Let him talk

Arjun Singh has reaffirmed loyalty to the Nehru-Gandhi family, and his circle of sycophancy will presumably be complete. Singh has consistently used his declarations of devotion to the Family for peculiar personal benefit, and each time it has damaged the Congress party. He did it in the last years of the Narasimha Rao government, leading to a split in the party and ending for Congress an era of single-party governments. He tried so just a month ago, by kick-starting an echo for Rahul Gandhi to be declared the party8217;s prime ministerial candidate. As before, the objective was perverse: to invoke loyalty in order to undermine the prime minister of the day. The Congress has the prerogative to deal with its self-servingly garrulous leaders as it likes, but the spectacle Arjun Singh has enacted once again over the weekend frames the abdications of responsibility he has extracted from the UPA government.

A month ago, the Congress high command administered a snub to Singh through its spokesperson. This weekend, Congress President Sonia Gandhi did so at a public function through the unspoken word. A day after he wondered at the Family8217;s ways of 8220;evaluation of loyalty8221;, she ignored him at a university convocation in Delhi. To make the point, she lavished praise on the prime minister8217;s role in enhancing higher education. The context may have been political, but the non-mention of the Union human resource development minister was factually correct. Like his predecessor in the NDA government, Murli Manohar Joshi, Singh has been more interested in using the post to build an ideological constituency for himself. The only significant expansion that is happening in higher education is inadvertent, because of the institution of OBC quotas. On Arjun Singh8217;s watch, in fact, expansion by the private sector has been stifled by an obstructionist regulatory regime.

So, even as the Congress considers Arjun Singh8217;s amended statement of loyalty 8220;till I live8221; to the Family, the Centre must take action. His has been a four-year record of abdication; at least the last year of this government8217;s term should see some effort at recompense in the ministry. If Arjun Singh proves to be too much of a stalwart for the Congress to cast away, at least higher education must be hived off the HRD ministry and entrusted to a more willing lieutenant, maybe even the deliberately sidelined minister of state, D. Purandareshwari. Singh8217;s soap opera could then be an independent, and inconsequential, sideshow.