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THE NATION:
GOVERNMENT
Whose
Fault Is It Anyway?
Not
Vajpayee's. As prime minister, he allocates ministries. But within these
ministries, allocation of work to junior ministers is decided by the cabinet
minister. The Vajpayee team has 29 cabinet-rank ministers of whom 18 belong
to the BJP. Among the seven MOS with independent charge, three belong
to the BJP and the rest are from the allies. Of the 42 MOS who function
as understudies to cabinet ministers, 31 are from the BJP; more than half
of them are unemployed or underemployed. The fact that they belong to
the BJP makes it more difficult for them to get redressal, since unlike
ministers from alliance partners, they are hardly in a position to flex
their muscles or to threaten withdrawal of support to the Government.
The BJP's junior ministers include Munni Lal (Labour & Employment),
Bandaru Dattatreya (Urban Development), Bachi Singh Rawat (HRD), Jaisingrao
Gaekwad Patil (Mines), Sriram Chauhan (Consumer Affairs), U.V. Krishnam
Raju (External Affairs), A. Raja (Health) and Jayawanti Mehta (Power),
besides Hussain, Mahajan and Yadav.
 The
very nature of a coalition government means that everyone has to be kept
happy; give them plum posts even if you can't give them work. This is
why many junior ministers are perpetually grumbling. Take Lal, a Dalit
and an ex-bureaucrat. "I feel ashamed to admit that I have not been
given any assignment. I have not seen a single file during the past one
year as a minister. Sometimes I wonder why I was appointed a minister.
It is akin to cheating the public," he fumes. Every day, people from
his home state, Bihar, throng his residence in Delhi's Telegraph Lane.
"They seek my help to get them jobs and effect transfers, but all
I can do is write a few letters and make a few phone calls."
Lal has
often tried to get out of this predicament by meeting his senior minister
Satya Narain Jatiya. "He is a very nice person. Whenever I meet him,
he says he is thinking of assigning some work to me, but so far nothing
has happened," he says. In fact, his friends feel he was better off
as just an MP. "At least he could take up people's problems and fight
for popular causes. As a minister without any work, he is neither here
nor there," says a confidant. He recently sent a five-page "confidential
note" to Vajpayee, listing all he could have done given his experience
as an IAS officer in Bihar. But the response both shocked and surprised
him: he was allotted a bigger and better bungalow in the more exclusive
Teen Murti Lane.
The plight
of the underworked MOS is somewhat like that of the "ministers without
portfolios" of an earlier era. They are never called by the prime
minister for discussions and, in most cases, cabinet ministers give them
the short shrift. Often it boils down to a problem of egos. Many junior
ministers have had harrowing experiences with their seniors though few
are ready to talk about it. Union HRD Minister Murli Manohar Joshi is
known to rarely meet his juniors, let alone assign them any task. Under
him, Uma Bharati had rebelled, then threatened to resign. She was later
shifted to the Tourism Ministry.
Tired of
perpetually waiting for work, Mahajan worked on her excellent personal
equation with former BJP president Kushabhau Thakre to get the Department
of Women and Child Development in the hrd Ministry in which, presumably,
Joshi has no interest."I have no complaints against anyone. Now nobody
interferes in my work, perhaps because of the department I am handling,"
she says.
Hussain
did not have the same luck. A Muslim mascot in the Vajpayee Government,
the young minister had heard about the famous Joshi temperament when he
was shifted from Sports and Youth Affairs to HRD. Yet he lost no time
in seeking an appointment with his senior. The meeting lasted 15 minutes,
during which Joshi talked about everything except his new assignment.
Hussain was later assigned partial charge of the Department of Secondary
Education. But his spirits lifted considerably when he was allotted a
massive bungalow at Motilal Nehru Marg. More recently, Joshi took him
along on a tour of the US and Canada.
Despite
their unenviable state, the ministers, for obvious reasons, do not go
around addressing petitions to the prime minister. But as an aide of Patil
says, "In the NDA Government, the MOS has nothing except an official
car with a red beacon. No status, no power." An aide of MOS for Commerce
& Industry Raman Singh echo these sentiments: "Our minister has
no work, never gets to see any file and nobody in the ministry listens
to him." Who then wields the real power? In the pecking order of
the department, the MOS comes much below the secretary. "There are
secretaries who are known to humiliate and harass junior ministers,"
says an aide.
It is this
kind of humiliation that forced MOS for Agriculture S.B.P.K. Satyanarayana
Rao to put in his papers on September 29. In his resignation letter, he
complained that MOS were a redundant lot and hoped that his resignation
would "to some extent, unburden the exchequer". Rao's concern
for the exchequer's health isn't out of place. Each month, the government
spends approximately Rs 1 lakh on the salary, staff, furnishing and travel
expenses of each mos. Besides, there is the upkeep of the massive bungalows
that most ministers have been allotted in Lutyens' Delhi.
Contrast
their fate with that of MOS for Railways Digvijay Singh of the Samata
Party. Singh's aides say he handles up to 400 files a day-a majority involving
policy decisions-and works late nights in the Rail Bhavan. And with the
Railways' safety record being what it is, he often heads for accident
sites to supervise relief operations. A former junior minister in the
finance and external affairs ministries, Singh's official charges include
Signals and Telecom, Mechanical, Safety, Security and Stores Departments.
"If an MOS wants to work, no one can prevent him from doing so,"
he says. "It's a two-way system: you win the confidence of the minister,
who should also recognise your talent and trust in you." Mamata's
faith in Singh must be unshakeable as she spends almost three weeks every
month in Calcutta plotting moves to get into Writers' Building.
Some ministers
like B.C. Khanduri have benefited from the Government's moves aimed at
restructuring and ministries. Khanduri was reportedly sulking after the
BJP ignored his claim for the chief ministership of the new state of Uttaranchal.
But when the Centre, in a bid to accelerate infrastructure development,
recently split the Ministry of Surface Transport into Roads and Shipping,
Vajpayee gave the retired army man independent charge of the Roads portfolio.
The bifurcation
was to have been accompanied by the amalgamation of several ministries
to form two separate super ministries-Ministry of Science Development
which would look after the Departments of Atomic Energy, Ocean Development,
Electronics and Space, and the Ministry of Natural Resources to look after
Environment and Forest, Water Resources and Non-Conventional Energy.
That this
did not happen may have to do with the fact that a lot of ministerial
jobs would have been lost in the process. And that, in a coalition set-up,
could invite retribution.
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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