said in the context of BJP’s Ram Mandir focus: “Temples won’t create jobs in India.” That led to the prime minister and other party lead­ers calling the Congress leadership “Hindupho­bic”. In February 2019, Pitroda questioned the veracity of the Balakot air strikes in response to the Pulwama attack. The irony is that Pitroda, who sounds like a serial blooper factory, contin­ues to be on the Nehru-Gandhi family’s roster of close aides and advisers despite the fact that he left the Congress leadership red faced in the political and public space multiple times. And now he is back in the saddle, a key part of the inner circle of the Nehru-Gandhi coterie. With an adviser with as many faux pas to his credit as this 82-year-old (Remember octogenarian Joe Biden’s fumbling and then his petty “You’re the sucker, you’re the loser,” in the recent US presidential debate?), Rahul Gandhi, the newly minted Leader of the Opposition in Lok Sabha, could be walking on more slippery ground than ever.

Atal Behari Vajpayeefaux pasforeign universitiesGandhi family confidantIndian Overseas CongressPitroda-Rajiv GandhiRahul GandhiSam PitrodaTelecom revolution