Whatever Yogesh Chander Deveshwar (Yogi to friends) is, he is not colour-conscious. Ask anyone who knows the ITC chairman — or has tracked his climb in corporate India — and he will tell you Deveshwar is always with the powers-that-be — red, green or saffron.

If faculty members of the Indian Institute of Management in Calcutta (IIMC) had known that, Deveshwar’s decision to accept the controversial fee cuts wouldn’t have come as a surprise. Most see it as humiliating capitulation to Union human resources development minister Murli Manohar Joshi — something that the faculty clearly hadn’t expected of their chairman.

But then, they should have known better. If he was close to Madhavrao Scindia and Ghulam Nabi Azad when the Congress was in power in the early Nineties, he is today close to the likes of Joshi and Pramod Mahajan in the Bharatiya Janata Party.

Joshi, in fact, had picked him to head the IIMC board from a list of names that was famously “as long as an arm” in April 2002, after his predecessor Subroto Ganguly, former ACC chairman, resigned in protest against the “high-handedness” of the human resources development ministry. Two years later, Deveshwar may have let down the faculty, but not the minister.

To be fair, Deveshwar had little choice in the matter. Conflicting interests often trouble a CEO heading the board of governors of state-run institutes such as the IIMs. It’s not easy to take on the government while you are managing a Rs 11,200-crore company with diverse interests — ranging from tobacco and garments to packaging and information technology. Very few CEOs would risk that.

And Deveshwar is no Narayana Murthy. The revered Infosys supremo, who chairs the Indian Institute of Management’s board in Ahmedabad, is locked in a fierce battle with Joshi over his decision to slash the IIM fees. Murthy sees Joshi’s move for what it is — an attack on the autonomy of the country’s premier B-schools.

Deveshwar, clearly, does not agree. And he made no secret of his stance when the IIMC board met in Calcutta on March 26. An IIM, being a government institute, cannot fight the government, he argued. And Deveshwar’s private stance was no different from his public position.

A few days before the board meeting he told his aides that it would be foolhardy to challenge the ministry on the issue. “We cannot do what Murthy has done. IIMA, in any case, has lots of money,” he had remarked. “Accepting the fee cuts while ensuring the institute’s autonomy would be in the best interests of all.”

This is the quintessential Deveshwar, known in corporate circles as much for his managerial skills as for his political contacts. And unlike most of his colleagues in the professional managerial class, the graduate from IIT Delhi understands the establishment. That partly explains how he has over the years managed to stay in favour with successive governments. “Deveshwar has always been a government man. He wouldn’t do anything to rub it the wrong way,” says a former colleague at Air-India.

As the head of the ITC’s hotel division in the early Eighties, Deveshwar, now 57, managed Gwalior’s Usha Kiran Palace Hotel owned by Madhavrao Scindia. The late Congress leader was said to have been greatly impressed by Deveshwar’s managerial abilities when he personally supervised the wedding reception of Scindia’s daughter in 1988. Three years later, the seeds sowed then bore fruit. When the former Maharaja of Gwalior took over as civil aviation minister in 1991, he made Deveshwar the chairman of Air-India, a job he did reasonably well.

But when Scindia resigned over a plane crash and Ghulam Nabi Azad took over as civil aviation minister, Deveshwar switched sides, winning the trust of the new minister by giving Scindia a wide berth. “He always looks at things from a personal angle and is ready to sacrifice anybody in his own interest,” the Air-India official says.

The same charge was levelled against him when he took over as the ITC chairman from his mentor, K.L.Chugh, in a bruising corporate battle in the mid-Nineties. Once Deveshwar’s three-year stint with Air- India ended in 1993, Chugh had actually brought him back to the ITC as vice- chairman, superseding three senior directors and riling the BAT, the London-based single largest shareholder of the company.

Once installed as vice-chairman, Deveshwar, however, did not take Chugh’s side. And once BAT had succeeded in ousting Chugh — a proverbial thorn in its flesh — Deveshwar quietly made his peace with the BAT and grabbed the throne with the help of the Indian financial institutions, which had a larger stake in ITC than BAT. There again, his government contacts came in handy.

Chugh felt betrayed — just as the IIMC faculty now feels let down. “The chairman had promised to take the interests of the institute into account before drafting the resolution. It now seems that he only took his own interests and the interest of the government into account. It’s a breach of trust,” Ashis Bhattacharya, a spokesman for the faculty, says.

It is ironic that the same faculty had hailed Deveshwar’s appointment as chairman of the board two years ago. “The Government of India must be congratulated for their excellent choice. …we need a person of Y.C. Deveshwar’s dynamism to propel us further,” Amitava Bose, then IIMC director, had crowed.

The teachers were even more impressed when Deveshwar took it upon himself to draw up a “corporate governance” plan, making it easier for the institute to run its myriad committees. He also dispatched engineers from ITC to help the IIMC’s under-staffed maintainance unit.

Things change. Faculty members now say the professors had no access to Deveshwar. “Even the director could not meet him. He had to get the papers signed though a senior ITC official who virtually acted as an intermediary between the IIMC and its chairman,” he says.

O tempora, O mores!