The official website of the Prime Minister’s Office may have a clue for opposition parties demanding the resignation of railways minister Ashwini Vaishnaw. They want his scalp on “moral grounds” for the deadly train disaster in Odisha. But first, they may want to look at the section on the ‘Portfolios of the Union Council of Ministers’. It gives, though unwittingly, an inkling of how much ministers and their portfolios matter in this government, where all powers are centralised in the PMO.
As per the PMO website, Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi is still the Minister of Minority Affairs. Ramchandra Prasad Singh is the Minister of Steel, and Kiren Rijiju the Minister of Law and Justice. Naqvi and Singh had resigned in July 2022, their portfolios given to Smriti Irani and Jyotiraditya Scindia, respectively. It has been three weeks since Arjun Ram Meghwal became the law minister, but Rijiju still holds that portfolio as per the website.
Now that could be a mere oversight on the part of content managers. To be fair, the PMO website does mention these portfolios “as on 07.07.2021”. But the fact is that the site has the latest updates for everything except ministers and their portfolios. On the same page that features Naqvi, Singh and Rijiju as Union ministers, there is an updated bar of “popular news” about the PM’s press statement on 1 June, and “recent news” about the PM condoling the death of actor Sulochana Latkar on 4 June. It’s not that content managers are sleeping at the wheel. Just that they probably didn’t find it so important to update the list in the last two years.
You may be right in thinking that I am making a mountain out of a molehill. After all, it’s just a website, isn’t it? Probably. It’s also the fact that how empowered or disempowered the ministers are isn’t really linked with the larger question of accountability that the opposition is seeking.
PM Modi’s options
“The country expects that the way Lal Bahadur Shastri, Nitish Kumar and Madhavrao Scindia resigned…Ashwini Vaishnaw, too, will do the same,” Congress spokesperson Pawan Khera said at a press briefing on Sunday. Many other opposition leaders had made the same demand the day before. So, what are PM Modi’s options? The first, of course, is the usual tried-and-tested strategy – brazen it out.
Remember how then railways minister Ramvilas Paswan reacted when 13 people were killed in the Himsagar-Karnataka Express collision in Faridabad in 1997? Three days after the accident, he launched a cleanliness drive at the New Delhi railway station and swept a platform. For good measure, he explained, as quoted by India Today: “If a driver crashes into another train, it’s hardly the railway minister’s fault. Do chief ministers resign after car accidents?”
Vaishnaw’s response to the accident has been much better. He flew down to the accident site right after learning about it and has been camping there since then. Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself rushed to the spot. ‘What more can a government do? You can’t fault the Railway Minister for changes in electronic interlocking!’ Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders might contend. They have been known to brazen it out whenever the opposition demanded action against their party’s ministers and leaders – Sushma Swaraj to Shivraj Singh Chouhan and Ajay Mishra Teni to Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh, among many, many others.
Lal Bahadur Shastri did resign after the November 1956 railway accident in Ariyalur in Tamil Nadu that resulted in 144 deaths. As Sandeep Shastri wrote in his book, Lal Bahadur Shastri: Politics and Beyond, the then railways minister offered to resign in August 1956, too, when 112 people were killed in a train accident in Mahbubnagar, Andhra Pradesh.
Then-PM Jawaharlal Nehru persuaded him to withdraw his resignation. After the November 1956 accident, however, Shastri insisted on it. Sandeep Shastri quotes Nehru as saying in the Lok Sabha about his dilemma that he had the highest regard for Shastri but “from the broader point of view of constitutional propriety that we should set an example in this and no man should think that whatever might happen, we carry on without being affected by it.” Nehru later accepted Shastri’s resignation.
It goes without saying that the resignation gave a high moral ground to both Nehru and Shastri just three months ahead of the Lok Sabha elections in 1957. After the polls, Shastri was back in Nehru’s Cabinet as Minister of Transport and Communications. So, yes, Shastri did raise the bar for his successors, but it happened to be politically convenient, too.
As for Madhavrao Scindia, he had offered it after a train fell from a bridge into water in Kollam in Kerala, killing over 100 people in July 1988. Scindia, however, stayed on as then-PM Rajiv Gandhi didn’t accept his resignation. Nitish Kumar did resign from Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s Cabinet following the Gaisal train disaster in August 1999, but within nine weeks, he was back as Minister of Surface Transport. Following a train wreck in December 2000, then-railways minister Mamata Banerjee also offered her resignation but stayed on after Vajpayee declined it.
The long and short of it is that BJP can think of myriad arguments to defend Ashwini Vaishnaw if it wants to. PM Modi might also have his own way of following what Nehru described as “constitutional propriety” and accountability. Remember former railways minister Suresh Prabhu’s resignation offer in August 2017, after back-to-back train derailments? The PM kept it on hold for about 10 days, only to shift him to the Ministry of Commerce and Industry.
Also read: Why Modi and Shah are softening towards regional parties ahead of 2024
Why PM Modi needs to act
When it comes to sophistry, BJP is more than a match to the opposition. But does PM Modi want his government to be defined by ad hocism as he prepares to go into what’s increasingly looking like a challenging battle in 2024? Vaishnaw is a competent administrator, for sure. But look at his portfolios –railways, electronics and information technology! So, here is a multi-tasker who is expected to take care of electronic interlocking, repair and build rail tracks, build Vande Bharat Express trains, make India a semiconductor manufacturing hub, control social media content.
Being BJP’s chief strategist for every election – from local bodies to assembly and the Lok Sabha – is a huge responsibility in itself. But Amit Shah must also handle the Ministry of Home Affairs and then the Ministry of Cooperation! Results? Let’s look at only Sunday’s developments. Back after a four-day stay in Manipur last week, he was appeal ing to the people on Twitter to lift blockades on the Imphal-Dimapur highway and then leave for Kochi to attend the silver jubilee celebration programme of a hospital and also meet Christian clergies. The previous evening, too, he was firefighting as usual- meeting wrestlers who have been agitating for the arrest of his party colleague, Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh, and who had been ‘manhandled’ by the Delhi police in full public glare. A 24×7 leader with unquestionable political and administrative skills, Shah’s daily itinerary can take your breath away.
He has his hands full. It has been five years since Jammu & Kashmir was turned into a Union Territory with the promise of restoring statehood and holding elections. A fortnight back, at a luncheon with selected media personalities, when there was a query about elections in J&K, Shah said that it would be done after the issue of voting by two-three lakh people staying outside J&K was sorted out. Those present in that meeting told me that it was the same answer he had given in another interaction after his return from Kashmir in October last year- that is, seven months back. Meanwhile, The Indian Express reported that 10 soldiers and seven civilians had been killed in just two districts of Rajouri and Poonch this year. The Naga Framework Agreement, signed at the Prime Minister’s residence way back in 2015, is yet to be fructified into a peace accord. Parliament gave its approval to the Citizenship (Amendment) Act in December 2019 but rules are yet to be notified. And these are just a fraction of the works he’s to do in his capacity as a single-window solution to most problems in his party and the government.
‘Skill India’ used to be a big slogan of the Modi government. Look at how often this portfolio has changed hands – Sarbananada Sonowal, Rajiv Pratap Rudy, Dharmendra Pradhan, Mahendra Nath Pandey and now back to Pradhan. It’s another matter that PM Modi seldom talks about Skill India now. Last seen, he was distributing 71,000 appointment letters – comprising both the central and state governments’ jobs – in a Rozgar Mela as millions waited in the queue.
There have been four education (earlier Human Resource Development) ministers in the past nine years—Smriti Irani, Prakash Javadekar, Ramesh Pokhriyal, and Dharmendra Pradhan. The Ministry of Rural Development has had five ministers in nine years. Ministry of Labour and Employment has had four. Then we have people running ministries that seem to be lying virtually dormant in terms of new initiatives – Smriti Irani of Women and Child Development, Narayan Rane of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises, Mahendra Nath Pandey of Heavy Industries, Pashupati Kumar Paras of Food Processing Industries, and I almost missed one prominent name – Narendra Singh Tomar, Minister of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, the ministry that was supposed to have fulfilled PM Modi’s promise of doubling farmers’ income by 2022. The last time I saw and heard him was in 2021 when he was meeting a delegation of farmers who were protesting at Delhi’s borders against Central farm laws. My bad.
The Modi Cabinet is increasingly looking like an assembly of men and women who are either buried under responsibilities and expectations or have little to do. The former are too bogged down to come up with out-of-box ideas and solutions while the latter aren’t burdened with any expectations, anyway. It’s probably time the PM revamped his team and rebooted his governance.
DK Singh is Political Editor at ThePrint. Views are personal.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)