Vayalar Ravi cannot decide what profile suits him better: that of a high flier agonising over a messy civil aviation ministry or a grounded do-gooder whose immediate concern is to repatriate Indians “trapped” inside strife-torn Libya. Both job descriptions leave him palpably harried. The 74-year-old Rajya Sabha MP from Kerala, whose induction in the Union cabinet in 2009 was uncertain till the last moment, holds charge of the civil aviation and the overseas Indian affairs ministries.

For the moment, Ravi, who took over the civil aviation ministry from Praful Patel in January, knows what is expected of him. “The biggest issue I have to resolve is a proper integration of Air India and Indian Airlines. Technically they have merged but in fact no HR (human resources) integration has taken place. There’s a trust deficit between IA and AI that I want to bridge. It has to start by removing the salary disparity,” he says, signalling that his revamp blueprint would be people-centered and not capital or technology-driven.

The first thing he did after stepping into Patel’s shoes was engaging with the airlines’ trade unions in Mumbai. “I spent two days talking to the leaders and members. I heard them out patiently. Salaries are not being paid on time because oil companies demand their back-dated payments and dent our stretched resources. There are 41,000 workers, including casual and contract ones. My policy is to be sympathetic to them,” he stressed.

The minister realises that it is not easy to reconcile the interests of the workers with the ruthless moves that a clean-up of the system would entail. “Over the last three years, the airlines toted up a loss of Rs 13,000 crore. The losses have nothing to do with human costs. There has been no new fleet purchase since 1991. We are working with old aircraft that guzzle fuel and sometimes break down as a result of which flights are delayed. We have purchased 111 aircraft, both Airbus and Boeing, but only 80 have been delivered,” he says.

The nub of the problem, says Ravi, is that the purchases cost the ministry Rs 50,000 crore for which Air India borrowed Rs 25,000 crore from banks. “It has been an interest burner, a working capital burner. The operational costs are nothing much,” clarified the minister, who is also a veteran trade unionist. He has headed the Cochin Port Trust Workers’ Union for the past 30 years.

Ravi admits that initially it was a trifle hard for him to reconcile his “pro-proletarian” instincts with the new look Congress of Manmohan Singh. But he adds that he has learned to “live with the corporate sector without loving it”. “It has its role in India. My effort and intention is to put AI on the fast growth track as soon as possible,” he says. And he is clear what the rule of the game will be: “Let the private carriers compete with AI. I do not want AI to compete with any of them.”

Ravi’s working credo is anchored in his life-long belief that the public sector alone has held and will hold the Indian economy together. “We cannot leave Indians at the mercy of the corporate sector. Corporate houses have to show more social responsibility. One example is the recent escalation in onion prices. Just because there were unseasonal rains, does it mean that traders should sell onions at Rs 100 a kg? Onions are consumed more by the poor than the rich. It is a sin to make profits off the poor.”

But was the bit on AI just a brave proclamation, wishful thinking or a realistic slogan? Ravi avers that AI will hold its head high because it had the unstinted support of the Prime Minister. Manmohan Singh, he says, is “determined” that AI should regain its glory. “The PM has categorically said that there is no question of privatising AI. He is proud of our national carrier and he wants to run it. Coming to the nitty-gritty, we will first rationalise the routes and cut out the loss-making ones like those flying to Europe,” he said.

So was it his trade union background that persuaded the Prime Minister and Sonia Gandhi to bring him into civil aviation? Ravi fiddles with the papers on the table of his chamber inside Parliament and takes the question with hesitation. “I do not know. Perhaps it was my ability to carry workers along or perhaps it was my work in the overseas affairs ministry that impressed them,” he says.

Ask him whether or not his predecessor has left him an unenviable legacy, and Ravi turns tactful. “I never looked into what Patel did,” he claims. And what of the charge that Patel hawked profitable domestic and international routes to private airlines? “Not his fault,” Ravi responds. “Some routes were subject to international bilateral pacts. AI could not use them because of an aircraft crunch.”

Diplomacy was not always Ravi’s forte, though. On a bad day in 1986 when he was a minister in the Kerala government, he discovered that the late K.Karunakaran — “I had very good relations with him”— had inexplicably stripped him of his home portfolio. “I resigned,” he says. Rajiv Gandhi, who was then the Prime Minsiter, sought an explanation. “‘It is an insult,’ I said. Rajivji did not compel me to stay on,” he recalls.

That’s when Ravi almost did a Jagan Mohan Reddy and hit the road to share his woes with the janta. The Congress panicked. “Arjun Singhji pleaded with me to call off my campaign. I realised there was no point in rebelling and so I stuck to addressing only two meetings,” he says.

While he is economical with his praise of Rajiv (“he belonged to a different generation”), Ravi is effusive about Indira Gandhi and Sonia Gandhi. “Soniaji is very good to me and my wife. She has Indira Gandhi’s mind on politics and economics. She not only loves but respects Congress leaders and workers,” he says.

The senior Mrs Gandhi was, in fact, his political mentor. “I formed the Kerala Students’ Union (KSU) in 1957. Indiraji picked me to set up the National Students Union of India (NSUI) in 1971. The NSUI flag she approved is an amalgam of the KSU’s swathe of blue and the Congress’s tricolour strip. This is the best tribute I could have earned. When the Congress split, the entire Kerala Congress went with Indiraji,” he recalls.

Ravi insists that Indira Gandhi was not quite the autocrat that she is made out to be. After initial reluctance, in 1971 she allowed him to contest his first Lok Sabha election from Chirayainkil in rural Thiruvananthapuram. It was a Catholic-dominated seat. Ravi, a backward caste Ezhava, had eloped and married Mercy, a Catholic just two years ago for which the Church refused to pardon the couple. Ironically, two Catholics, A.K. Antony and Oomen Chandy, both former chief ministers, had stood as witnesses to their civil marriage. By juggling the caste equations and dividing the Christian votes, Ravi won with a “creditable” margin. And Mrs Gandhi gifted him a berth in the Congress’s elite working committee.

Having endured the rough-and-tumble of Kerala’s faction-driven politics, today Ravi shepherds other novices through that tricky terrain. One of them is Shashi Tharoor who debuted from Thiruvananthapuram in the 2009 elections. “We tried to persuade Shashi to stand from Palakkad because the caste equations were more favourable to him there. Besides, it is his home district. He said he preferred Thiruvananthapuram. I met Sonia Gandhi one day and she asked me ‘what do you think of Tharoor?’ I said, ‘we will support his candidacy from Palakkad. She said, ‘what about Thiruvananthapuram?’ I said, ‘if you say so we will wish him well and work for him there,’ ” says Ravi.

Midway through Tharoor’s electoral campaign, he got reports that things were not quite on course because of a rebellion within the Congress. “I knew the fellows who were creating trouble. I scolded them. We fanned out into the villages and addressed as many meetings as possible because there was a lot at stake in Tharoor’s victory,” he says.

Did he feel let down by Tharoor after the IPL episode? Ravi is back to being his diplomatic self. “He’s not a seasoned politician but he’s a good fellow.” he says. Will the Congress field him again from Thiruvananthapuram? “If he wants to contest, nobody’s going to deny him a ticket.”

Like any quintessential Congressman, nurtured in a more “idealistic” era than the present one, Ravi is sceptical about how far such present-day attributes as a foreign degree and felicity with the English language can take a young politico. “I have no Oxford degree, I did not study in an English medium school. I went to a village school and I had to walk eight miles to reach it,” he says.

Ravi would like to believe he was born into indigence. Actually, he was raised in a middle-class family that was in the coir business. His father, M.K. Krishnan, was a freedom fighter who always wore a “Gandhi topi” and his mother, Devaky, was a Congress worker.

Though he may not have an Oxford degree, clearly, his political pedigree is faultless.