Parallax View: The problem with this cabinet reshuffle was one of perceptions

This government fears Cabinet reshuffles in the way that small children fear visits to the dentists.

The government knows that the reshuffle is necessary. It recognises that without regular reshuffles its teeth will fall out. But it is, nevertheless, terrified of

the process, anxious about the pain it will entail and desperate to find a way out.

 

   To make sense of the last reshuffle, we need to understand several things. One: the Prime Minister wanted to reshuffle his pack because he was unhappy with the way in which various ministries were being run. For instance, the sports and urban development ministries had been criticised for their role in the Commonwealth Games expenditure. Controversies surrounded the road transport ministry. The tourism minister was probably not best suited to the portfolio and so on.

 

   Two: the PM believed that by shifting people around he would serve notice to his ministers that non-performance would not be tolerated and that controversial figures would lose their portfolios.

 

   These were limited aims on par with – if we are to stick with our image – getting your teeth polished by the dentist.  The Prime Minister’s problem was that both the country and the Congress party expected much more; the political equivalent of a root canal surgery, probably.

 

   The Congress felt that the government had lost direction and needed to be recast. The country felt that this avatar of the UPA had failed and regarded the reshuffle as the chance to make a new beginning. Moreover, given the current public mood and the publicity surrounding various scams, it was believed that the reshuffle offered the Prime Minister the opportunity to seize the initiative and re-write the political agenda.

 

   Anyone who has observed Manmohan Singh’s style will tell you that none of this was ever going to happen. While the Prime Minister has many strengths, an obvious area of weakness is in human relationships. He likes to put people into jobs and then gives them the freedom to get on with it. He does not like to constantly monitor them, to have to motivate them, or to have to upbraid them for non-performance. He is an essentially decent person who hopes that everybody else will be as decent and hard-working. Further, he does not like to make needless enemies. During UPA I, he told friends that he did not believe in dropping ministers because he thought that this only created small pools of dissidence and dissatisfaction.

 

   In the circumstances, a major reshuffle was never more than a distant possibility. Two big ideas – the shifting of S.M. Krishna and P. Chidambaram – were shot down moments after they took flight. Another big idea – to introduce many younger ministers – never took off because the only way you can give ministerial berths to young MPs is by throwing out the older people who already occupy them and the PM was unwilling to drop anybody.

 

   There was a further complication. Coalition politics requires a Prime Minister to balance the demands of his allies. But Manmohan Singh believes, with some justification, that he has already paid the price for going along with the demands of such allies as the DMK. So, he was unwilling to entertain the crooks the DMK had put up for inclusion.

 

   While nobody denies that Mamata Banerjee remains the Congress’s best hope for unseating the Left in West Bengal and changing the public mood throughout the country, there is also a recognition that she is hard to handle. If the Congress-TMC alliance does win in West Bengal, then Mamata will be chief minister. At least some of the ministers she has installed in New Delhi will also follow her to Calcutta. This will necessitate an overhaul of the TMC’s participation in the Union Cabinet.

 

"If the Congress-TMC alliance wins Bengal and if the Prime Minister’s leverage with the DMK increases then we will see a far-reaching and ambitious reshuffle."

   It made sense, therefore, for the Prime Minister to take the line that any reshuffle involving the allies would have to wait till after the Tamil Nadu and West Bengal elections.

 

   So, when you plan a reshuffle that will not touch the allies, will not lead to the dropping of any ministers, will not accommodate any younger people and which will reject big ideas, there is not much you can do. The best you can hope for is that by judiciously re-arranging your ministers, you can get a government that functions more effectively.

 

   This aim, no matter how limited, is not by itself a bad thing. But the problem with this reshuffle was one of perceptions. Last September, when Manmohan Singh told newspaper editors that he was planning a reshuffle, they went away with the idea that this would be a major operation. Then, in the run-up to this reshuffle, stories were leaked to the media suggesting that a complete overhaul of the ministry was in the works.

 

   Such is the mood in the country that the public – well, the TV-watching classes, at any rate – wanted some sign that the Prime Minister had taken note of the gloom and despondency and had embarked on a course correction. Nothing less than a full-fledged reshuffle with many sackings and new appointments would have satisfied those who wanted to see evidence that the Prime Minister was responding to public criticism.

 

   Alas, Manmohan Singh was never ready to do this. At some level, I suspect, that this was because the Prime Minister genuinely does not believe that India is as badly off as the media suggest. We are still the second-fastest growing economy in the world and the global euphoria about India is unaffected by the internal mood of middle-class gloom. From the Prime Minister’s perspective, there was no urgent need for a major overhaul.

 

   Plus Manmohan Singh is a cautious man. He likes making small, incremental changes on the back of consensus and is not a fan of radical surgery or sweeping transformations. He has often said that in a country as vast as India, change can only be gradual.

 

   There will now be another reshuffle after the Assembly elections. I don’t think much thought has gone into that exercise as yet. So, we can only guess what that will entail. Some people believe that if the Congress does badly in the elections then the Prime Minister will be forced to make sweeping changes.

 

   Speaking for myself, I incline to the opposite view. If the Congress-TMC alliance wins Bengal and if the Prime Minister’s leverage with the DMK increases (the UPA can easily drop the DMK and take the support eagerly offered by Mulayam Singh) then we will see a far-reaching and ambitious reshuffle. This is not a government that works well when it is weak. It is at its best when it is at its strongest.