The busiest official in Delhi, meet NAJEEB JUNG, the Lieutenant Governor and a perfect gentleman
Jung , born at his ancestral home in 1951, was one of the four sons of his business man father and homemaker mother. “My father was a businessman initially. Post 1947, after the partition, he digressed into social work as he suffered losses during partition, as did several other Muslims,” says he. Jung went on to attended St Columbus School, where he stayed till he graduated. Then it was St Stephen’s for an undergraduate degree in history in 1972. “In those days options were limited. If one was ‘well-connected’ then they went for the services. If you had the aptitude then you went for engineering or medical. And then there were people like me who appeared for the civil services. History seemed like a good option to take up for the civil services examination. Two of my elder brothers were part of the civil services as well. One of them went on to work for the railways and the other in the audits. The third went into business.” Jung joined the IAS in 1973.
But we were to meet Jung for the first time in 2009, when he was appointed as the Vice Chancellor of Jamia Milia Islamia. The man who happened to sign on Jung’s appointment—HRD minister Kapil Sibal— had directed him in the play Che Guevara decades ago when they were batch mates at St Stephen’s. (Jung’s most memorable role; essaying Shylock in The Merchant of Venice.) My initial thoughts about Jung were that he was “a different sort of a Vice Chancellor” as by then I had the fortune of meeting several members of his ilk. Jung was one of the few administrators who had migrated from the administrative services to the higher education sector and believed himself to be “blessed” for his peculiar background.
I remember that at that time he dismissed the idea that his background was a disadvantage by a single line, “All jobs are new when you start.” He went on to say that, “The change was softened because I came to Jamia straight from Oxford where I was leading an academic life in the Institute of Energy Studies. And I believe that my time working with the Indian Administrative Services (IAS) taught me to manage large projects as well. It taught me multitasking and handling a multitude of problems at a single time. My classroom was Shilwarah where I spent two years. It was a mostly tribal area with no drinking water or electricity. I had to focus on holistic development in that area and that taught me a lot. Holistically, that’s exactly how a university should be run, one must look at all aspects. Honestly, this is a wonderful change.”
From Shilwarah, Jung moved as a District Magistrate to Tatiara, next to Gwalior. It was a time when Tatiara and the adjacent lands were under the thumb of three very special “administrators”; Malkhan Singh (Chambal Ke Sher), Phoolan Devi and Ganshyam Singh (Nanhu). For those uninitiated into the annals of history, they were three of the most notorious dacoits of India. “I had colourful company,” he says with a laugh. Fortunately, Tatiara proved less of a thrilling ride than expected, and before he knew it, it was time to shift to Raipur, then the second largest district in Madhya Pradesh (area-wise). Though Raipur today is the locus of the Naxalite problem in India, in Jung’s time the threat was non-existent. From there, the government posted Jung as the Managing Director of the Madhya Pradesh Oil Sales Cooperative. His stint was going to be the start of the soya bean revolution in India.
His first high-profile post came in 1985, when Madhavrao Scindia became the Railways Minister at the Centre and appointed Jung his private secretary. In the meantime Jung completed his Master’s at the London School of Economics (LSE), where he earned his MA in Economics. Post LSE Jung returned to service and became Joint Secretary (exploration) in the Petroleum Ministry in 1993. That was a period when India was recovering from a balance of payments crisis. In exchange of loans from World Bank and Asian Development Bank (ADB), Indian government at that time had agreed to open up its oil and gas fields to the private sector and Captain Satish Sharma was the Petroleum Minister. Jung took leave from the IAS in 1994 and went on an assignment to the ADB in Manila, where he remained till 1999. His interest in energy was fortuitous.
In 1999, Jung resigned from the IAS and joined the Oxford Institute of Energy Studies in England, a boutique institution, in his words, dedicated only to the study of natural gas and oil. He not only assisted PhD scholars in the institution, he also produced two books in the meantime. “We were engaged in a large amount of environmental studies across studies. Naturally before you ask again, no it was not that different being an academic because the IAS also demands that you learn new things—on the job.”
He went back to ADB for another stint in 2002, before returning again to Oxford in 2005. During this period, he worked as a specialist and a consultant for Reliance Europe and Observer Research Foundation (ORF), funded by the Reliance Industries. In 2007, Jung entered the fray to become the chairman of ONGC but the job went to R.S. Sharma, an ONGC veteran. Jung returned to India in 2008. Back in Delhi, he joined the ORF as director, energy research. During the period, he also consulted for a company called Reliance Global Management Services.
But our perception of Jung being “different” was not based simply on the fact that he came from the IAS background. It was also that my colleague and I were (figuratively) floored by his gentleman-like and yet accessible behaviour. The way he conducted himself around people and the way he spoke—he was pleasant, attentive and yet commanding your attention when he spoke. He constantly referred to his students as “his children” not only when he spoke to us but also when he wrote about them in newspapers, which he did so often in those days.
During our interview he mentioned his inspiration as “Abba”. We naturally assumed that he was referring to his father but it turned out that “Abba” was a father-figure who raised the four Jung brothers and went on to become a “nanny” to the extended family. “He was the gentlest spirit I knew. My family owes a lot to him,” is how Jung describes Abba. Then there was his yoga obsession which started rather interestingly when he served as the collector.
“In those days, I would start working at 6.30 am when I would start with the official files. On one such ordinary day, I was told that a swami was there to see me. When I went to meet him, I was face to face with a Caucasian swami called Mahatma. He had arrived in the city in the morning with an order to start an ashram there. Not knowing where to start or how to, he had started to ask around. The people at the station believed that he should probably meet me. So there he was! I must admit the situation was surprising, but the Collector’s bungalow was a sprawling affair spread over acres so after consulting with the then chief minister Arjuna Singh, we allotted space on the bungalow premises itself. Since I was there, living in the same space, I couldn’t stay away from the classes.” Thus began a long-standing affair with yoga which grew so exponentially that it percolated to the second generation Jung as well. One of Jung’s three daughters is a yoga specialist, a part of the Bicarb School of Yoga–you guessed right, the same school to which Mahatma belonged.
When he came came to Jamia, a lot of friends were apprehensive about how he would cope with 25,000 students and staff of 1,000 teachers. Jung believes that the IAS trains people to cope with every challenge. “In the IAS, departments change all the time. The services train you to cope, and cope well, in new situations. So, I was confident and not afraid that I would learn. I am not been factitious but it has been a wonderful change indeed. People were apprehensive that the academic community would not take to me because I was from a different background, but I have not even felt a single wave of ill will. Not till now.” It seems that he left with an unblemished record.
Who would not take to Jung we wonder? There is something affable and sophisticated about him at the same time. Then there was the sense of humour. When we had asked him about his daughters, he had said, with a most stoic expression, that he had three daughters, “and one wife”. It took us a while to fully comprehend the joke, but when we did Jung joined in our laughter. He was not one to mince words. One of his primary goals while in Jamia was to get it the status of a minority university; a status that Jamia received in 2011 despite the HRD ministry’s opposition on grounds that a petition challenging the status was pending in the Supreme Court and its judgment would have a bearing on the Jamia case.
“Jamia was established for the purpose of keeping Muslim education in Muslim hands, entirely free from external control. The Muslim community brought Jamia into existence in the only manner in which a university could be brought into existence,” Jung had told us very clearly then. Truly being factitious is not something that he is used to.
Ghalib’s poetry, Hussain’s paintings, energy economics, Central Asian history, tennis, golf and Farsi, a long career in energy and IAS and time as an academic; Delhi truly has an interesting man in the prestigious seat of the Lieutenant Governor. And as challenges before him escalate, it would be interesting to see how Jung manages to combine his IAS expertise and VC background to his advantage.