PM Narendra Modi’s lofty vision cramped by his team’s talent deficit

PM Narendra Modi’s lofty vision cramped by his team’s talent deficit

FPJ BureauUpdated: Saturday, June 01, 2019, 01:29 AM IST
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Smita Mishra, the FPJ Chief of Bureau, unravels the mystique of the Narendra Modi government

The jury is still out on whether there is any glimpse of the promised ‘achche din’. But as Narendra Modi’s government enters its second year, the glaring talent deficit in team Modi is there for everyone to see. There are enough instances, starting from the very first day he took oath, of him battling the problem of his ministers not having the insight to implement what he exactly desires. While some ministers feel technically challenged when compared with their leader’s knack of successfully harnessing technology, some others are unable to keep pace with the PM’s back breaking schedules. At least one minister, of an important alliance partner, has been requesting his party leader to relieve him from the ministership and find a replacement.

But while allies at least have the freedom to complain within their party forum, that luxury is not available to their BJP counterparts. As weeks and months pass by, it is becoming increasingly clear that a very big, if not the biggest challenge inheralding the achche din, is the talent or absence of it, in his own council of ministers.

Take for example union agriculture minister Radha Mohan Singh. The Rajput caste leader from Bihar was inducted in the first round keeping in mind the dire need to keep the upper caste flock together after BJP’s divorce from Nitish Kumar. In the words of Arun Jaitley, the agrarian situation is the biggest challenge to the government at this juncture. But hauling up Radha Mohan Singh in meetings has not yielded much. With Bihar elections the biggest political challenge this year, removing Radha Mohan is definitely not an option.

Smriti Irani, the union HRD minister, has proved her talent in taking on the Gandhi scion but as a minister she has courted more controversies than this govt would like — from her own qualifications to the state of education. Neither the people in the system nor the RSS is happy with the goings on in HRD.

There are others whose inexperience is a cause of much unrest among the officials such as power minister Piyush Goyal and petroleum minister Dharmendra Pradhan though, to be fair, they have managed to stay away from controversies.

While the youngsters are being questioned for their inexperience and ‘first-timer’ hurdles, the elderly ones like minority affairs minister Najma Heptullah and MSME minister Kalraj Mishra have fared even worse. Ditto for tribal affairs minister Jual Oram. The buzz is Heptullah is holding to her cabinet berth only till the next reshuffle while Mishra and Oram are trying every trick to stay on. If they do, it would be more owing to their identities rather than any claims to performance. Mishra is an established Brahmin leader from UP while Oram is BJP’s senior most tribal face.

Questions are now being raised about the performances of some others like rural development minister Ch Virender Singh in the face of the huge land bill fiasco. The repeated goof-ups in Parliament owing to pathetic floor co-ordination are already the butt of many political jokes in the capital’s power corridors.

While a lot more can be written on how the government is struggling with the inexperience and lack of foresight of its ministers, it may be interesting to compare (or contrast) the situation with Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s NDA-I. Vajpayee’s six years in office started and ended with coalition collisions. From Mamata to Jayalalithaa to Nitish to Paswan to Farooq, the BJP’s tallest leader had to try every trick under the Sun to keep his flock together. But that challenge was somewhat made up by a team of seasoned, visionary and committed ministers like George Fernandes, Sharad Yadav, Murasoli Maran, Arun Shourie. One could add Pramod Mahajan, Gen BC Khanduri, Nitish Kumar and CP Thakur also. In their own way, they worked to translate Vajpayee’s vision from paper to terra firma.

One may of course argue that Modi believes in a centralized mechanism and if there are too many first-timers in his team that choice was none other than his own. His close associates point out that he is grooming a new leadership because he has the future in mind…at least ten years down the line. But democracy is a five-year race and it would be interesting to watch whether Narendra Modi’s lofty vision and the talent of his ministers are a match for each other.

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