The Cabinet reshuffle marks a break from the past
The pandemic, politics, perception and the PM’s preferred working mode have shaped the composition of the new team
For a politician who likes to be seen as a risk-taker, Prime Minister (PM) Narendra Modi’s Cabinet reshuffles, earlier in Gandhinagar and now in Delhi, have paradoxically tended to be less disruptive and generally avoided a big bang approach. Which is why Wednesday’s Cabinet rejig marks a break from the past. By inducting as many as 43 ministers, old and new, but even more crucially, by forcing the exit of 12 ministers, including a few senior Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders, the PM appears to have finally realised that the status quo on governance is no longer tenable in pandemic times.
While the government’s media managers project the changes as an objective mid-term appraisal of ministerial performance, it is apparent that the shadow of Covid-19 loomed large around the decision to press the reset button. The axing of the health and the information and broadcasting ministers is a belated acknowledgment that the Modi government’s pandemic strategy, especially during the critical Covid-19 2.0 period, was sub-par on both the health and communication front.
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Harsh Vardhan and Prakash Javadekar, both genial but lightweight politicians, are victims of the political and administrative chaos that ensued during a devastating summer of death and disease where the soft underbelly of complacent and ill-equipped State machinery was cruelly exposed. The two ministers were the inevitable fall guys amid growing demands for political accountability, although whether uniform standards of culpability were applied for all ministers, especially those in key economy-facing ministries, is a moot question.
The case of another high-profile exit in Ravi Shankar Prasad is perhaps more curious. As law and information technology minister, a belligerent Prasad found himself jousting with an array of stakeholders, including global social media giants such as Twitter. The daily barrage of headline-grabbing soundbites suggested that the government was waging a “war” with the digital universe. The sparring may have been endorsed at the highest level, but it was also proving to be self-destructive for the government’s domestic and international image.
In Prasad’s resignation then lies a message for Modi’s ministers. In this regime, there is a certain lakshman rekha that cannot be crossed. A minister has to be a quiet and efficient implementer of government policy; in a hyper-media whirl, he cannot become the news himself.
Which is why Prasad’s replacement reflects the PM’s preferred ministerial prototype: Ashwini Vaishnav is a low-profile former IITian and ex-Indian Administrative Service officer with wide experience in project implementation who enjoys Modi’s confidence. Trust in a few key bureaucrats has always been critical to the PM’s tightly-controlled managerial style of governance, and this might explain why diligent, faceless bureaucrats have risen so rapidly within the power elite even as the more traditional politicians are gradually eased out.
But the reshuffle hasn’t just seen a change in personnel but also an attempt to redraw ministerial boundaries. The new buzzword in the corridors of power is “synergy”, a single word substitute for the PM’s original one-line slogan of “minimum government, maximum governance”. With a 78-member council of ministers, this is no longer a minimum government. But, interestingly, the PM is attempting to create wider areas of ministerial responsibility and convergence; aligning education with skill development, for example, is an excellent move.
Not all such ministerial streamlining makes sense just yet: Why, for example, is the minister for environment also expected to handle labour and employment? A focused minimum government approach calls for more than just inter-ministerial jugglery. Nor is there any clarity on the exact remit of the controversial new cooperation ministry to be headed by home minister Amit Shah.
But this Cabinet reshuffle is clearly more than just about setting the house in order. It also marks a generational shift within the BJP. Only two ministers now survive from the Vajpayee-Advani era: Rajnath Singh and Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, while a third from the old order, Nitin Gadkari, has lost the important micro, small and medium enterprises portfolio. By lowering the average age of the council of ministers to 58, the BJP is looking to freshen things up ahead of the 2024 elections. The new health minister Mansukh Mandaviya, a trusted Modi acolyte from Gujarat, is 49; the information and broadcasting minister, Anurag Thakur is 46, while several ministers of state also represent a younger demographic.
With a strong presence of ministers from Other Backward Classes, Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe communities across 25 states and Union Territories, the government is consciously projecting itself as a “rainbow” Cabinet, although the rainbow appears to still have only one token Muslim representative in its kaleidoscopic arrangement, mirroring the limitations of the new Modi-fied BJP.
For all the hype, this remains a Prime Minister’s Office-centric government in reality. The shuffling of the pack has been done and some of the fresh faces in important ministries are seen as genuine doers. But a mid-term booster shot calls for more than just a change in optics. Will there be a new mindset that is ready to course-correct, delegate and empower, accept contrarian opinions and value expertise and experience? The jury is still out.
Post-script: The first minister to take oath on Thursday was former Maharashtra chief minister, Narayan Rane. Once a die-hard Shiv Sainik who later switched to the Congress, Rane was repeatedly accused by BJP leaders in Maharashtra of being only involved in money-laundering and land-grabbing. Now, he is seen as one of the party’s prime weapons against the Shiv Sena, a reminder that for all the talk of ethical governance, realpolitik compulsions often continue to trump morality lessons.
Rajdeep Sardesai is a senior journalist and author
The views expressed are personal
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