Ministerial reshuffle fails to enthuse
Electoral considerations have trumped the need for good governance in the latest reshuffle of the Union Council of Ministers. The inclusion of even known non-performers in the ministry has been done in a bid to reach out to crucial States in the run-up to the Assembly and the lok Sabha elections. While that is bad for the Congress-led UPA regime which approaches the electorate on its claim of good governance, it is doubtful whether even the electoral balancing act will yield favourable results for the Congress in the States that it had in mind when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh revamped his team. For instance, Mr Singh has brought in Mr Sis Ram Ola and Ms Girija Vyas from Rajasthan into the Cabinet. Rajasthan goes to poll later this year and the Congress regime there led by Mr Ashok Gehlot is on a sticky wicket. The Congress believes that Mr Ola's elevation can bring them the votes of the Jats who have been disgruntled with the Gehlot Government. Since both Mr Ola and Ms Vyas are known opponents of the Chief Minister, the party wants to send across the message to the voters that it is prepared for a change in the State leadership if it is voted back to power. This belief gets strengthened further by the arrival of another Gehlot detractor, Mr CP Joshi, into the party's organisational structure. Mr Joshi recently quit the Cabinet to join the organisational team in the wake of the coming elections. And so, while Congress heavyweights battle one another in the State, the BJP led by Vasundhara Raje is working with renewed focus to reclaim lost ground.
If the Congress is on a desperate mission to return to power in Rajasthan, it is fervently hoping that the ministerial reshuffle will calm the troubled waters in yet another of its (one-time) stronghold — the southern State of Andhra Pradesh, where the party's Government is living by the day, battling challenges from Telangana and the rest, including a resurgent Telugu Desam Party. Of the 31 Ministers from the south who are now in the Union Council of Ministers, as many as 13 are from Andhra Pradesh — representing coastal Andhra, Seemandhra and Telangana regions. But the Congress may well realise that the effort has come as too little and too late. The mere inclusion in the Union Ministry of so many members from Andhra Pradesh does not mean that the Telangana issue gets diluted; nor does it reduce the challenge to the Congress from Mr Jagan Mohan Reddy's YSR Congress. Additionally, we must remember that Union Ministers from the Telangana region are an uneasy lot and could well be a source of trouble for the party and the Government in the coming days.
Given these realities, the latest ministerial change is not going to infuse any new energy at least in the functioning of the Government. This is even more so because a few of the promising faces have been dropped from the Council of Ministers, ostensibly to free them for party work in the run-up to the elections, while deadwood have been inducted. This sort of exchange of familiar faces between the party and the Government cannot even be called a genuine reshuffle; it's a meaningless exercise. Both the Congress and the Manmohan Singh regime could not have done better to essentially maintain status quo.