He says he enjoys a challenge, and doesn’t back off no matter how formidable it is. Just a day old in politics, Dr Jagmohan Singh Raju, the BJP candidate from the hot seat of Amritsar East, which is witnessing an acrimonious contest between Punjab Congress president Navjot Singh Sidhu and Shiromani Akali Dal’s Bikram
Singh Majithia, is unfazed by his political opponents.
The soft-spoken Tamil Nadu-cadre IAS officer, who quit 35 years of service to jump into the poll battlefield of Punjab, says though he doesn’t espouse the gladiator style of politics being carried out on the seat, he thinks BJP may have chosen him because they felt he was their best bet.
“All through my 35 years, whenever there was a challenge that no one was ready to take, I would step up and give it my best.” So when he was given the unenviable charge of adult literacy or Saakshar Bharat in the HRD ministry in 2009, he set a record of sorts by making 2 crore women literate in 4.5 years, a feat that earned him the UNESCO King Sejong world prize for literacy.
Born in Faridkot, Jagmohan is no stranger to Amritsar. His father Dr Karam Singh Raju, was a well-respected bureaucrat of Punjab, who took up law after retirement and penned 20 books on Sikh religion and social justice till his death in 2019.
A alumnus of public administration department at Panjab University, Jagmohan was 22 when he cleared the civil services and was given the Tamil Nadu cadre in
1985. Thirty-five years on, he says he is returning to “serve Punjab”. “In the last 10 or 20 years, there has been a continuous decline in the human development and economic index of Punjab, while other states like Tamil Nadu have made big strides.”
Jagmohan says he chose BJP because it’s ruling at the Centre. “I have observed that states that are able to mobilise the resources of the Centre tend to prosper. There is no other way out as the Centre has the finances.”
Drawing an ideological parallel between Punjab and Tamil Nadu, he says though both are dominated by regional parties, and have made similar demands for autonomy, the southern state managed to cultivate a fruitful relationship with the Centre while Punjab faltered. “Consequently, it has failed to get the funds it needed.”
On the problems facing the state, he says the biggest is poor political leadership. “Why is it that bureaucracy is very efficient in one state and inefficient in the other? It’s because there is no political leadership to give it direction,” he asks.
Punjab, he feels, is ripe for a change given its “discredited leadership” facing various charges.
A PhD in public policy from TISS, and a visiting fellow at Cambridge, Jagmohan says he draws tremendous inspiration from his father. “He was born to a landless Dalit labourer, yet he made it to the Punjab Civil Services and was later promoted to IAS. But he didn’t stop there and did his PhD at the age of 70 and worked
for Dalit rights,” says Jagmohan.
It’s a subject dear to his heart as well — he had once sent a legal notice to the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) against the “casteist, vindictive and malicious discrimination” by an officer through his lawyer Prashant Bhushan — but he says even a Dalit leader needs skill, commitment and intention to produce results.