NDA’s potted plants

The discussion now has been on such profound issues as whether Vajpayee would accommodate two more faces from Madhya Pradesh or one. Or whether Mamata Banerjee returns to the cabinet alone or brings along her slightly estranged Sancho Panza, Sudip Bandopadhyay. None of the non-performers will, of course, be touched. You can’t annoy coalition partners with elections coming up.

It is, therefore, not the time now to ask Nitish Kumar what business he has wasting his time and money setting up mineral water plants or building private rail lines, Tughlaq-style, through his constituency when his trains have been crashing, burning, going off rails, losing money and slipping into obsolescence while the world is looking at 400-km an hour plus trains. Nobody will also ask one Kashiram Rana (who’s he?) what he has been doing as textile minister all this while. Anand Geete will not be handed a mid-term questionnaire that asks him elementary facts of his ministerial life. Like the subtle difference between wattage and voltage.

You ask any senior member of this cabinet what India’s number one future problem is going to be. The answer may be water. Now ask your spouse or child or landlord or tenant or neighbour who the water resources minister in this cabinet is. One of them will have to be a genius or a PhD on Madhya Pradesh politics to be able to come up with the name of Arjun Sethi. Isn’t it time somebody asked him what he has been doing in the cabinet so far?

This government is peculiar in that it has displayed old-fashioned conservative strength on foreign policy and strategic issues while retaining a very pulpy core that reflects very poorly on its quality of governance. What’s the point of being so good at calling Mian Musharraf’s bluff when you go supine so easily when faced with Mamata’s blackmail? No surprise then that most members of its cabinet see their role in a peculiar light as well: They think they pay their dues simply by being there, by giving stability to the coalition and other such blah. In return, this government and the taxpayer owe them the freedom to run their ministries as they wish to. This newspaper, for example, broke a most stunning story this week on how the ministry of civil aviation had decided to divert Rs 12.5 crore budgeted for security fences and fire tenders meant to protect its airports, to buy potted, plastic plants to “beautify” them instead.

This is not merely callous or stupid, this is also, as any civil servant worth his safari suit will tell you, downright incompetent. When you run the government, you can splurge on a funny whim. But you do not steal for that from such budgeted heads — or if you do, you never put it in writing. And you are not talking about a few lakhs from a discretionary fund but Rs 12.5 crore merely to buy some potted plants. That kind of money could buy you a slice of the Amazon rainforest. Or, with Rs 12.5 crore, I could even persuade Veerappan to accept a very generous VRS and thereby save all of the Nilgiris. It is too embarrassing an expose now to be completely ignored so it is possible that the minister, who has a stellar record in running most of the major organisations under his ministry headlessly, may be moved. But only sideways. You can’t upset the “balance” so close to the elections.

A reshuffle as pointless as this is important only because it shows how soon our leaders lose breath, how tempting they find it to slip from the mode of governance into politics. It is easier on the instinct and the conscience. It is also more fun. Then, when you move from governance to politics the two things that cease to matter are performance and accountability. Otherwise, how is it there is, today, so little talk on who might lose his job for non-performance. The rumour mill, on the other hand, is abuzz with dark hints of the prime minister “lessening” the weight on “over-burdened” ministers. That these very ministers also happen to be among the only performers loses all relevance. What matters is, political “balance”, the impact on Orissa, the need to keep the likely trouble-makers in the Delhi elections gainfully employed, getting a Rajnath Singh to pull his finger out of Mayawati’s eye or compensating a minor ally, a crook for a crook.

Yes, politics is tough business and you can’t moralise all the time. But 18 months before general elections is too early for a safe and stable coalition to slip into such a cynical state of mind. Already we have seen too many ministers obstructing even the most minor reform and deregulation to avoid “political implications”. Issues of day-to-day business and regulation, like telephone tariffs and the implementation of CAS (conditional access system) for cable television viewers are being referred to the ruling party president who holds forth on behalf of the government. When was the last time you saw this? This is not old Soviet Union or China. This politicisation of governance has already institutionalised so many extra-constitutional centres of power, from the president of the BJP to Swadeshi Jagran Manch to the supremo of Shiv Sena.

No infection spreads faster than that of electoral politics. So in its own way the Congress is also catching the virus. Sheila Dikshit is widely acknowledged to be running its best performing state government. It has succeeded because it has focused on infrastructure, privatised many vital activities including power distribution and brought about a quantum improvement in the quality of life in the Capital. Now it’s been forbidden from even implementing small reformist decisions already taken, ranging from part-privatisation of the Capital’s garbage collection to a widely-acclaimed rationalisation of house tax structures. The restraint has come from the very top. If the BJP is taking no chances on the “eve” of the elections, why should we, in the Congress? People, meanwhile, can wait while nothing changes around them. Like the potted plants at Shahnawaz’s airports.

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