The Modi government’s image makeover
Politics, particularly electoral politics, in India is as much about public perception as about the quality of governance. This comes out quite clearly in Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's major expansion of his council of ministers and reshuffle of portfolios on Wednesday night.
The exercise—the first since Modi returned to power for a second successive tenure as PM in May 2019—saw 36 new ministers coming in, four high-profile senior ministers and Bharatiya Janata Party leaders getting the axe, seven junior ministers being elevated to the cabinet rank, and seven women rewarded with ministerial berths. However, the big four portfolios and the people helming them remain unaffected by the reshuffle—the Ministers of Home (Amit Shah), Defence (Rajnath Singh), Foreign Affairs (S Jaishankar) and Finance (Nirmala Sitharaman).
In the hugely diverse mosaic of Indian society where national elections and state-level polls follow each other in quick succession, the poll politics of a national party like the BJP is always at the back of its mind. The party needs to get its caste, age, gender and regional calculus right in its organisational structure and shape the ministerial council, whether at the central or state level. Equally significant is the need to deliver in terms of governance. Modi tried to strike a balance between all these factors in his mega cabinet reboot to deal with severe criticism, both at home and abroad, as the country emerges from a devastating second wave of Covid-19 ahead of key elections in five states in the next couple of years, followed by the most crucial parliamentary poll in 2024.
In the run up to Modi's anointment as PM in 2014, he had repeatedly and passionately talked about "minimum government and maximum governance". Whatever way one interprets that, the fact is that numerically, the strength of his council of ministers today is 77—nearly half of whom are new. As India emerges from the battering of the pandemic's second wave and economic slide, which started much before that, it is the quality rather than the numerical factor that will matter. Modi clearly has a challenge at hand.
Three main features of the revamp of the council of ministers stand out: Modi has gone for a much younger look, with the average age of ministers coming down to 57 from 61 years; he has junked seniority in the party as the sole yardstick by dropping a number of senior ministers who are also BJP veterans like Harsh Vardhan, Ravi Shankar Prasad and Prakash Javadekar, and brought in that of educational qualifications in choosing his refurbished team of ministerial colleagues; and he has done caste arithmetic ahead of assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh (UP), Gujarat, Tripura and Karnataka next year. Though going for a more youthful look, Modi has also kept in mind the need for experienced administrators. That is why he also brought in his cabinet former chief ministers Sarbananda Sonowal of Assam and Narayan Rane of Maharashtra, and former central minister under the Congress government Jyotiraditya Scindia.
The fact that 20 percent of the ministers in the council had been dropped before Wednesday's expansion sent out the message that it was performance-linked. The departure of Harsh Vardhan as health minister was on the back of a huge public outcry against the Modi government's handling of the oxygen crisis during the second wave of Covid-19, in the run up to which the pace of setting up oxygen plants slowed down and ventilators bought through the PM CARES fund could not be used in many hospitals due to the shortage of trained manpower. What came as a little surprising is the exit of Prasad, who was seen as the main force behind the government's new rules for multinational social media platforms like Twitter, which opposed the rules, and Facebook.
That caste equations were also a major consideration for Modi, keeping in view electoral needs in UP and Gujarat, is underlined by the fact that he inducted 27 people belonging to the Other Backward Class (OBC) on Wednesday into the 78-strong ministerial council, with the idea of involving smaller communities in a bid to counter the BJP's main rivals like the Samajwadi Party and Bahujan Samaj Party in UP, and Congress in Gujarat. The inclusion of 27 OBC ministers shrinks the caste bias in favour of the representation of forward castes in the government. It is the politically powerful and populous OBC, to which Modi himself belongs, that the BJP is hoping to rely on to retain its support base.
The BJP is keen to woo non-Yadav castes like Kurmis in UP, and it is reflected by the induction of Anupriya Patel of ally Apna Dal and RCP Singh of Janata Dal (United). That it is also trying to reach out to the numerically powerful Yadav caste is demonstrated by the accommodation of senior BJP leader Bhupender Yadav from UP, Annapurna Yadav from Jharkhand, and Dalit Virender Kumar from Madhya Pradesh in the ministerial council, in which the presence of people from Scheduled Tribes has also gone up by eight.
The caste equation was also very much in play in the elevation of Mansukh Mandaviya and Parshotam Rupala from minister of state to cabinet status. Both belong to the electorally decisive Patidar community of Modi's home state of Gujarat where assembly polls are due next year. The BJP is mindful of how it got a hard-fought victory in the previous polls in Gujarat in 2017.
The cabinet reboot has also seen some people with professional backgrounds and PhDs and MBA degrees getting in. The most prominent in the technocrat-bureaucrat category is the presence of former Indian Administrative Service officer from Odisha Ashini Vaishnaw, who had quit government service to join the corporate sector before venturing into politics. Holding M.Tech and MBA degrees, Vaishnaw has been brought in as a cabinet minister and given charge of two key portfolios—Railway, and Telecom and IT. Another MBA-holding new inductee in the ministerial council is Anupriya Patel, the Lok Sabha MP from Mirzapur in Uttar Pradesh who before plunging into politics, had worked as a professor at a private university.
Keeping in mind the large number of the women electorate, seven women were inducted in the ministerial council this time, pushing up the total number of women to 11, one of the highest ever. When the Modi cabinet took oath in 2019, it was criticised for low representation of women, with only three cabinet ministers and three ministers of state. There were nine women in the first Modi government from 2014-2019, including six in the cabinet.
Lastly, the drafting in of four BJP lawmakers from West Bengal—two of them from the northern part of the state where the saffron party has so far successfully resisted the efforts of Trinamool Congress—also shows the Modi-led party's intention to stick to its elusive state dream. Only the politically-naïve had expected the BJP to win the recent assembly poll in Bengal, the party top leadership's hype in the run up to the election notwithstanding.
Pallab Bhattacharya is a special correspondent of The Daily Star. He writes from New Delhi, India.
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