A vacancy filling exercise

LIKE THE EXPANSION of the Council of Ministers the Prime Minister, Mr. Atal Behari Vajpayee, effected in November 1999, the one made last Saturday when he inducted three more Ministers was evidently prompted by the compulsions of coalition politics. The highlight of what Mr. Vajpayee himself described as a `vacancy filling' exercise was of course the reinduction of the Samata leader, Mr. Nitish Kumar, who quit the Cabinet less than three months ago to become the Chief Minister of Bihar only to make an ignominious exit after hardly a week in office as the NDA's devious plan to scuttle the formation of an RJD Government fell through. And now he is back, his Cabinet rank and portfolio (Agriculture) intact. Interestingly, Mr. Nitish Kumar, soon after his aborted tenure as Chief Minister, had pledged himself to ``concentrating'' on Bihar and working for its ``larger peace and development''. Not so lucky however is BJP's Ms. Sushma Swaraj whose case is strikingly similar to that of Mr. Kumar. In fact, her recent election to the Rajya Sabha was seen as a development paving the way for her return to the Central Cabinet. But then, Ms. Swaraj's claim is deeply embroiled in the BJP's group politics and has to stand out against counter claims by several party stalwarts. The decision of Mr. Vajpayee not to have anyone from his own party even as a replacement to Ms. Uma Bharati says it all; he rather preferred to club Tourism (the portfolio held by her) with Culture and place the combined ministry under the charge of Mr. Ananth Kumar-one should think, operationally, Civil Aviation and Tourism would have gone together better especially from the standpoint of tourist promotion. As for the other two inductees-both are from the Biju Janata Dal - while Mr. Arjun Charan Sethi replaces his party leader, Mr. Naveen Patnaik (who has moved to Orissa State politics to become its Chief Minister) in the Cabinet, Mr. Brij Kumar Tripathi takes over as Minister of State in the place vacated by Mr. Dilip Ray, at the behest of Mr. Patnaik, in a sudden development caused by the falling out of the two.

The shifting of Dr. C. P. Thakur from Water Resources to Health and Family Welfare is perhaps the most significant part of the `reshuffle' part of the exercise. At a time when the focus of socio- economic development effort is turned on basic health care, it makes sound logic that the related subjects should be handled by a Minister of the Cabinet rank and by one with a lot of professional experience and background like Dr. Thakur. In the process, however, the debutant Mr. Sethi has been given the charge of Water Resources, a particularly difficult assignment even for an experienced hand because of the highly sensitive nature of the subject; and this at a time when a whole range of festering inter-State issues are threatening to flare up. These apart, there have been a number of portfolio-related minor changes, most of them at the junior level. Not only do they fall short of the expectations the tone and tenor of Mr. Vajpayee's promise of ``changes in economic ministries'' had raised, but they also add up to nothing more than a tinkering job. The NDA Government has been in office for seven months now and the Prime Minister would need to embark upon a comprehensive exercise to evaluate the performance of individual Ministers and follow it up with necessary correctives, and rewards wherever called for. Even granting that a Prime Minister's prerogative to choose his (or her) ministerial squad is severely abridged in a multiparty coalition set-up (like the NDA), those constraints need not preclude any initiative for performance evaluation of individual Ministers or, on the basis of such an exercise, for chopping off the deadwood. After all, no head of government can afford to abdicate the basic responsibility to provide good governance.

Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Section  : Opinion
Next     : Articulating the exchange rate