Another jumbo

S. M. Krishna has certainly set out on the wrong foot. He could not have started his term as the new Chief Minister of Karnataka with a falser step than the foisting on the state of a 43-member ministry. Announcing the unwieldy team, he has given a twin message to the public as well as to his own party. The size of the ministry does not only constitute a serious violation of the Administrative Reforms Commission-set norm of no more than 10 per cent of the strength of the elected House of 224 members in this instance. It is also an unabashed breach of the Congress leader8217;s promise of a 8220;compact8221; ministry, made in the first flush of electoral victory. The contempt for the ARC norm is worse compounded by the fact that nearly one-third of the 133 Congress members of the state Assembly have been accommodated in the ministry 8212; and that over a half of the new ministers hold the Cabinet rank. What this signals to the party is not an endearingly special place in the leader8217;s scheme of things for its legislators.It is his vulnerability. The kind he acknowledges when he admits to have succumbed to 8220;pressures no chief minister is free from8221;. This can only sound like an open invitation for more factional and individual claims. Sure enough, the allocation of ministries to different caste and other groups in the state Congress has raised demands for 8220;due8221; representation for rival intra-state regions and left party MLAs belonging to none of the above categories bemoaning their lot.

This is not exactly a recipe for a result-oriented Congress rule. Krishna belies his own reputation for political sense and sobriety, when he lets the 8220;pressures8221; prevail over the lessons of the poll outcome. The voters of Karnataka have, above all, punished the non-governance suffered by the state under J. H. Patel. The victors cannot, obviously, afford to repeat the folly of the former chief minister, who was too busy trying to buy factional peace in his own camp ever to get down to the business of governance. Krishna cannot cope withthe problem by resorting to the trite device of creating corporations and posts at their helm for the disgruntled. Jumbo ministries have, here and elsewhere, all too often failed to take off and, more than occasionally, crashed. The Karnataka Chief Minister could have at least learnt from the surviving examples of mega ministries in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. Neither Laloo Prasad Yadav and Rabri Devi nor Kalyan Singh has succeeded in making the size of the ministry synonymous with political stability. All the sinecures they could offer in their respective states would not seem to avail, as they await the next Assembly elections with trepidation after their losses in the Lok Sabha polls.

Monster ministries at the Centre have been seen as the inescapable corollary of the coalition era. What Krishna has shown is that an unfractured electoral verdict alone is no guarantee of an unflabby government. This, of course, may not be what Congressmen mean when they talk of the party being a social coalition. But, theKarnataka ministry does make a mockery of the case for a single-party rule and against ramshackle multi-party regimes that the Congress continues to press.