By Devika Bedi
On September 3, portfolios of Indian cabinet ministers were reshuffled. This reshuffling 3.0 comes eighteen months before the next general elections of India. The move saw various kinds of responses from ruling and opposition party leaders. While the appointment of Nirmalaya Sitharaman as the second female Defence Minister after Indira Gandhi was applauded, opposition leaders accused the government of carrying out the discussions in “secrecy” and in a less democratic manner.
A plethora of reactions
Omar Abdullah from the National Conference Party tweeted, “3+ years as PM & @narendramodi’s ability to spring big surprises is undiminished & unchallenged. Never fails to catch talking heads off guard”. Janata Dal (United) spokesperson K.C. Tyagi said that he and his party were uninvited in joining the government. “It was the BJP’s internal reshuffle and not the NDA’s, so we would not like to comment on it,” he said on Sunday. National Democratic Alliance’s (NDA) allies like AIDMK, JD (U) and Shiv Sena were all unhappy with the reshuffle as intrinsic to BJP’s cadres that isolated its allies from entering the cabinet. From what comes as the final act of governance for the 2014 elected NDA government, this may be speculated as the phase where the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) wishes to maintain schemes and agendas for the upcoming 2019 elections.
Incapability of the newly appointed
Another strong criticism comes from Congress spokesperson Manish Tewari, mocking BJP for its unsuitable choice of ministers. Calling the 9 new ministers part of the “senior citizen’s club”, he went on to state that while the mean age of the country was approximately 27 years, the mean age of the new entrants was about 60 years. He establishes that he has largely been “disconnected” from the reshuffling exercise adding allegations to BJP President Amit Shah for his dictatorial functions of asking ministers to resign even before the shuffling. P. Chidambaram goes on to prompt the centre for “maximum government and minimum governance”. Commenting on the much talked about portfolio of Nirmala Sitharaman, he said, “We can only hope she doesn’t run the Defence Ministry like the Commerce Ministry that saw a ‘crippling decline’ in exports over the past 38 months.”
Not in touch with democracy
There has been an equivocal disagreement from the opposition leaders alleging BJP for its narrow spectrum strategies to reshape the cabinet, marinated with bureaucratic interferences. “Bureaucrats don’t necessarily make good politicians: they have a very different mindset.. and the induction of these four substantiates the apprehensions that many people have that everything is controlled by the Prime Minister’s Office. There is bound to be an erosion of political discontent.” , said B. K. Hariprasad, Congress General Secretary. On a similar issue, Nationalist Congress Party’s D.P. Tripathi, however, recalled how rare it was in democracies around the world to have three former BJP Presidents in the Parliament before the Vice-Presidential elections. Irrespective of how the opposition has reacted, it is to see if major problems like cross-border defence, unemployment and bureaucratic corruption are dealt with political wisdom or not.
Featured Image Source: Wikimedia
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