Amitabh Kant & Rajiv Gauba are in line for new roles
Days after a high-level bureaucratic reshuffle in the government, which saw Rajiv Gauba retire as the longest-serving cabinet secretary in history, the corridors of power are abuzz with the possibility of Gauba’s induction into the Prime Minister’s Office as adviser.
Senior civil servants say that along with Gauba, the PMO could see another high-profile induction of former NITI Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant. Currently, Kant is posted as India’s G20 Sherpa — a position given to him months ahead of India assuming the G-20 presidency in December 2022. Several of Prime Minister Modi’s flagship initiatives, such as Startup India, Make in India, and the Aspirational Districts Programme, are known to have Kant’s stamp on them. Incidentally, Kant shared a post on X Wednesday, announcing the end of his weekly column in The Week magazine — which he has written since he assumed charge as G-20 Sherpa in 2022.
Azad and his ‘home sweet home’…
Former Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Ghulam Nabi Azad’s Democratic Progressive Azad Party (DPAP) might have come a cropper in the Lok Sabha election, but that has not diminished the Bharatiya Janata Party’s fondness for him. Three-and-a-half years after he retired from the Rajya Sabha, he still retains his official bungalow in Lutyens Delhi, thanks to the Narendra Modi-led government’s magnanimity.
Rules mandate that a former MP has to vacate his official accommodation three months after relinquishing his position. Azad retired from the Rajya Sabha in February 2021 but is under no pressure to vacate his 5, South Avenue Lane house in Delhi. This is at a time when officials at the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) are scurrying around to get the bungalows of former ministers vacated so that they can accommodate the ministers newly inducted into the government. The Rajya Sabha Secretariat had allotted the house to Azad, but it’s from the MoHUA pool and, therefore, the ministry can keep giving extensions.
The Modi government has been quite strict with the rules for the official accommodation of ex-MPs. Soon after the Modi government took over the reins in 2014, it moved to evict former civil aviation minister Ajit Singh from his Tughlaq Road residence. After much protest by the Rashtriya Lok Dal workers who wanted the government to convert the bungalow into a memorial for Chaudhary Charan Singh, Singh vacated the house. In March 2022, Lok Sabha MP Chirag Paswan was evicted from the bungalow allotted to his late father Ram Vilas Paswan. He was not an ally of the BJP then. There are numerous other evictions of overstaying former parliamentarians from their houses.
Ghulam Nabi Azad, former Congress leader, has, however, been availing of the Modi government’s magnanimity. His party, the DPAP, flopped in the Lok Sabha election, securing only 80,000 votes in the three constituencies it contested. Azad recently declared that he would not campaign in the coming assembly elections for health reasons. Later, he, however, changed his mind and announced he would campaign. Although there is no formal alliance between the BJP and the DPAP, Azad’s party is known to work in coordination with the ruling party at the Centre. The DPAP is expected to eat into the Congress-National Conference vote bank in the Jammu region to the BJP’s advantage.
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…And NDA largesse for the Yadav clan
Meanwhile, in another similar act of generosity by the NDA government, the Manohar Lal Khattar-led Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs has allotted three bungalows to the Samajwadi Party’s Yadav family in Delhi. This is when many of BJP’s MPs have been forced to live in state bhawans whenever they are in the capital, with official accommodation not yet allotted to them.
Akhilesh Yadav, Kannauj MP and SP chief, and his wife, Dimple, MP from Mainpuri, have been allotted adjacent bungalows — 59 Lodhi Estate and 60 Lodhi Estate. Akhilesh’s cousin, Dharmendra Yadav has also been allotted a bungalow nearby. Khattar’s generosity has surprised many because the housing ministry is supposed to allot accommodations to ministers only. Allotting houses to MPs is the responsibility of the respective Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha House Committees. But, in the case of the Yadav family, the housing ministry made an exception and gave three bungalows from its pool to the Lok Sabha House Committee. The LS House Committee then issued the order for the allotment.
People in the power corridor are still trying to figure out the reason behind this new-found bonhomie.