Narendra Modi has clearly used electoral considerations for the future rather than the past to pick his small team. But there might be some unexpected surprises lurking in his new cabinet choices, such as whether the RSS will be able to control the HRD ministry and if the PM will control the MoEF along with key economic ministries.
Even as it was flaunted and vilified in equal measure during the election campaign over the last few months, the Gujarat model of growth remained an abstraction that charmed many more than it repelled. This week, though, the imprint of the Gujarat model of governance became unmistakable on the selection of ministers for the Narendra Modi cabinet.
The former Gujarat chief minister ran the state more like a CEO from his super-CMO (chief minister’s office) that took pretty much every policy decision — ostensibly to cut through the usual maze of red tape — and entrusted the departments and the ministers only with the implementation. There is little room for doubt (lack of synergy) or disagreement (second power center) in this scheme of things.
While picking his men and women in Delhi, Modi’s boldest decision was to come clean. Having decided that the old guard had no role to play in his mode of governance, he did not succumb to the demands of a section of the Sangh Parivar or the political courtesy of accommodating them somewhere. Inducting a sulking LK Advani or a disgruntled MM Joshi in peripheral roles would have created internal tension in the government. By dropping them altogether, Modi saved himself and his rather young team the confusion.
If the former Gujarat CM relied mostly on an inimitable Amit Shah to run the state, Modi the prime minister has picked Arun Jaitley for that role in Delhi. As Home minister, Rajnath Singh is the de facto number two in the cabinet and the formal hierarchy will become clearer the day Modi leaves on his first foreign tour. But trusting the finance minister with the defence ministry for the time being, Modi has clearly established Jaitley’s unparalleled clout in the new government.
The path for the Gujarat model of centralization of governance was paved by appointing a bunch of juniors in charge of key ‘growth ministries’ so that Modi could have a free hand in running them and unleash the animal spirit of the economy. First timers such as Piyush Goyal (Power and Coal), Nirmala Sitharaman (Commerce), Dharmendra Pradhan (Oil and Gas) or Prakash Javadekar (Environment) will be happy to take orders and implement the decisions signed on by the super-PMO.
Similarly, Modi’s choice of Smriti Irani, one of the youngest Cabinet ministers ever, for the Human Resources Development Ministry probably testified as much to his affection for a staunch loyalist as to an accommodation of the RSS agenda. MM Joshi’s controversial tenure at the helm of the HRD Ministry, when he reconstituted academic councils and sought to rewrite history by scrapping books written by eminent Left historians, revealed how central the ministry was to the RSS’s ‘purification’ drive.
Not much has changed in the Sangh’s agenda in the decade since. The appointment of a first-timer – who Modi referred to as “Tulsi [after the popular character she played in a TV soap] mere angan ki” at an election rally in Amethi – as the HRD minister is likely to have the blessings of those keen to “correct” the cultural and civilizational foundation of the Indian nation.
Rewarding loyalty and performance remains a running theme in the Cabinet selections. Najma Heptullah, former deputy speaker of the Rajya Sabha and the lone Muslim in the cabinet, got her due for leaving the Congress for the BJP weeks after the party suffered an electoral setback in 2004. Sitharaman, Javadekar and Goyal were acknowledged for ably defending Modi on news channels. Young Dharmendra Pradhan was rewarded for the party’s stellar show in Bihar under his watch.
Caste, Religion, Region & Allies
Modi’s choices of ministers do not follow any regional or alliance lines, but he found place for only four from minority communities. They are Maneka Gandhi, Harsimrat Badal (both Sikh), Najma Heptulla (Muslim) and Kiren Rijiju (Buddhist). Smriti Irani is a Khatri married to a Parsi. Of the remaining 40 ministers, 21 are upper caste Hindus.
Modi picked seven Brahmins (Jaitley, Sushma Swaraj, Nitin Gadkari, Ananth Kumar, Kalraj Mishra, Javadekar and Sitharaman), four Rajputs (Rajnath Singh, Radha Mohan Singh, VK Singh and Jitendra Singh) and 11 from other forward castes (Venkaiah Naidu, Ravi Shankar Prasad, Harsh Vardhan, Gajapati Raju, Sadananda Gowda, Santosh Gangwar, Piyush Goyal, P Radhakrishnan, GM Siddeswara, Manoj Sinha and Raosaheb Danve).
Of the other half of the ministry, nine are from the Other Backward Castes (Gopinath Munde, Uma Bharti, Anant Geete, Narendra Singh Tomar, Rao Inderjit Singh, Shripad Naik, Dharmendra Pradhan, Upendra Kushwaha and Sanjeev Balyan), six from the Scheduled Tribes (Jual Oram, Sarbananda Sonowal, Mansukhbhai Vasava, Vishnu Dev Sai, Krishan Pal Gurjar and Sudarshan Bhagat) and three from the Scheduled Castes (Ram Vilas Paswan, Thawar Chand Gehlot and Nihal Chand).
A few states where the party did exceptionally well in the Lok Sabha polls fell off the radar. Rajasthan sent 25 MPs but only one minister, Nihal Chand, was picked from the state. Only three ministers came from the eastern states with Bengal drawing a blank. In fact, the focus has been on the states that are heading for Assembly polls. Maharashtra is due for polls later this year and got six ministers. Bihar (due in 2015) got five and the all-important Uttar Pradesh (due in 2017) nine ministers.
Irrespective of the number of MPs they brought to the House, the three BJP allies got only one minister each. Smug with his numerical security in Parliament, Modi offered his allies no more than token representation in the ministry. While both the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) and Shiv Sena are likely to have another couple of berths when Modi expands his cabinet, he has kept it uncluttered for now.
For someone known for his 56-inch chest and hunkaar rallies, Modi escaped misogynic stereotyping by picking as many as seven women ministers, six of them in the cabinet. He also went for younger faces, with Irani being the youngest at 38. The only two septuagenarians in the mix are Heptulla (74) and Kalraj Mishra (72). The average age of the ministry led by the 63-year-old PM is only 57 years, with 16 ministers below 55. The average wealth of Modi’s ministers is in excess of Rs 13 crore each but only a few of them, such as Uma Bharti and Sanjeev Balyan (accused in the Muzaffarnagar riots), have criminal charges against them.
A Matter of Control
It was expected that Modi would club certain complimentary sectors and assign a single minister to each cluster. But certain combinations of portfolio are unusual.
Putting together External Affairs and Overseas Indian Affairs under Swaraj; Corporate Affairs and Finance under Jaitley; Urban Development, Housing and Poverty Alleviation under Naidu; Rural Development, Panchayati Raj and Drinking Water and Sanitation under Munde; Road Transport and Highways and Shipping under Gadkari; and Power, Coal and Renewable Energy under Goyal – these have a rationale. But what is the logic for dumping Defence on Finance Minister Jaitley or Environment and Forests on Information & Broadcasting Minister Javadekar?
In the former instances, over-centralization may cut both ways. While it will quicken decision-making, unified commands often miss the range of diverse inputs necessary in an economy of India’s size and complexity. In the latter, the moves probably reflect Modi’s intention to directly control the two ministries of Defence and Environment without being seen to be doing so.
It is quite likely that the prime minister is still looking for a suitable defence minister. Having included Swaraj, one of the key dissenting voices against him inside the party, in the Cabinet Committee on Security (PMO-Home-Finance-Defence), Modi could not have accommodated another whose loyalty was suspect. Since none of his younger protégés probably has the stature to share the South Block with him and Swaraj, he wanted to run the Ministry of Defence by proxy for now and parked it with his closest colleague.
It is possible that Javadekar got the environment ministry for the very same reason. To revive the economy and help investor sentiment, the industry is banking on the new government to remove green bottlenecks and clear pending projects worth $7 billion. This will require bypassing a number of legal and procedural barriers at the green ministry. It suits Modi to have a part-timer at Paryavaran Bhawan, at least till he finds a suitable candidate, and let the PMO exercise complete control.
From that perspective, the choice of the ‘caretaker’ environment minister is apt. Javadekar has always been vocal against green regulations and had launched a scathing attack on the UPA government before the polls for blocking development and getting back to the era of red tapism and license raj in the form of environmental clearances. Hours after the oath-taking ceremony on Monday, the industry welcomed the new green minister’s statement made in an interview with ANIthat “poverty is the biggest disaster” and “India needs a window for growth” because there was no contradiction between environmental protection and development.
The other set of laws that are likely to challenge the new government’s promise of rapid growth are the ones that safeguard tribal rights. The choice of Jual Oram, who served as India’s first Tribal Affairs minister (1999-2004) under AB Vajpayee, for the same post is curious. Oram has long beencommitted to fighting the proposed mining of Kandadhar hills by South Korean steel major POSCO in Sundergarh, his constituency in Odisha. One hopes Kandadhar will not become the new government’s sole mascot of tribal empowerment, just like Niyamgiri did for the UPA while bulldozers flattened tribal homes elsewhere.
There remain two riders, though. While Modi the super-CM ran the entire government in Gujarat, he was assisted by his chosen bureaucrats in the departments and an able team of technocrats outside the government. While a few key appointments have been made, the complete picture of Modi’s trusted league of babus in Delhi is yet to emerge. Likewise, it is yet unclear who will help the super-PMO from outside to run the key ministries parked with young ministers.
And finally, that fundamental question of scale. It is one thing to run a state, largely homogenous and one the country’s most developed, single-handedly; quite another to repeat that feat when it comes to making sense of and finding solutions for a nation of India’s size and diversity. Modi has the mandate to replicate his Gujarat model, both its means and the end, for the entire country. The only fear bigger than that he may fail is that he may succeed. But then, who is to say that Modi the prime minister won’t improvise a new model for India.
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