Modi’s dilemma

Modi needs to bring in very bright people, of whom he does not have many. And, those that he has, he does not want

When India’s cabinet was sworn in about six months ago, two important portfolios were given to one man. Arun Jaitley held both defence and finance, two of the four jobs considered most important in the Union government (the other two being home and external affairs). On the day he took office, Jaitley said he would only hold the defence portfolio for a few weeks, till someone else came along. At the time, it was being speculated that this someone could be the former journalist Arun Shourie. Whoever was on the prime minister’s mind, that person did not come along and May has turned to November.

It is for this reason that Goa’s chief minister, one of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) best minds, Manohar Parrikar, is now being brought into the cabinet, according to reports. The question is, why get a chief minister, particularly one who is seen as very competent, to leave his job and move to Delhi? Why bring an outsider when there are more than 300 Lok Sabha MPs and Rajya Sabha MPs available to Narendra Modi to choose from? There are two reasons why this problem of a shortage of talent has come about.

The first problem is a general one. Any strong ideology, especially one like Hindutva, which is based on anger and resentment against real or perceived injustices, will attract a certain sort of person. We must not expect those who gravitate towards the writing of such people as Guruji Golwalkar and Veer Savarkar and Deendayal Upadhyay to be subtle in their thinking.

That is why the Congress with 200 seats had many more capable leaders than the BJP with 280. The Congress had a choice of any of three first-rate finance ministers (Manmohan Singh himself, P Chidambaram and Pranab Mukherjee), while Modi must use the only finance minister he has available to also spend time on defence. There are, of course, BJP leaders who show suppleness and pragmatism in their thinking (like Jaitley and Parrikar), but they tend to be less ideological and more flexible on Hindutva issues.

The second problem is a more specific one. It has to do with the prime minister’s insecurity. He does have some talented and experienced people on his bench, but he chooses not to use them. The excuse used is either that they are too old (L K Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi, both of whom are in the Lok Sabha but with no work) or that they are too young (Varun Gandhi, who is ambitious and smart, and angling for more responsibility). The real reason these people are kept out is that they threaten Modi and he would rather not deal with them in the cabinet.

He did the same thing in Gujarat, where experienced leaders like Keshubhai Patel and Kashiram Rana, along with their supporters, were kept out of power. But there is a hurdle in the way of replicating in Delhi what he could in Gujarat. In running the Gujarat government, as with any state government, Modi’s focus was mainly on governance. That is to say, executing policies that were, for the most part, sent down from the centre. When the Vajpayee government opened up the power sector to private companies, Modi was excellent at implementing it in Gujarat, which has a power surplus, mainly from private generation. In doing this work, he empowered a team of bureaucrats who handled the work of the ministries, undercutting the politicians who were the ministers. There were only two ministers, who had real responsibility (Saurabh Patel and Amit Shah), and neither was given cabinet rank so that they understood that their work had to be supervised by Modi through the bureaucrats.

After his move to Delhi, the nature of the work has changed. Modi must focus on legislation and policy and not so much on implementation. This has disrupted his model. He has tried to exert control by giving much of the work, as in Gujarat, to ministers of state he trusts, like Piyush Goel and Nirmala Sitharaman. They manage portfolios like energy and commerce and industry, which are Modi favourites. But the main function of the Union government is policy and lawmaking. In managing this, Modi needs to bring in very bright people, of whom he does not have many. And, unfortunately for them and for the government, those he has, he does not want.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 9^th, 2014.

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