Educated at Mayo College, Ajmer and in England, he is both articulate and passionate about Jharkhand and its people. No surprises there because he, after all, is the son of Jaipal Singh, the Oxford-educated founder of the Jharkhand Party.

But unlike his father, who was the captain of the victorious Indian hockey team at the Amsterdam Olympic Games in 1928, Jayant has never played hockey. He is tall and athletic but the passion for sports, he confesses, has been passed on to his sons, who, you guessed it, are in school at Ajmer.

Representing the Essar Group of companies in Jharkhand after his stint with Haldia Petrochem and the Tatas, one would have expected him to play a more central role in Jharkhand.

But while Madhu Kodas and Anosh Ekkas go about deciding the fate of the state, Jayant Jaipal Singh remains a shadowy figure in the background despite his impeccable political pedigree and the “tribal” status.

This was his first visit to the smallish Hotel Green Acre near the airport in Ranchi.

We settle down at the rooftop coffee shop overlooking the runway. The coffee shop is cramped for space and with several other tables occupied by hotel guests, it was difficult to converse. But soon the others left and we settled down with coffee to what I had insisted would be a casual, chat session. Although I have known him, off and on, for over two decades, we had rarely talked about his father, called affectionately the marang Gomke or the great leader. So, I start off by asking him about his earliest recollection of his father. He took a few moments to answer and then looked up and said: “I discovered my father only after his death.”

Jayant was in Class IX when his father, an MP then, died. He remembers being bundled into a plane for New Delhi, from where the family brought the body back to Ranchi.

“As we hovered over Ranchi, the pilot announced that the plane could not land till the runway was cleared of people,” he recalls. “And we looked out of the window and saw a sea of humanity on and around the runway.” That was the first time, claims Jayant, he realised how popular his father was.

Jaipal Singh, despite his aristocratic lifestyle, was known to feel equally at home with his people in villages, a simple and straight-forward person. He was known to have been close to the first Prime Minister of the country and Jayant does remember Jawaharlal Nehru visiting the family at White House, the bungalow which used to be there at the junction of Club Road and Station Road, at a corner of the GEL Church Complex.

Did he get an autograph from Nehru, I ask. Jayant looks bewildered. “No, because we never realised it was such a big deal,” he replies slowly. Nehru was just another guest visiting the family and he remembers a cake being baked for him. “You got a piece of the cake and that was it,” he adds. The children were not paraded before the VIP or asked to recite poems and sing a song.

Nehru and Jaipal Singh came very close to an accord, the latter even agreeing to merge Jharkhand Party with the Congress. But both leaders died in quick succession, one after the other, and their dream accord remained on paper. What he does remember of his father is that Jaipal Singh was fussy about the use of language. He himself spoke well and he wanted his children to get a good education and use the language well. He was also punctual and “for him 9 am meant 9 am and not five minutes past 9,” recalls the son, who had arrived 15 minutes late for the breakfast meeting. It was to honour his father’s wish for a good education that Jayant went to England after school.

Seven years in England would have opened whichever door he would have opted at that time. But Jayant wanted to return and “understand” his father’s legacy. Perhaps he even wanted to inherit it. But he admits it was a mistake to get into business on his return to Ranchi.

An even bigger mistake was to set up a shellac processing unit at Bundu. A fluctuating export market finally forced the unit to shut down but not before our man had squandered a minor fortune.

Why did lac, a natural raisin found in abundance in the forests, fail to realise its full potential? Even a flourishing unit at Murhu, an Indo-German collaboration named as Achruram-Khalkhov, had also unceremoniously and suddenly closed down, I recalled. “Achruram closed down because they had exported large volumes to Iraq just before the first Gulf war and lost a lot of money,” says Jayant. Lac, even now, is used to provide gloss to food products like cake, he agrees but adds that lack of vision, flawed policies, deforestation, corruption, a volatile market and a host of other factors spelled the demise of shellac processing units.

The failed industrialist did try his hands at politics and contested the Assembly elections in 1985 as an Independent and lost. “It is ironical,” muses Jayant, “because in 1984 Congress wanted me to contest for the Lok Sabha from Khunti; I refused because I was virulently anti-Congress then, blaming the party for all the ills.”

He would have romped home in the Rajiv wave, I point out and he laughs. “Trust me to look a gift-horse in the eyes and turn away.”

But he has no regrets about contesting the election.

“Everybody, including you, joke about it,” he adds seriously, “but it was a wonderful experience. I visited places, which I would never have gone to and met people I never would have met. It was a learning experience and even now when I go back, people are so hospitable, friendly and so warm.”

Is politics still an option? No, he replies firmly. “In 1984 if I had contested, I was told it would cost me Rs 3 lakh,” he chuckles, “now I believe it runs into crores.”

Does he feel bad about the drift in the state? “Last year I did feel very frustrated over the situation here and told my family that enough was enough, that we should leave the state; but my sons did not want to leave Ranchi,” he recalls with a laugh. There is something in the air here that brings you back, forces you to settle down, adds he.

But shouldn’t he be playing a more pro-active role in changing Jharkhand? “I do give suggestions, for whatever they are worth, to people I know and some of them are taken seriously by bureaucrats,” he asserts.

His two sons, Shivraj and Krishan, are studying at Mayo. Both are good in sports and while Shivraj has taken a fancy to swimming, the younger boy is shaping up as a good squash player.

As he drove off, I stood wondering at the man who is helping Essar set up a power plant and a steel plant in the state.

He should have been negotiating for the state. But states in modern India remain singularly bad in making the right use of the right people, a mistake that business houses repeat less frequently.