POOR Dr Manmohan Singh. No Prime Minister in the past has received such a damning dubbing as he did over the cabinet reshuffle issue. The fact that he continues to function shows how immune he is – or his boss, Sonia Gandhi is – to criticism.
Let us begin with what The Telegraph (January 21 ) said. It could not have been more cruel. The paper said that the persons responsible for running the second avatar of the United Progressive Alliance government belong to the genre “with the special gift of never losing an opportunity to lose an opportunity”. “They are not an endangered species but are a threat to the very idea of good governance,” it added.
Claiming that the Prime Minister and Sonia Gandhi had “a godsend opening to ring in changes to the Union Cabinet” the paper said that what they did “was nothing more than on eyewash” with the Prime Minister “tinkering with his team at the most inconsequential level”. According to the paper “the changes announced leave ground for the suspicion that they were made with an eye to the forthcoming assembly polls in certain states” and the “aim was not to put together the best possible team to run the government but to fulfil certain short-term and narrow political considerations”.
The Times of India (January 20) said that what the UPA government needed was a “cabinet rejig” but “as things turned out, the reshuffle was a damp squib” focusing “neither on projecting result-oriented Ministers nor the youth factor.” Commending MS Gill’s exit as “some consolation”, the paper said that “some appointments are clearly based on political considerations” and “others are in the nature of a merry-go-round”. Said the paper: “If Kamal Nath, Praful Patel and Murli Deora have indeed been moved around to facilitate their much-needed shake-ups in key economic Ministries, its not apparent their replacements have either more competence or experience to realise the aim. Overall, the reshuffle is a bad case of missed opportunities”.
The Mumbai-based DNA (January 20) said that it can be argued that “cabinet reshuffle is not meant to send out political signals about which way the ideological wind is blowing and that it is just a re-assigning of work”. That, said the paper, “is not convincing enough”. “What seems to have been achieved” said the paper, “is a tweaking of sorts that has left the observers’ gallery dissatisfied and angry”. Hindustan Times (January 20) said that the first cabinet reshuffle since the UPA returned to power in May 2009 “is an act of easy juggling, rather than a pro-active team-formation”. The paper described the reshuffle as “take-one-onion-from-one-sack-and-put-it-in-another-sack” exercise. “What was largely on display,” said the paper, “was a retrogressive, anachronistic divvying up of ministries among allies based on regional, casteist, quota-type politics” adding that “it’s silly to expect that in this day and age, states going to the polls in the next few months will vote according to whether their person has been made a cabinet minister or not”.
A ministerial formation, the paper pointed out “is also about the brand showing the product”. “Will PM’s shuffle mean better government?” asked The Asian Age saying: “It is not quite clear if the new look gives the government an image make-over, or infuses agents of efficiency into the system”. Commenting on the portfolios lost by MS Gill and Sharad Pawar, the paper said that other than these two instances “which resound with justification, it is hard to say if changing the portfolios of other Ministers has brought in incumbents that might be noticeably better than those they replace”. The paper father noted that as cabinet reshuffles go, the present round appears “to be fairly comprehensive, although in the main the exercise is confined to Congress Ministers”.
Sounding almost supportive of the Prime Minister, the paper said that the “rejigging of portfolios appears fairly extensive” and “on the whole ministers from Uttar Pradesh, Kerala and Tamil Nadu have done quite well for themselves, gaining either sensitive portfolios or moving up the ladder”. About the only criticism made by the paper is that “no fresh blood has been inducted” and “this aspect needs to be righted”. Meanwhile, The Hindu ( January 24) has rapped Minister Kapil Sibal severely on his knuckles, saying that “defending the indefensible may be part of the lawyer’s trade but this doesn’t extend to flagrant distortion of easily verifiable facts”. The reference was to Shri Sibal’s arrogant assertion that the Exchequer suffered only zero-loss in the 2G spectrum allocation. It was not just arrogance; it was impertinence of the highest order resulting in the Supreme Court asking him to “behave with some sense of responsibility”.
The Hindu described behaviour of Shri Sibal as “an egregious overflow of enthusiasm” in debunking the report of the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) saying that he “presented himself as an omniscient authority on the subject” in pre-judging the case. The Hindu’s views on this deserve fuller presentation. It said: “With the highest court in the land now monitoring the investigation into the 2G spectrum scandal, the CBI should have the nerve to get on with the investigation without allowing any intervention or improper inputs from its political masters. But this is easier said than done. Clearly there is no systemic protection for India’s investigating agencies. In several crime cases that have the potential to hurt those in power at the centre, the CBI has handled the investigation in a way that achieves the end-result of aborted or failed prosecution. The Bofors case, which is synonymous with political corruption, is a notorious case of investigators acting in the service of their political bosses. If the UPA government has any intention of getting to the truth in the telecom scam, Shri Sibal should publicly retract his irresponsible, over-the-top comments made at a sensitive juncture. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh owes it to the nation to dissociate his government from his Minister’s act of egregious folly and to provide credible assurances that there will be no further political obstruction of efforts to get to the truth.”
Have we come to such a stage that the media should pull up a Prime Minister in such strong terms? Who, one wonders, is running the UPA government? Is it the Prime Minister or Sonia Gandhi or irresponsible Ministers? Will some one tell?
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