Sweet ’n’ Soren moments

Poor Shibu Soren. It is shameful how he has been treated for no fault of his. I mean, can’t a man commit a few inappropriate and indisc...

Poor Shibu Soren. It is shameful how he has been treated for no fault of his. I mean, can’t a man commit a few inappropriate and indiscreet acts—that may or may not have resulted in the loss of human life—in the course of four decades in active politics, without having the police land up at his doorstep with a Non Bailable Warrant (NBW)? Is such behaviour fair?

And then they taunt him for having run away, when all he did was to go off on a little picnic in the woods, all by himself. Where is the respect and courtesy that every minister has reason to expect as his due? There he was, so rudely plucked from a cosy ministership—with all its variegated delights like cars with red lights, a bungalow in Lutyens’ Delhi, secretaries to do one’s every bidding, a portfolio that was a gold mine in terms of returns—and cruelly hurled into the Great Unknown.

Life has truly been a sweet ’n’ Soren affair for the man who first made it to public notice for accepting a bribe—and strictly for the greater good of the country. He saved P V Narasimha Rao’s government and all he got for this bit of social work was a two-year spell in the cooler. Poor, poor Shibu Soren.

The Opposition is right. If you ask me, Manmohan Singh has made a hash of this entire tainted ministers’ issue. He should have come clean on it and ensured that the chargesheeted men were given portfolios suited to their impressive backgrounds and years of empirical experience.

For instance, instead of giving Laloo Prasad the Railways portfolio, Manmohan Singh should have made him Union Minister for Animal Welfare. Hadn’t Mr Fodder Scam ensured that thousands of buffaloes and cows, not to speak of sheep and goats, benefited from a feast of fodder at state expense to the tune of hundreds of thousands of rupees? Some may say the poor dumb beasts did not get to digest the windfall. But what of that? No one can claim that Laloo did not have the welfare of his quadrupeds in mind going by the allocations he made for them.

Or take Taslimuddin. He is wasted as the Minister of Heavy Industries and Public Enterprises. Given his long years in the business of extracting resources from the humans hapless enough to cross his path, he should have been made Minister of Human Resource Development.

Soren, given his years of dodging law enforcement agencies and facing innumerable depositions before judges, should not have been saddled with the Coal, Mines and Minerals portfolio. He should, instead, have been made the Law and Justice Minister. That may have even helped him deliver law and justice in his own case.

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And what is Jay Prakash Narayan Yadav doing with Water Resources, when he would have energised the Poverty Alleviation Ministry? Here was one man who has alleviated his personal poverty in such a remarkably short space of time that his genius should have been harnessed for the benefit of the nation’s poor.

Manmohan Singh really should have displayed greater sagacity in portfolio allocation. If he had done it right, no one would have accused him of harbouring tainted men. Instead he would have been praised for providing citizens with ministerial helmsmen capable of delivering transparent, accountable governance with a high degree of professional competence.

The Prime Minister is also, I believe, far too defensive about his tainted colleagues. He would have taken the wind out of Oppositional sails if he had the foresight to have provided his law-eluding colleagues special ministerial chambers, complete with an ante-chambers for secretaries and spittoons for the urgent ejection of masticated paan residue—in New Delhi’s Tihar Jail.

That way, nobody would have had to run, nobody would have had to hide, in the event of an NBW. And ministerial work would have carried on, uninterrupted. As for the nation, it would have learnt in time to take pride in its ministers clad in striped prison pyjamas.