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| Wanted: A talented Congressman as Foreign Minister | | | The search for a foreign minister continues. Though the Prime Minister had publicly committed himself to appoint a full-fledged foreign minister nearly two months ago, an assurance reiterated again in the Nainital conclave of the Congress party, he has not met any success so far. The reason is obvious. There is a paucity of ministerial talent in the ruling Congress party. Period.
For want of a better candidate, Manmohan Singh was not averse to shifting the Science and Technology Minister Kapil Sibal to Foreign Office but there are no takers for him in the Sonia Gandhi establishment. Sibal does not enjoy the confidence of the coterie around the Congress boss. Nor is he considered senior enough to be entrusted with such a high-profile assignment. None of the other ministerial-aspirants in the party are considered worthy to head the Foreign Office.
The Minister of State for MEA, Anand Sharma does not make the cut. Indeed, the other day while returning from one of his foreign visits, a journalist asked the PM, while Sharma was sitting in seat next to him in the Air India One, whether they had at last zeroed in on the right candidate for the Foreign Minister’s post. The PM merely responded Nahi, abhi dekh rahe hain (We are still scouting around.)
In some circles the name of the former junior foreign minister, Salman Khursheed is being mentioned but due to the proximity of the Assembly elections in UP, the party may not be able to spare his services at this stage.
The only other option is to shuffle the portfolios of senior Congressmen already in the Government. At one stage, it was decided to move Shivraj Patil out of Home because of his lack-lustre record. Defence Minister Pranab Mukherjee was a prime candidate for Home but speculation in the media that he was being made Deputy Prime Minister virtually nixed his chances of promotion.
The 10 Janpath insiders sourced those reports about Mukherjee being made Deputy PM to his aides. Sonia Gandhi took such a dim view that Mukherjee was put in his place. Given HRD Minister Arjun Singh’s penchant for creating controversies, he rules himself out for foreign minister’s job.
Yes, P Chidambaram can be relied upon to do a good job as Foreign Minister but then there is none in the Congress parliamentary party to take over as Finance Minister. Chidambaram himself wouldn’t mind the shift, especially when he feels that his hands are tied in Finance by the Leftists who have vetoed further economic reforms and liberalisation.
It is notable that the previous NDA government had such a profusion of ministerial talent that though Yashwant Sinha and Jaswant Singh had swapped jobs in Finance and Foreign ministries, there were at least three other competent BJP leaders, including Arun Shourie and Arun Jatiley, who could have fitted equally well in the Foreign Office
The preferred cadres for postings and post-retirement sinecures were any of the northeastern cadres during the previous NDA government. Now, it is UP, Kerala and Madhya Pradesh, in that order. Thanks to the Cabinet Secretary, B K Chaturvedi, a 1966 batch UP cadre IAS officer, even his retired batch mates belonging to the UP cadre, have been found plum assignments. Some of his colleagues had settled in well with the usual post-retirement routine of home and Gymkhana Club, when a fortuitous turn in the career of Chaturvedi saw him being handpicked for the Cab-Sec’s job. Since then quite a few of his batch mates have been found official sinecures.
The Kerala cadre comes next in the pecking order due to the predominance of the Malayalees in the Prime Minister’s Office, including the National Security Adviser, M K Narayanan. They are being given plum posts because they are able to network through the Mallu connections both in the PMO and 10 Janpath.
Then comes the Madhya Pradesh cadre. Since the Minister of State for Personnel, Suresh Pachauri hails from the State, it is natural for him to earn IOUs from senior IAS and IPS officers of the MP cadre by finding them important assignments. Which means that only the leftover posts of the above three cadres are usually available to officers from the rest of the country. Small wonder there is a strong resentment in the bureaucracy against the patrons of these three ‘in’ cadres.
Former Maharaja of Kashmir, Karan Singh did make a strong pitch for accepting Railway Minister Lalu Prasad Yadav’s application for membership of the prestigious India International Centre, but he was over-ruled by an overwhelming majority of the screening committee in view of the very serious criminal charges Yadav was facing in several courts in Bihar and Jharkhand. But the same IIC committee had no difficulty in admitting Yadav’s trusted aide and the Minister for Company Affairs, Prem Chand Gupta.
Wanted: A talented Congressman as Foreign Minister Karan Singh, one of the five life-long trustees of the IIC – the other four being eminent jurist Soli Sorabjee, senior lawyer L M Singhvi, art historian Kapila Vatsayan, and former scientific adviser Prof. M G Menon - did not even remotely hint that he would quit as a trustee should Yadav’s application for admission be turned down. Clearly, his decision to resign was an after-thought, motivated by a cold calculation that if he was able to realise his life-long ambition of being nominated for the vice-president’s post, in case of a contest the votes of Lalu’s RJD would be crucial. In other words, he has given up the most coveted IIC trusteeship to keep Yadav in good humour.
The IIC bosses screened some 4,000-plus applications for about 6,00 fresh admissions over the next three years. Karan Singh argued that Yadav was invited to address the prestigious IIM and had reportedly turned around the fortunes of the Railway Ministry and therefore he ought to be made a member. But he was over-ruled on the ground that no one else seeking admission was facing trial on criminal charges. It may be a poor consolation for Yadav that quite a few sitting High Court judges and senior government officials did not make the grade this year for want of adequate number of seats in the IIC.
The Congress high command is considering changes at the top in its Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan units. The party high command believes that neither Pradesh Committee is functioning well and needs to be replaced by a more assertive leadership. Since the BJP governments are in place both in Jaipur and Bhopal, the Congress Party reckons that it might make sense to dispatch the AICC General Secretaries, Ashok Gehlot and Digvijay Singh, to lead the opposition in the two States.
Given how crucial it is for the party to wrest the initiative from the BJP in the two States in case of a snap parliamentary poll, the re-induction of Gehlot and Singh will also help put a tight lid over the bitter faction feuds in the two PCCs. Admittedly, no decision has been taken in this regard but Sonia Gandhi’s close advisers who are no longer enamoured of Digvijay Singh have mooted the proposal.
Bureaucrats do not take kindly to regulatory bodies since these tend to sit in judgement over their actions. Otherwise, the petroleum sector regulator would have been in place several months ago. Parliament had passed the enabling law in 2005. Only a couple of weeks ago, a selection panel to short-list the names of the chairman and members of the petroleum sector regulatory authority was constituted. But before it could hold its first meeting bureaucrats in the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas had it put off on some flimsy excuse. Given the natural instinct of Petroleum Minister Murli Deora not to push hard in these matters, the babus seem to have a free run of his ministry.
Meanwhile a retired secretary in the Petroleum Ministry has been networking furiously with the powers that be in the hope of landing the coveted job of the chairman of the proposed authority. However so far babus in the Ministry have stalled the very constitution of the authority.
Now that the BJP has denied the ticket to Varun Gandhi to contest the Vidisha parliamentary by-election, the mother and son duo of Maneka and Varun has put the party leadership on notice that he might weigh other options unless he was suitably mollified. Reports have surfaced in a section of the media that overtures have been made to Varun on behalf of the Congress party. However senior leaders in both parties discount these reports, the proprietorial rights over the Congress Party not being for sharing with the ‘wrong’ Gandhi. Meanwhile, the BJP is set to offer a position in the organisation to accommodate the ambitions of young Varun.
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