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THE NATION:
GOVERNMENT
Ministers
of Idle State
Appointed
to appease groupings in a mammoth coalition, junior ministers are only
a financial drain because they are assigned little or no work
By
Farzand Ahmed
The
NDA Government has not yet usurped the catchline of an earlier regime
at the Centre: "A government that works". But if the daily routine
of some of its ministers is anything to go by, Prime Minister Atal Bihari
Vajpayee may never be able to appropriate the slogan.
This is
not to suggest that the Vajpayee Government does not work. It is a just
that there are a whole lot of ministers with virtually little work to
do. Consider what some of the ministers of state (MOS) in the Vajpayee
Ministry did in the first week of the ongoing winter session of Parliament.
On November 23, 14 of them gathered for dinner at the residence of MOS
for Human Resource Development (HRD) Sumitra Mahajan and raised a chorus:
give us some work to justify our ministerial offices. According to one
minister who attended the meeting, several more had called up to extend
moral support. The hearty meal over, the junior ministers decided to seek
an appointment with Vajpayee to discuss their roles in his government.
Some, in
fact, were already at it. A day before Parliament met, MOS for Petroleum
E. Ponnuswamy called on Vajpayee with an unusual appeal. His plea was:
you have given me a portfolio, now give me some work.
The same
day, Syed Shahnawaz Hussain, MOS in the HRD Ministry, refused to attend
a function organised in the capital. He was sore that though the function
was organised by his own ministry, he was not given a seat on the dais
and would have had to sit among the audience.
Elsewhere,
the same day, MOS for Shipping, Hukumdeo Narain Yadav-the firebrand socialist-turned-BJP
leader-rang up Law Minister Arun Jaitley who had been given concurrent
charge of the Shipping Ministry to inquire about his assignment. The young
lawyer, never one to ruffle feathers, simply told the veteran from Bihar:
"You are a senior and seasoned leader. You run Shipping, I will look
after Law."
 Yadav,
of course, is an exception. For many MOS, the bitter truth is that they
have very little work. Their senior ministers, some with inflated egos,
simply do not want to share responsibilities with their juniors. The prime
minister is said to have often pondered on the plight of the ministers
who are there only because Vajpayee has the tricky task of keeping together
a 24-party coalition. On October 1, when he expanded his team for the
third time, the prime minister admitted that his ministry, 74-member strong,
was very large. "But there have been bigger ministries in the past.
Besides, I am leading a very large coalition," he reasoned.
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Enron
symbolises everything that's wrong with the way reforms were handled by
M/s Rao & Manmohan, says INDIA TODAY Associate Editor