For five years, ministers and officials of the Indian railways showed dreams of a swanky, futuristic, world-class railway station in the national capital. In February 2021, the former Minister of Railways Piyush Goyal tweeted pictures or artists’ impressions of the Rs 6,500 crore project.
The New Delhi railway station (NDRS) must match India’s rising global status. Millions of hearts swelled with pride to see those pictures. They skipped a beat when, in January last year, Goyal’s successor, Ashwini Vaishnaw, told The Indian Express that the revamped railway station project would decongest a large part of the capital.
All these big promises sounded like a cruel joke late Saturday evening when 18 people died in a stampede, the worst ever at NDRS. We can’t even have a crowd management system in place while our political leaders boast about the number of trains sent for Mahakumbh. Headline management is politically important but it should not become the centrepiece of governance. Three days before the NDRS stampede, Vaishnaw was in the third-floor “war room” in the Rail Bhawan. As per an official press release, he “reviewed crowd management situation of Prayagraj Railway stations”. The minister even tweeted the real-time visuals from the Prayagraj stations that he was watching from Delhi. The 24×7 war room at the ministry headquarters supposedly looks at the crowds at all important stations, including in New Delhi.
Not the resignation era
The Opposition has demanded the Railways Minister’s resignation, predictably. They already know the answer. Nothing happened to him after the Balasore rail disaster—when close to 300 people died. In fact, the usual conspiracy theories started floating right after the accident. Last heard, in October 2023, the Indian Railway S&T Maintainers Union was welcoming the Odisha High Court’s decision to give conditional bail to the three accused from the signals and telecommunications (S&T) department, who had been arrested by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).
“The question that arises…is whether the accident is a result of any crime committed by the accused…or, is the accident…a result of composite negligence on the part of the railway authorities in maintaining the railway tracks and signal system,” said the judge.
Well, composite negligence or accountability is something that gets buried under conspiracy theories. It started with Prime Minister Narendra Modi suggesting a “conspiracy” from “across the border” behind the Kanpur rail accident that killed 150 people in 2016. He said it while campaigning for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the 2017 Uttar Pradesh Assembly election.
The National Investigation Agency (NIA) had taken over the case in November 2016. More than eight years since then, it’s still investigating.
What I am driving at here is not whether Vaishnaw should take moral responsibility or not. The days of ministers doing that are over. Remember how Jawaharlal Nehru rejected Lal Bahadur Shastri’s resignation offer after the Mehbubnagar disaster in September 1956 but accepted it at Shastri’s insistence after the Tamil Nadu’s Ariyalur train accident two months later? Nitish Kumar forced Atal Bihari Vajpayee to accept his resignation after the Gaisal accident in West Bengal in 1999. Kumar was back in his Cabinet a few weeks later as the agriculture minister, only to get the railways portfolios back one-and-a-half years later. After two such accidents in 2000, Mamata Banerjee offered to resign but Vajpayee rejected it.
Modi has a different style. His government can do no wrong. The only time he even hinted about making mistakes was in an interview with Nikhil Kamath, the Zerodha founder, in January. “I am human who can make mistakes, but I will not do anything wrong with bad intentions….Everyone makes mistakes, including me. After all, I am a human being, not some God,” he said.
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PM isn’t bothered
Since 2001, when Modi became the Gujarat CM, it was the first time that Modi ever suggested that he could commit mistakes. And because he couldn’t go wrong, how could he go wrong about choosing the right ministers? He didn’t immediately accept Suresh Prabhu’s resignation after fatal derailments in 2017 but shifted him to another ministry a few weeks later. That’s PM Modi’s style. He is not daunted by any public uproar or the Opposition’s pressure when it comes to defending his ministers’ alleged failures. But he serves the punishment in cold. Just see where Suresh Prabhu is today.
Coming to Vaishnaw, he is among the very few competent ministers in the government. Modi has reasons to give him so many portfolios—electronics and information technology, information and broadcasting, besides railways. Amit Shah made him in-charge of different states, last he delivered as co-in-charge in Maharashtra. Modi and Shah aren’t known to give in to the Opposition’s demand or public outrage. They know how the system works. They didn’t fault the Railways Minister for a few officials in Balasore messing up with signals and telecommunications. Just as they won’t fault him for the crowd management at the New Delhi Railway station. The 24×7 politicians that they are, they understand that moral responsibility or accountability doesn’t mean much electorally.
After all, 141 people were killed in the Morbi suspension bridge collapse in Gujarat in October 2022, just four weeks before the Assembly election. The BJP won the assembly polls, including the Morbi Assembly seat. The horrible Balasore train accident didn’t have any electoral impact as the voters elected the BJP to power barely a year later in Odisha.
So yes, PM Modi doesn’t have to bother much about a stampede here or a rail disaster there. He doesn’t care how his putative successor, Amit Shah, has evidently messed up in Manipur and failed to deliver on the Naga peace process or the framework agreement that the government of India signed with so much hype and hoopla in 2015. He doesn’t have to bother about Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s last Budget in which her internship scheme was supposed to accommodate 10 crore youngsters in five years—two crores a year on average. If you go by the Ministry of Corporate Affairs’ reply to Parliament, only 8,000 candidates joined the programme till January this year, as reported by The Indian Express.
Sitharaman, while presenting the Budget 2025-26, didn’t even mention a word about the centrepiece of her previous Budget—the internship programme. You can understand why. Nobody asked about the achievements of the much-hyped Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship that was created in 2014. Just go to the ministry’s website. It talks about “evolving an appropriate skill development framework, removal of disconnect between the demand for and supply of skilled manpower… forging strong partnership between educational institutions, business and other community organizations… partnership with the industry who need the skilled manpower” and so on and so forth. Essentially, the Skill Development ministry was supposed to be doing for a decade what Sitharaman did in her 2024-25 Budget.
There have been four skill development ministers, including two terms of Dharmendra Pradhan spanning close to five years. With such an ambitious and expansive ministry in place, why would the finance minister need to roll out an internship programme? That’s like a public admission of the failure of the skill development ministry.
Anyway, I am not getting into the workings or achievements of ministries here. As I said Modi doesn’t have to bother about the ministers or the ministries. After all, the people vote for him and his PMO decides who does what. But does Modi want his brand to be remotely linked with rail disasters, Manipur fiasco, ‘skill India’ mission failures, and whatnot? Failures of his ministers are creating holes in his teflon or titanium coat.
Brand Modi
Well, for PM Modi to save his own brand, he needs to change the public perception about every minister’s accountability or the lack of it. To start with, he should take a cue from Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu. Look at his ministerial ranking. In the last one, he placed himself at six, his son Lokesh at eight and his deputy Pawan Kalyan at 10, apart from others.
Kalyan may be upset—and that’s something we will discuss another time—but the fact is that Naidu does it methodically. He keeps track of all the files that go to his ministers and sees how promptly they clear them. He has survey agencies that tell him who among his ministers respond to the people’s grievances and how quickly. He even got the IVRS or the interactive voice response system during the Vijayawada floods to call up people—sitting on rooftops, wherever—every six hours and ask how long it took for relief materials to reach them and how they rate the government’s efforts. It’s direct feedback from the people.
That’s how Naidu is keeping his ministers and officials on tenterhooks. It’s time Modi called up Naidu and discussed how to replicate it at the national level. He must send out a signal that sycophancy or ‘Modi bhakti’ is no substitute for performance. Because it’s hurting Brand Modi.
DK Singh is Political Editor at ThePrint. He tweets @dksingh73. Views are personal.