Ashwini Vaishnaw: Controversial Rise from Bureaucrat to Modi's Key Man

Ashwini Vaishnaw, the Union Minister for Railways has had a rather unusual career trajectory. A former officer of the elite Indian Administrative Service (IAS) who served former Prime Minister of India Atal Behari Vajpayee as his personal secretary, Ashwini Vaishnaw quit the civil service to become a corporate captain before joining politics. He is the only first-time member of the Rajya Sabha to hold two important ministerial portfolios, over and above that of the Railways. As a cabinet minister, he is clearly a confidante of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

When Ashwini Vaishnaw rode pillion on a motorcycle in front of news camerapersons to reach the site of a passenger train accident that had taken place on 17 June in the Darjeeling district of West Bengal, the critics of the Union Minister for Railways blamed him for gimmickry and optics instead of owning up responsibility for the accident. 

Vaishnaw is no Lal Bahadur Shastri who offered to resign from his position as Minister for Railways twice in 1956 following two accidents. On both occasions, the then Prime Minister of India Jawaharlal Nehru rejected his resignation offers. 

The current minister is preoccupied pushing Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s agenda which emphasises “high-speed” and “world-class” train travel for the upper and middle classes and ignores providing better facilities and more trains for poor passengers.

That Vaishnaw enjoys the confidence of Modi is all-too apparent. He is more than the country’s Minister for Railways. After the general elections of 2024, he was appointed Minister for Information & Broadcasting and continues to head the Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology (MEITY). In July 2021, he had been given charge of the Ministry of Communications (a portfolio now held by Jyotiraditya Scindia). Never before in the history of India has a first-time Member of the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of Parliament, headed three important ministerial portfolios.  

After the Darjeeling accident, representatives of the Opposition alleged that the Modi government was “destroying” the Indian Railways and Vaishnaw was mocked as a “reel minister,” a reference to his penchant of using the social media. His Instagram account displays reels shot by professional camerapersons that highlight the “amazing strides” that the Indian Railways have made under his stewardship in just over three years. His emphasis on the launch of fast, air-conditioned Vande Bharat trains (see here, here and here), that cannot be afforded by the poor.

A year earlier, when at least 296 people were killed and more than 1,200 injured in a train accident in the Balasore district of Odisha, one of the worst railway disasters in the history of India, Vaishnaw had similarly been accused of “showmanship.” The country’s premier police investigative agency, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), was entrusted with a probe into the train tragedy, which was described as an attempt by the central government to find a “political solution” to the technical shortcomings in the railways’ systems that had caused the disaster that, certain experts contended, could have been averted,.

Vaishnaw had not just hinted at a possible “criminal” angle behind the triple train collision in Balasore. The regime’s spin doctors also attempted to give a communal color to the tragedy. 

The Balasore train tragedy was the first time when Ashwini Vaishnaw came under intense public pressure because the accident is considered the deadliest in India in nearly three decades. Vaishnaw rushed to the accident site immediately. The minister was seen as taking stock of the rescue and relief work at ground zero, emerging from under the debris of the mangled steel of a train dressed in neat casuals and a pair of dazzling white sneakers. Later, he was shown drinking coconut water at a roadside stall while chatting with local people in Odia – Vaishnaw used to belong to the Odisha cadre of the Indian Administrative Service (IAS).

Under Vaishnaw, the Indian Railways, once a major employer, has cut down on new recruitments. In January 2022, roughly six months after Vaishnaw took charge of the ministry, riots broke out in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh over delays in recruitment by the railways.  

The ruling Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) has sought to shield Vaishnaw from criticism by indulging in whataboutery, by pointing out the failures of former railway ministers, notably Mamata Banerjee of the Trinamool Congress and Lalu Prasad Yadav of the Rashtriya Janata Dal. Even after the Darjeeling train tragedy, certain Noida (Uttar Pradesh)-based television channels and media organisations rolled out figures and statistics pointing out that railway accidents were “common” during the tenure of the two Congress-led United Progressive Alliance governments.

“Union Ministers of Railways have historically been political heavyweights who win Lok Sabha elections after serving their terms in Rail Bhavan because they can ‘nurture’ their constituencies by spending on employment-generating projects,” a source in an Opposition political party told the authors of this article, on condition of anonymity, adding: “Lightweight Vaishnaw’s appointment was a significant departure from the past.” 

He was elected to the Rajya Sabha, thanks to the BJP and Biju Janata Dal (BJD) led by former Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik coming together to back his candidature in June 2019.

Vaishnaw’s Cabinet colleague from Odisha and BJP leader Dharmendra Pradhan (who is currently Union Education Minister and was earlier the Minister for Petroleum and Natural Gas in the Central government) has said that the “understanding” between BJP and BJD to field Vaishnaw as a common candidate was not a secret.

“This [the understanding] was done through open discussion. The move will be in Odisha’s interests. In democracies, such agreements happen,” Pradhan remarked.

Nevertheless, the announcement of Vaishnaw’s name as a candidate for the post of Rajya Sabha MP from Odisha for the first time was quite dramatic and contentious. In June 2019, within minutes of former Chief Minister Patnaik announcing that Vaishnaw was a candidate for one of the three Rajya Sabha seats from Odisha that had fallen vacant, he made an about-turn and declared that Vaishnaw has been fielded by the BJP and that his own party, the BJD, would merely back his candidature.

Patnaik clarified: “I think there was some confusion about Mr. Ashwini Vaishnaw. The Prime Minister spoke to me as did the Home Minister (Amit Shah). We will support the candidature of Mr. Ashwini Vaishnaw, who was the private secretary of Mr Vajpayee when he was the Prime Minister.”

As soon as Vaishnaw’s name was cleared, representatives of Opposition political parties, led by the Congress, disrupted proceedings in the Odisha legislative Assembly alleging a nexus between the BJP and the BJD. The then Congress legislature party leader in the Vidhan Sabha, Narasingha Mishra, demanded a statement from Patnaik about Vaishnaw’s alleged links with the “mining mafia” in the state. “Those who loot the mineral resources of the state are sent to represent us in the Rajya Sabha,” he reportedly remarked, adding that this was “most unfortunate.”

It was a surprise that the then ruling party in Odisha, the BJD “sacrificed” a seat in the Rajya Sabha despite having the numbers to have its own candidate. Vaishnaw was elected unopposed.

One of the authors of this article had met Mishra at his official bungalow in Bhubaneswar and asked him about Vaishnaw’s alleged links with the mining mafia. Mishra refused to comment any further on the issue: “Whatever I have said is on record in the legislative assembly already,” he said. “I have nothing more to add.”

More on these so-called links a little later in this article.

Vaishnaw was elected to the Rajya Sabha unopposed for a second time in a row, in February 2024, as the BJP and the BJD came together again to support his candidature.

This was, of course, a few months before relations between the BJP and the BJD soured in the run-up to the Lok Sabha and the Vidhan Sabha elections that were held simultaneously in Odisha. Today, the BJD is bitterly opposed to the BJP and Patnaik said on 24 June that the nine Rajya Sabha MPs belonging to the BJD would “strongly oppose” the third Modi government.

A Meteoric Rise Amidst Controversies

Vaishnaw’s career has seen many controversies, his former bureaucrat colleagues and top political leaders of Odisha told the writers of this article. All agreed that his rise from a junior officer of the 1994 batch of the IAS to becoming a powerful Cabinet minister, has been truly meteoric.

“In the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration, he maintained a low profile,” says Amitabh Kumar Das, former officer of the Indian Police Service who, was his contemporary in the academy. 

In 2003, he was sent on Central deputation where he joined as a deputy secretary in the Prime Minister’s Office in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government.

A retired civil servant of Odisha cadre, who had worked closely with Ashwini Vaishnaw in the past, told the authors of this article that he was generally considered a good and efficient officer but that “power went to his head” later.

“During his stint in Odisha, Vaishnaw came in touch with Ashok Saikia when the latter was a joint secretary in Vajpayee’s PMO. It was Saikia who would take him into the PMO as a deputy secretary. Vaishnaw went on to become Vajpayee’s private secretary,” said the retired IAS officer.

Interestingly, Ashwini Vaishnaw continued to serve as Vajpayee’s private secretary even after the former Prime Minister demitted office in 2004. From 2006, Vaishnaw served as the Chairman of the Mormugao Port Trust in Goa for two years before proceeding on study-leave to the United States where he acquired a Masters of Business Administration (MBA) degree from Wharton Business School. On his return to India, he quit the civil service. 

Said one of his contemporaries in an off-the-record conversation: “There are some who believe he took voluntary retirement. But this was not so in Ashwini’s case. One can take voluntary retirement only after 20 years of service. In his case, since he left the service earlier, he would not have got retirement benefits.”

What he did forego presumably did not matter to Vaishnaw who then took up senior management positions in multinational corporations, including the affiliates of General Electric (GE) and Siemens (in their transportation and mobility divisions, respectively). 

In 2012, he quit the corporate sector to become an entrepreneur in his own right by setting up a couple of auto-component manufacturing units in Modi’s home state, Gujarat

An article in the Outlook magazine had stated: “It is this rare combination of experience in both public and private sectors that is believed to have tilted the scales in his (favour)… when PM Modi finalised the names of ministers to be inducted in today’s reshuffle. While his efficiency and varied experience are beyond question, Vaishnaw has been dogged by controversy, primarily because of his association with B Prabhakaran, who was named in the MB Shah Commission report on the massive mining scam in Odisha in 2013.”

Prabhakaran was arrested over his role in the scandal that reportedly took place between 2004 and 2012.

In November 2017, Vaishnaw and Prabhakaran came together to incorporate a firm for manufacturing pellets from iron ore dust in the mineral rich district of Keonjhar in northern Odisha. Vaishnaw served as a Director in this firm, Thriveni Pellets Private Limited, until June 2019.

In February 2018, Vaishnaw became a Director of another iron pellet-manufacturing company, Brahmani River Pellets Limited, along with Prabhakaran. Billionaire businessman, Sajjan Jindal, who has several business interests in Odisha, including the controversial integrated steel-manufacturing unit in the Dhinkia area of Jagatsinghpur, would also join Vaishnaw and Prabhakaran as one of the directors of this company in February 2018. 

Vaishnaw would continue being associated with this company as its Managing Director till three days before he was named as a Cabinet minister by Modi in July 2021.

“Prabhakaran is a wily businessman from Chennai. He operates between Chennai, Delhi and Bhubaneswar. It is believed that Prabhakaran firmly supported the Naveen Patnaik’s government in Odisha because of his mining interests. He is known to be close not just to the former Odisha Chief Minister but also to Home Minister Amit Shah and former Tamil Nadu Chief Minister, the late J Jayalalithaa,” said a former Lok Sabha MP from Odisha, speaking off-the-record to one of the authors of this article.

Former IPS officer Amitabh Das added: “I believe Ashwini Vaishnaw is close to businessman Gautam Adani who, in turn, is perceived to be close to the Prime Minister.”

Vaishnaw was quoted by the Hindustan Times saying: “I feel let down when people target my integrity. I have lived a transparent life. I never had a fascination for politics. I was indeed surprised when the offer to contest came. But once elected as an MP, I will (serve) … with full public spirit.”

On his relations with Thriveni River Pellets, he stated: “My goal was to create an enterprise that can sustain 1,500 families. In the Kalinga Nagar plant, we are giving subsidised food even to our contractual employees. I was happy achieving my target and working towards a goal of sustaining 5,000 families till the offer of a Rajya Sabha MP came.”

One controversy that is out in the open and has evidently dogged Vaishnaw during his career as a bureaucrat in Odisha relates to the allotment of a 2,400 square metre plot of land in Odisha’s capital, Bhubaneswar. 

Vaishnaw was one of the beneficiaries of the plot which he had purchased in 2003 through a “discretionary quota scheme” launched by the state government. He continues to be the owner of the plot of land as per his affidavit filed with the Election Commission of India.

An inquiry had been initiated into the allegedly discretionary land allotment scam by the Odisha government through Taradatt (he uses one name), the then Additional Chief Secretary, Revenue & Disaster Management Department. Subsequently, the allotments were cancelled by the state government in December 2014.

In this case, a first information report (FIR) was lodged by the Deputy Superintendent of Police, Vigilance, Vigilance Cell Unit Office, Bhubaneswar, before the Superintendent of Police, Vigilance, Bhubaneswar Division, alleging that on the basis of a preliminary enquiry it was found that certain public servants occupying crucial positions in the Bhubaneswar Development Authority (BDA) and in the Housing and Urban Development Department, Government of Odisha had “surreptitiously” distributed prime plots in the Commercial Complex District Centre located at Chandrasekharpur in Bhubaneswar.

Vaishnaw’s family members, including his wife Sunita Vaishnav, his son Rahul Vaishnav and his daughter Tanya Vaishnav continue to be on the boards of directors of the companies he was associated with after he resigned his positions in these firms just before he was inducted into the Union Cabinet in July 2021. Two of these firms – 3T Industrial Solutions Private Limited and Adler Industrial Services Private Limited – are in Gurugram, Haryana, in the National Capital Region.

The Modi government was rocked by the Pegasus scandal in July 2021 soon after Vaishnaw took charge of the Ministries of Communications, and Electronics & Information Technology. Allegations that the Israeli spyware was misused to compromise the mobile phones of several political opponents, journalists critical of the Modi government and others were made in a series of articles published in The Wire portal, as part of an international investigation.

On July 21, 2021, Vaishnaw, as the then head of the Ministries of Communications and Electronics & Information Technology, laid a statement in the Lok Sabha questioning the veracity of the reports that were published by The Wire. In a surprising turn, a few hours later, the website wrote that the newly-appointed minister Vaishnaw and his wife Sunita were among those whose phones had allegedly been infected by the Pegasus spyware.

The Wire report stated: “He appears to have been targeted for possible surveillance back in 2017, when he had not yet taken the plunge in favour of the BJP. Another number, apparently listed in the name of his wife, also appears to have been selected.”

Subsequently, a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) was filed in the Supreme Court in the Pegasus controversy by certain individuals (including one of the authors of this article) whose mobile phone data were allegedly accessed by using the Israeli spyware.

A three-member expert panel was constituted by the Supreme Court to examine the allegations of snooping of mobile phones using the spyware. A three-judge bench of the Supreme Court headed by the then Chief Justice of India NV Ramana said that the central government did “not cooperate” in the investigation. Ashwini Vaishnaw did not depose before the expert panel. The case is currently pending in the Supreme Court.

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