Infosys co-founder enters India politics with a bang as a candidate for the governing Congress party in Bangalore in the coming general election, a rare boost for a party whose popularity has collapsed after a decade in power

March 9, 2014 4:11 pm

Infosys co-founder enters India politics with a bang

By Victor Mallet in New Delhi

Nandan Nilekani, one of India’s best-known businessmen, will stand as a candidate for the governing Congress party in Bangalore in the coming general election, a rare boost for a party whose popularity has collapsed after a decade in power.

Mr Nilekani, 58, co-founded Infosys, the outsourcing and information technology group in 1981, and became the face of modern Indian business as it integrated itself into the global economy.

He currently chairs the Unique Identification Authority of India, a huge official programme to give India’s 1.3bn people verifiable identity documents that can be used for everything from passport applications to receiving cooking fuel subsidies. More than 560m identity numbers have already been issued.

“I’m very excited and very confident that I’m going to win this election,” Mr Nilekani said after formally joining Congress on Sunday and being named as candidate for Bangalore South to the sound of drums and exploding firecrackers.

“I think politics needs a change, needs new people, people with a clean image and people with experience in problem-solving, and people who are local. I satisfy all that.” He will be pitched against incumbent Ananth Kumar of the Hindu nationalist opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), who has won the seat five times running.

The BJP under its prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi is forecast by opinion polls to emerge as the strongest party in parliament when nationwide votes are counted in May.

Most investors, foreign and Indian, favour the BJP over the left-leaning Congress and expect Mr Modi to accelerate much-needed power and transport projects after years of delay. Congress, led by Sonia Gandhi and her son Rahul Gandhi, has been mired in corruption scandals over mining, telecoms, arms purchases and projects for the 2010 Commonwealth Games.

Asked whether Congress’s reputation for corruption would damage his chances, Mr Nilekani said: “It is not that the other party [BJP] has a great clean image either. We know the problems we had for the last five years in the state.”

Bangalore is in Karnataka, a state run from 2008 to 2013 by the BJP. It is a middle-class city whose residents have long complained that state governments are beholden to the more numerous rural voters and neglect Bangalore’s needs in spite of its disproportionate contribution to the economy.

“Nilekani is a man of extraordinary accomplishments,” said Ashutosh Varshney, political commentator and professor at Brown University in the US. “People of his calibre can bring a lot of good to politics.”

Mr Nilekani’s co-option by Congress was a rare piece of good news for the party, which has been demoralised by defections and by opinion polls predicting it could win as few as 100 seats in the 545-seat lower house of parliament, less than half of its tally in the last election in 2009.