‘I took Left and unions on board before take-off’

The Minister, who announced his proposal for putting a 49% cap on FDI for these projects yesterday, said he had discussed the proposal ‘‘threadbare’’ with senior Left leaders as well as unions. ‘‘We have found a common meeting ground,’’ he said.

Among the leaders Patel said he had discussed the proposals with are CPI general secretary A B Bardhan, CPM’s Dipankar Mukherjee as well as the party’s politburo member Sitaram Yechury. He is scheduled to meet another CPI MP, Gurudas Das Gupta tomorrow.

‘‘There are some other Left leaders I met but do not want to talk about it.

With the deadline of June 4 (for receiving expression of interest) hanging on my head, I decided I would have to take a pro-active approach instead of a reactive one. I didn’t want to wait for things to happen and therefore went to each of them. And where is the conflict? What do I have to hide?’’ he asked.

Significantly, when asked about how some of these very leaders had addressed employee unions sitting on dharna outside Rajiv Gandhi Bhavan, the Minister said, ‘‘The Government will run with such contradictions. The fact is that I personally went and asked Left party leaders what their concerns were since I had come up with a very acceptable model in which every employee is protected and in which the assets were not going to be disposed off, only leased.’’

Patel said that since any deferment of the decision would have sent ‘‘very wrong signals’’ he had decided to ‘‘take the bull by the horns.’’ Before doing so, five days ago, he took up the subject with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. ‘‘The Prime Minister told me there should be no question of deferring the decision but asked me to take everybody along.’’ Patel also said he held a meeting with Finance Minister Chidambaram.

What were the Left’s and the union’s counter-arguments? ‘‘Some of the Left leaders did feel that we could have waited before going public and that this was too quick. After all they have their own agenda. On the very eighth day, one PSU and two airports going. They have to defend all that. But I told them about the deadline and how I had to quickly define policy. The unions, of course, felt we were giving things away too quickly and that the modernisation could all be done internally.’’