Before Atal Bihari Vajpayee resigned as the prime minister in 2004, a deputy secretary in his office is rumoured to have told him that he didn’t want to work under a Congress prime minister. This bureaucrat would stay on as Vajpayee’s private secretary until 2006. And later go on to be the blue-eyed boy at “new” India’s highest seat of power.

Ashwini Vaishnaw’s dramatic political ascent, from bureaucrat and technocrat to politician, has few precedents in Indian politics (perhaps the closest parallel in recent times is that of External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar). From being a promising IAS officer from the Odisha cadre in 1994, he had by 2021 – after stints in corporate India, a degree from the prestigious Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and an enterprise – made his way to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s cabinet. 

And his entrepreneurial run was, by all accounts, a hit. If money is a parameter of success, a single company he invested Rs 1 lakh in had reaped him shares with a book value of over Rs 113 crore within years. In fact, the revenue of this company rose from Rs 45 lakh to over 323 crore within six years of inception.