Nirmala Sitharaman

New Delhi, March 28: The BJP’s newest spokesperson had won a bottle of Moet & Chandon champagne at her first job as a shop assistant with Habitat, a home decor store in London’s Regent Street. She had totted up record Christmas sales.

Nirmala Sitharaman had taken the job impelled by a “typical” immigrant’s instinct to “find an opening” on unfamiliar terrain. It lasted a month until Price Waterhouse snapped her up as a researcher to look into how East European economies were adapting to western audit and marketing systems and practices.

At least the assignment was closer to economics, her chosen discipline at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. Her PhD dissertation was on the India-Europe textile trade in the GATT framework, because globalisation and its impact on developing countries happens to be the subject closest to her heart.

Nirmala, 49, the second woman to become a BJP spokesperson after Sushma Swaraj, may look a little out of place in the party’s line-up of ladies who either conform to the Bharatiya naari template or arrive with a celebrity cachet.

She uses her maiden surname and not her husband’s, which is Parakala, a distinguished name in Andhra Pradesh politics.

Nirmala, born to an apolitical home, had married into a house of politicians, none of whom was from the BJP. Her father-in-law was three times a Congress minister in Andhra and her mother-in-law was a Congress MLA. Her husband, Prabhakar, was briefly a spokesman for Chiranjeevi’s Praja Rajyam Party.

So why the BJP?

“Why not?” she asks.

She doesn’t say so but Nirmala’s association with the party goes back to the days of NDA rule when she was appointed to the National Commission for Women as an “apolitical” member.

Once she had been removed by Arjun Singh, the human resource development minister in UPA I, she went back to Andhra to start a policy research centre in Hyderabad and then a school for the underprivileged in a village.

Her NGO stint brought her in touch with Sushma, who headed a parliamentary committee on women and child development.

Nirmala says: “I was forever approaching her to take up this or that issue in Parliament in my typical pounding kind of way. She is easy to approach and ready to listen.”

In between, she got involved with the Swadeshi Jagran Manch whose agenda, she says, was in sync with her concerns about whether India was sufficiently prepared to absorb the “perils and powers of globalisation”.

When Sushma and former BJP president Rajnath Singh approached her to be a member of the party national executive, her friends and family persuaded her to accept the offer because “it is not every day that a national party gives you something like this”.

Nirmala rejects the suggestion that a political aspirant has to “lobby” for entry.

Almost everyone spoken to in the BJP agreed that her induction was meant to fill in a “blank” in the quality of leaders the party wanted to project. “She is a woman; is earnest, modern; thinks independently and is not afraid to speak her mind,” a leader said.

Nirmala contests the label of the BJP being “Right-wing”.

“It is not such a Rightist party. ‘Left’, ‘Right’ and ‘Centre’… sit well with the western model of development. The BJP is for small enterprises, it accepts the benefits of big business and recognises the right of the smaller indigenous communities to survive and flourish,” she says.

A bit “frightened” about the “challenges” of being a spokesperson when the BJP is buffeted with problems, Nirmala admits to having felt “sick and upset” at the party’s internal feuds.

“The Congress, BJP and the Left are the three (groups) that have to hold themselves because they alone can hold the nation together,” she says.

And if she has to defend a person like Narendra Modi?

“Till date not an FIR has been filed against him,” she says. “It’s not that I don’t understand the pain of the (Gujarat) victims but I do not want to presume him guilty just because influential sections say so.”