Kumar Gandharva is playing in the background. A black-and-white photograph of Gandhi and Nehru hangs on the wall in front. Behind, though, the room in New Delhi’s Udyog Bhavan, which houses the commerce ministry, looks more like a boudoir, the red traditional Gujarati furniture vying with two beautiful thangkas for attention. In his trademark churidar kurta, minister of state for commerce Jairam Ramesh looks none the worse after being ticked off by the party for the latest brouhaha he’s involved in: seeking the scalp of old friend and tourism and cultural affairs minister Ambika Soni over the Archaeological Survey of India’s Sethusamudram project affidavit.

The Jairam jigsaw falls into place: inside the khadi-clad believer in Nehruvian simplicity, there’s a colourful, irreverent character struggling to come out.

Ramesh, 53, has agreed to be interviewed only if he is asked no questions on Ram Setu. But what about the countless questions that do the rounds about him — that he knows when he attacks someone in the party he’s bound to be of use to someone else and that he cosies up to people, only to swiftly dump them when he doesn’t need them any more? Like who, he asks.

Ambika Soni, for one. When they met, she was a powerful general secretary of the party and major domo in Sonia Gandhi’s office; he was merely an economic adviser. She introduced him to the slippery ropes of courtier politics, where the perception of proximity is more than half the battle won.

Ramesh looks at his Sony Vaio and says, “I spoke to her yesterday; she’s a friend, a colleague I’ve known for 15 years. She’s upset, but I am sure that over a period of time she’ll realise that my intentions are not as Byzantine as they are made out to be by the media.”

And what about former foreign minister K. Natwar Singh who had noticed him when he was a lowly secretary in the party’s economics cell led by Manmohan Singh and had mentored him? That didn’t stop Ramesh, along with other party colleagues, from tearing into Singh in 2005 for his role in the Iraq oil-for-food scam.

In response, Ramesh pulls out a book on non-violence, inscribed by the former foreign minister. “I felt sorry for what happened, but he brought it upon himself. I think it was entirely self-inflicted. I can’t understand how someone who claims to be a Nehruvian and has known the Congress party for 50 years can say the things he did.”

In any case, Ramesh goes on, 65 should be the age limit for people in politics. “That’s why politics in India is stale — the same issues, the same debates, the same chaps going round and round, whether the Congress, the BJP or the Lefties.” He’s sure Rahul Gandhi’s coming will have a great effect on the party organisation. “Unfortunately, Rahul will inherit a geriatric top; the middle is all right. Digvijay Singh, Y.S. Rajashekhar Reddy, Ashok Gehlot, are all in their fifties. But just look at the others. Arjun Singh, Vajpayee, Advani — they should all go home. It’s terrible. They’re yesterday’s men mouthing day before yesterday’s ideologies!”

Such candour is rare among politicians, let alone government ministers. And it often lands him in trouble. In 2000 he told Asiaweek in an interview, on the second anniversary of Sonia Gandhi’s taking over as Congress president: “Two years down the line, Sonia is seen as a loser and the morale in the party is very low... People who saw her as a ticket to nirvana now see her as a ticket to narak [hell].” Then he had added, “If things go the way they are, the Congress will not come back to power for another 50 years.”

So does he have foot-in-the- mouth disease? “I wouldn’t say I have foot-in-mouth disease. At times maybe I say things which in public life one should keep private,” says Ramesh.

If his skirmishes with trouble have not scuppered his career yet, that’s perhaps because even his fiercest critics will acknowledge Ramesh’s quicksilver brilliance.

The Indian Institute of Technology (Mumbai)-educated Ramesh, who went on to acquire degrees from the Massachussetts Institute of Technology and Carnegie Mellon University in the US, is an outsider without a political lineage. The son of an IIT professor from Karnataka became a politician by serving as an aide to influential men — telecom czar Sam Pitroda, S.V.S. Raghavan (who headed two public sector giants that were briefly combined), and P. Chidambaram, who was finance minister in the United Front government, to name a few.

After he returned to India from the US, he worked at the industry ministry as an economic advisor. His break came after a journalist recommended him to Rajiv Gandhi as a speech writer. After Gandhi was assassinated, he became an aide to Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao. In the heady first 100 days of the Rao regime, Ramesh was among the handful of men who dramatically altered India’s economic policy.

But Rao soon packed him off to the Planning Commission, where he spent time writing notes on economic topics and making friends with journalists. Ramesh himself was puzzled at having been sidelined but attributed it to his having leaked to an international news agency that the government would allow IBM to return to India — the Cabinet hadn’t yet cleared it.

He formally joined the Congress party with the blessings of both Chidambaram and Pranab Mukherjee.

The National Democratic Alliance (NDA) years were hard for most Congressmen but Ramesh survived by doing assorted jobs on both sides of the political divide: he wrote a column in India Today, was a member of the Rajasthan development council, economic adviser to Chhattisgarh’s Congress government and a member of the official delegation to the World Trade Organisation talks in Seattle in 1999. Andhra Pradesh chief minister Chandrababu Naidu, a key figure in the NDA alliance, asked him to serve on his economic advisory council.

Some in the BJP even today refer to him as Jai ‘shri’ram Ramesh. Today, he feelingly says, “I hate the BJP, can’t stand them. The only guy I could listen to without getting irritated was Pramod Mahajan. One can’t listen to Vajpayee when he talks. I think they are a bunch of retrograde and illiberal people. They may have had the right ideas on the economic reform, but that’s not enough.”

Despite his statement in Asiaweek about the Congress’s dim prospects, he stuck on in the party, hoping his luck would turn. It did. On the eve of the 2004 general elections, he became a member of the Congress Party’s strategy sessions. At a little ground floor flat meant to house lesser-known MPs — christened the war room — Salman Khurshid, Ramesh and Kumari Selja sat through the day, with Ramesh’s data on advertising material and men a mouse-click away.

For all Ramesh’s gaffes, he openly genuflects to the reigning party deities. What gives the Congress Party the ability to transcend all four markers of Indian identity — religion, caste, language and region — is the glue the Gandhi family provides, he declares. “Look at Narasimha Rao, he was a non-family person who ran the full tenure. Did he transcend those issues?” And then he adds: “I don’t subscribe to the word ‘dynasty’, ‘family’ is a much better word.”

Ramesh now believes that the future lies in Rahul Gandhi. “Rahul will be the tonic for the organisation. The organisation has to take this tonic and move ahead. He automatically doesn’t have the keys to the kingdom, nobody has. The Congress is barking up the wrong tree if it’s looking for a Sai Baba-type figure. There’s no Sai Baba in sight, it’s a collective effort. The age of miracles is over. It’s now the age of hard work, coalition building and seat adjustment,” he says.

He taps on his laptop. It’s clearly the age of the Sony Vaio too.