Sunday’s sweeping Cabinet rejig witnessed Prime Minister Narendra Modi brining in some former bureaucrats to help scale up governance and speed up implementation of Central welfare programmes but the exercise still could not fill up all the vacancies with several Ministers ending up holding charges of more than one Ministry.
The reshuffle left an uneasy feeling within a section of the BJP that there could be better representation from the party itself and a kind of “outsourcing” was not required to fill up the slots. The criticism is being targeted at the inclusion of two non-political entrants in the Council of Ministers. There has been a palpable discontent that MPs from the lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha with “proven credentials” have not been rewarded and “youth” not given their due in the Cabinet.
Despite the third Cabinet expansion exercise with general elections less than two years away, all the vacancies have not been filled as important Ministries like Environment and Forest, Information & Broadcasting and many others are still not being managed by a single independent Minister. Many have recalled a reported comment, last year, by a BJP vice-president and now a RS member (himself a potential candidate for ministership), that the Modi Government was “talent deficit”.
On a plus side, it has been pointed out that the Prime Minster is not averse to ringing in the “talent” even if he himself has been the subject of his criticism. Former Home Secretary RK Singh, who has been vocal in opposing his own Government in the past and even objected to describing the BJP Government as ‘Modi Government’ in the lok Sabha was on Sunday inducted by the Prime Minister in his Council of Ministers with key portfolio of Power.
The reshuffle sees Nirmala Sitharaman becoming the first full-time woman Defence Minister of the country as Modi elevated four “performing” junior Ministers — Sithraraman, Dharmendra Pradhan, Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi and Piyush Goyal — to the Cabinet rank with the latter shifted to the high-profile Railways relieving Suresh Prabhu, who in turn, is moved to the Ministry of Commerce & Industry.
Sitharaman’s entry in the Defence would make her a member of the Cabinet Committee on Security which is headed by the Prime Minister with Ministers of Defence, External Affairs, Home as its members. Sushma Swaraj is the other woman member in the important committee. There are a total of five women Cabinet Ministers in the Modi Government, the others being Maneka Gandhi, Harsimrat Kaur Badal, Uma Bharti and Smriti Zubin Irani.
In a brief ceremony at the Rashrapati Bhavan, which was not attended by allies the JD(U) and the Shiv Sena, President Ram Nath Kovind also administered oath to nine new faces as Ministers of State which included Virendra Kumar (lS member from Madhya Pradesh), Anant Kumar Hegde (lS member from Karnataka), Gajendra Singh Shekhawat (lS member from Rajasthan), former Home Secretary RK Singh (lS member from Bihar), Ashwini Kumar Choubey (lS member from Bihar), and former Mumbai Police Commissioner Satyapal Singh (lS member from UP), Shiv Pratap Shukla (RS member from UP), former IAS officer Alphons Kannanthanam (Kerala) and former diplomat Hardeep Puri.
Puri (Housing & Urban Affairs), Kannathanam (Tourism & Electronics and Information Technology) and Singh (Power and New & Renewable Energy), — all are given Independent charge of their respective Ministries.
Bharti, who after surviving the reshuffle, has been divested of the Ganga Rejuvenation and Water Resources portfolio, (now allocated to Nitin Gadkari) and will now be Minister of Sanitation and Drinking Water.
Vijay Goel has been replaced as Youth Affairs and Sports Minister by the Olympic silver medalist Rajyavardhan Rathore with Independent charge as the former is moved to Ministry of Parliamentary Affairs and Minister of Statistics and Programme Implementation. Rathore is also MoS for I&B Ministry of which Smiriti Irani continues to be Cabinet Minister while also being Cabinet Minister of Ministry of Textile.
Among the four Ministers pushed in the ladder to the Cabinet rank Pradhan is Minister of Petroleum and Natural Gas and Skill Development and Entrepreneurship, earlier held by Rajiv Pratap Rudy who has been asked to resign. Goyal is Minister for Railways and Coal. Naqvi, after a rather long wait, gets Cabinet rank as the Minister of Minority Affairs of which till now he was MoS (Independent charge).
Nirmala Sitharaman emerged as the biggest gainer of the Cabinet reshuffle as the Prime Minister gave her the heavyweight Defence portfolio, becoming the first woman Defence Minister of the country, Indira Gandhi having held it as the additional charge of the portfolio during seventies.
As Defence Minister, she has to ensure that pace of modernisation of armed forces continues uninterrupted and forces are equipped adequately to effectively combat the possible threats. Similarly Goyal would have to deal with the modernisation of railway tracks and signaling which has recently witnessed tragic derailments across the country. Reviving the health of Railway behemoth from where Prabhu left would be an onerous task for the new Railway Minister.
Surface Transport Minister Nitin Gadkari, who has also been tasked with Ganga Rejuvenation and Water Resources portfolio, would have his priority cut out to ‘clean’ Ganga which has been the pre-election promise of Modi to the people of Varanasi, his home constituency, even as the Supreme Court has also made queries on it.
The changes in the Council of Ministers have kept in view some of the poll-bound States particularly Karnataka by giving place to the MPs from the State. Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh, which are to go to polls before Karnataka, by the end of this year, however, do not find representation in the Cabinet revamping. The caste equations have been given due weightage in the selection of nine new faces which include Brahmins and Rajputs.