Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s much-awaited “Cabinet: the Reshuffle” was a ho-hum exercise, a box-office flop scarcely worth months of intense build-up – or even the effort of watching a supporting cast of 19 ministers of state take oath. The Union Cabinet showcases the same old ageing talent, featuring just one new entrant – Prakash Javadekar, bumped up from sidekick to star billing as full-fledged mantri.
One can only speculate whether any of the virtually unknown 19 new entrants to the council of ministers may have the star power to counter Priyanka Vadra in Uttar Pradesh. The PM maintains they were selected on the basis of their performances, but so far, one can safely say there are no hits and just two Mrs.
The Mrs in question – the only two women inducted – are both from Uttar Pradesh, Anupriya Patel and Krishna Raj. Patel is arguably the most colourful of the new inductees and no, she is not from the BJP. Daughter of the founder of Apna Dal, Sone Lal, she has serious mommy issues.
But as a graduate in Psychology from Lady
Shri Ram College, University of Delhi, she has handled them with aplomb. Evicted from the party by her mother, Krishna Patel, she had no trouble getting the BJP to endorse her – although the
other MP from the Apna Dal is aligned with her mother. Articulate and bright, Patel has been cast in the role of Kurmi leader, to counter the Samajwadi Party’s Beni Prasad Verma and Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar, who will doubtless campaign in UP.
Krishna Raj, one of the trio from UP, is a dalit. The other is Mahendranath Pandey, so there you have it: an OBC, a dalit and a brahmin. One might argue that UP is already over-represented in the council of ministers. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Home Minister Rajnath Singh, Water Resources minister Uma Bharti, MSME minister Kalraj Mishra and Women and Child Development minister Maneka Gandhi have all been elected from the state, as have ministers of state with independent charge Santosh Gangwar, V K Singh and Mahesh Sharma. As if that were not enough, Defence minister Manohar Parrikar is a Rajya Sabha MP from UP. And Human Resources Development minister Smriti Irani was the most celebrated loser from the state, bowing out to Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi after a pyro-technical campaign.
The BJP has clearly written a whole new script for the UP assembly elections. It sees as its main rival not the ruling Samajwadi Party but Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party. If she forges a dalit-Muslim-brahmin combine, the BSP would be unbeatable. Hence, the BJP’s plot twist: a split in the dalit vote, with the non-Jatavs abandoning Mayawati, while the brahmins remain on the storyboard as staunch supporters of the BJP.
At first glance, the expansion of the council of ministers reads like an exercise in statistics. Of the 19 ministers of state, five are dalits, two are from scheduled tribes and two are OBCs. Four new faces have been inducted from Rajasthan and three each from Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh. Two are from minority communities, namely M J Akbar and S S Ahluwalia.
Of the three new ministers from Gujarat – Parshottam Rupala, Mansukhbhai Mandavia and Jasvantsinh Bhabhor – two are from the Patel community. Rupala and Mandavia are both from the Saurashtra region and belong to the Leuva and Kadva Patels respectively, influential communities aligned with the BJP. Or they were, until young Hardik Patel stirred them up in a state-wide agitation for reservation. The “Patidar factor”, given the forthcoming assembly elections in Gujarat, appears to be weighing on the BJP leadership’s collective mind. Cabinet ministers Arun Jaitley and Smriti Irani were both elected to the Rajya Sabha from Gujarat after losing the Lok Sabha elections in 2014 but are hardly likely to prove assets in the 2018 assembly polls.
The sequel to the maximisation of government will hopefully be more eyeballs-worthy. After five non-descript ministers were written out of the script for lacklustre performance, the council of ministers now has 78 members – as many as Manmohan Singh had (so much so for minimum government). Of these, Anupriya Patel, leading journalist M J Akbar, conservationist and amateur riverologist Anil Madhav Dave, former minister of state for PMO Vijay Goel and dalit leader from Maharashtra Ramdas Athavale are perhaps the best known.
Will the PM’s “doers and performers” be able to deliver maximum governance? The opposition has already dismissed the expansion as meaningless, given that the presidential form of government favoured by Prime Minister Modi – where the PMO bureaucrats are all-powerful – makes the council of ministers less relevant than ever before. That’s unfair – ministers do have a role to play. Particularly if they depart from the script, improvise and thereby etch themselves into public memory. Talent cannot go unrecognised, especially when there’s so little of it to go around.
