The man Indian politics never gave his due
‘Siddhartha Reddy never really found a team where he could test his skills and win the rewards that go with such talent’.
In cricketing terms, Siddhartha Reddy (who passed away in Bengaluru on Thursday night) could best be compared to Mumbai’s redoubtable Padmakar Shivalkar or the late Rajinder Goel from Haryana. Both world class spinners, good to play for India, but never did.
Reddy Garu was in the same league in political terms. He was a spinner par excellence who had the capacity to take the field at the highest level. Understood all the guile and tricks of his craft, every nuance, every trend and development and could dissect the opposition’s weakness and strength and suggest a unique out of the box move to neutralize them and win the battle. Sadly, like messers Shivalkar and Goel, everyone agreed that Siddhartha
Reddy was India class, but he never really found a team where he could test his skills and win the rewards that go with such talent.
Almost four decades back, Reddy first shot into the limelight when he was busy organizing the Kisan rally planned by Mrs Gandhi’s older son, Rajiv Gandhi, who had just some time earlier taken to politics on the death of his younger brother Sanjay Gandhi in a plane crash. It was the older brother’s first major attempt to showcase his organizational ability and tell the world that he wasn’t really a reluctant politician.
His right hand in organizing that event was Siddhartha Reddy—in fact the first time that keen observers and journalists in Delhi came to know of him. Thin and natty (those days he wasn’t in kurta pajama, but trousers and bush shirts) with a staccato that reeled out instructions and comments at machine gun speed, he was a phenomenon viewed as one of Rajiv’s original boys who enjoyed the absolute trust and confidence of the boss. There are stories galore on how he came in contact with Rajiv. One suggests that he came through the Congress system while others believe that he was strategically placed there. The truth is that Siddhartha connected with Rajiv when they met. His plans and his vision board enchanted the Gandhi scion. Here was a man after his own heart—data driven, `cut the bullshit out` attitude and a penchant to marry realism with politics. It was perhaps a presentation that Reddy made on organizing the Kisan Rally that sealed the deal, so to speak and, convinced Rajiv that he had found his man. But there were others in the team—arun Singh, Captain Satish Sharma, Romi Chopra and sundry others, all jostling for attention, a higher place in the power ladder. It is the sort of grease pole scenario that was simply out of mettle for Siddhartha to manage. He wasn’t that type.
Momentarily, though, he had a pride of place in the Gandhi office at the corner of Motilal Nehru Marg and over time he took charge of Rajiv’s—who was by then the party’s General Secretary—constituency, Amethi.
The early work of mapping the blocks, putting in place teams to tend to the constituents and setting up a system of feedback was all typical of Siddhartha Reddy.
Sadly, he was a victim of the grease pole and no one knows why he exited. He vanished as silently as he had entered brought down by the intrigue at 2A Moti Lal Nehru Marg. But his affection for Rajiv Gandhi stayed till the end and he spoke of him with great respect. Not, though, for many others in the Gandhi clan or the Congress at large.
The rest of the years since them was a mixed bag for Siddharth. Inexplicably, he joined the BJP when L.K. Advani was on top along with his wife, the former Union Minister and MP from Chickmangalur, D K Thara Devi. But they got short shrift in that party and Siddhartha followed is wife into Deve Gowda’s JD(U) and then back to the BJP in 2017.
But he was no more in the rough and tumble of day-today politics. He loved psephology—although his science of numbers meant making dozens of calls and crunching the numbers on the basis of those calls. And he loved shocking everyone with his eye-popping predictions and assessments on his website politicsparty.com.
That was his calling when a minor surgical procedure and the subsequent complications cut short his life. It was a shocker, out of the blue. One’s immediate and considered reaction was the same. Here was a bowler with the guile and variation of a Shivalkar or a Goel. Alas, Indian politics never gave him his due. He should have been capped long back.
(K. Srinivasan is a senior journalist)