View: The true significance of the Cabinet rejig

There was a time in the hoary past when the media would give out ‘report cards’ to ministers, marking their performance according to what would resemble today’s ‘ease of doing business’ index. Today, such an exercise would not only be seen as insolent, but pointless. For one, ‘marking’ ministries of past governments was a function of coalition politics, where giving the thumbs down to, say, an A Raja, or a thumbs up to an Ajit Singh, was not just tolerated by a Union government, but also facilitated, all to negotiate the valves and gridlocks that Manmohan Singh once termed ‘political compulsions’. With his mandate and the constituents of his NDA government — overwhelmingly BJP — Narendra Modi has no such compulsions. And, till this week, the need to apportion responsibilities pertaining to government performance (read: blame) to ministers did not really arise. With a prime minister who takes his ‘portfolio’s’ job description of ‘primus inter pares’ with a barrel of salt by making his ministerial colleagues more enforcers and implementers than policy partners, a report card from any external source would be plain silly. But more than two years into his second term, and more than two months into the Covid-19 pandemic’s second wave, as optimus prime, Modi has given his government a report card in terms of a reshuffle — more of a recutting of the deck in the form of the biggest change of ministerial guards at his seven years-and-counting poker table. ‘Ministering’ is no rocket science —as even the unchanged defence minister and (prime) minister responsible for the department of space knows. It largely comprises setting the agenda and fulfilling it. Harsh Vardhan, as Delhi’s health minister in the Madanlal Khurana government, oversaw the implementation of the very successful pilot Pulse Polio programme in 1994 that was extended nationwide the next year. Brought into the second Modi government in 2019, the medical surgeon would almost certainly have survived the axe were it not for two things: Covid-19, and the way most people have reckoned GoI has handled it so far.Game Over. Restart? The biggest removal from the big table, Ravi Shankar Prasad, was a similar removal of a Kevlar vest that proved to be not bulletproof in the crossfire between GoI and ‘significant social media intermediaries’. Prasad, holding the ‘crossroads’ portfolios of law and justice, as well as communications and IT, was delivered to the altar so as to allow GoI have (at least an impression of) a reboot on this Raisina Hill vs Silicon Valley bout. These ‘resignations’ — and that of 10 other ministers — form the SOP in politics of distancing from a mess by removing those founding standing in the mess. Call it political social distancing protocol being operationalised with Ramesh Pokhriyal (education), Santosh Gangwar (labour and employment), Prakash Javadekar (environment, I&B, heavy industries), D V Sadananda Gowda (chemicals and fertilisers), Babul Supriyo (minister of state for environment), Debashree Chaudhuri (minister of state for woman and child development), Rattan Lal Kataria (water resources and sanitation), Ashwini Kumar Chaubey (minister of state for health), Pratap Chandra Sarangi (minister of state for MSMEs, dairy and fisheries), and Sanjay Dhotre (minister of state for education) — the last six names supposedly being viewed by GoI as growing liabilities in their home states. As for the new ministers and those being swapped offices or given additional portfolios, the same rules of executionary prowess apply. Someone like the new civil aviation minister, Jyotiraditya Scindia, may find the kind of working model he was familiar with as minister of state for power and commerce and industry in the Manmohan Singh government to be redundant in this more bureaucratic minister à la Modi role. The central government’s overhaul — not a facial, but a facelift — comes at a juncture when the Modi government needs to perform, and perform well. Reallocating finance —one would assume a ministry that has been bearing the brunt of Covidinstigated storms — would have, at this juncture, not been tactical spring-cleaning, but an all-too-visible admission of damage control not under control. So, the rules of de facto and de jure (prime) ministership continue to apply in North Block, as in all blocks of government. Perhaps Ashwini Vaishnaw’s induction as the new railways and communication and IT minister is where intent of this 77-ministerial government, maximum governance shows its hand the best. Vaishnaw had been acareer bureaucrat, who was Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s private secretary after a brief stint in his PMO, becoming aparliamentarian through the Rajya Sabha door only last year.Call It Sacrificial Lamb The placing of politically low-key implementers, with a mix of political ‘investments’ and ‘reimbursements’ — such as the one provided to new ports and shipping minister Sarbananda Sonowal, who made the ‘sacrifice’ of making way for Himanta Biswa Sarma as Assam chief minister after the May assembly elections — will form the architecture of this latest avatar of the Modi government. As for those who are surprised at the parachutes handed to some of the big ministers, that itself is a message to others of the dispensable nature of those brought in or kept in office by this dispensation. As Michael Dobbs wrote in his 1989 political thriller, House of Cards, ‘Politics requires sacrifice. The sacrifice of others, of course. Whatever a man can achieve by sacrificing himself for his country, there’s always more to be gained by allowing others to do it first.

from Economic Times https://ift.tt/3AHnWi5