The irrelevance of Yashwant Sinha

But what about Disinvestment Minister Arun Shourie? Clearly his biggest virtue is his (may we say journalistic?) doggedness. How many ministers can you think of who could sell off Maruti Udyog despite Bal Thackeray’s vehement opposition — even to the extent of his nominee Manohar Joshi filching the file on the matter at the last minute. What’s most interesting about Shourie, of course, is his choice of tactic. In the case of a minister who was opposing the sale of some government hotels, the story goes, Shourie turned to the PM during a cabinet meeting, with a slight flicker of a smile. ‘Sir, the minister is opposing the sale because there are three rooms in one hotel … which he uses for his aaiyashi (debauchery) … if we can make some intizaam (arrangement) for this, the sale will go through.’ ‘Arre bhai’, the PM is believed to have laughed, ‘yeh to chaap bhi denge (he’ll publish this somewhere).’ The minister, by the way, agreed to the sale immediately. Clearly, the ability to steamroll the opposition, however he may do it, is a great trait to have in a finance minister.

What about Jalan? Clearly, he’s done a great job in managing both the rupee and inflation, but his reputation as a supervisor has always been a bit suspect — this is perhaps why, for a long time, he’s been arguing that policing the banks is not really his job. He’s wrong, it clearly is, and that’s why poor Jalan’s reputation is shot all over again with all the mess about Home Trade and the cooperative banks coming to the fore right now. The irony, of course, is that in this case at least, the RBI hasn’t been asleep. It is the one that alerted Nabard to the happenings in the Nagpur co-operative bank last year (that’s how Home Trade’s bubble really got pricked). It’s also the RBI that, as in the case of Charminar Co-op Bank that collapsed in February, alerted various state governments to the problems (the state governments, not the RBI, are the ones with control over co-op banks). But if the states don’t act, what can Jalan really do — in Charminar, the RBI had asked for the co-op’s board to be superseded in September, almost six months earlier.

The RBI has said 11 per cent of the country’s co-op banks are ‘weak’ — that, presumably, means it has recommended a large number need to be shut down or superseded. But it is for the state governments to act on the lists provided to them. In a really curious case, last week, the RBI cancelled the license of a co-op bank, but the bank’s board got a stay order from a local court!

Which, in a sense, brings us back to the hapless Mr Sinha, and the impending move to replace him. The real fact is that it is the NDA that is out of control, it is the NDA which is not able to enforce any governance — how do you explain the fact that while the basic contours of the Maruti sale were finalised three weeks ago, the final sale took so long and remained touch-and-go all along? Or that Bal Thackeray could delay the sale for over a year? Or that so many housing ministers have changed over the years, thanks primarily to their stance over the demolition of Sainik Farms?

Last year, it’s equally relevant, Shourie regaled us with a series of fascinating stories of The File. One IAS officer in Maharashtra, for instance, was to be dismissed for graft in June 1985. Fifteen years later, and after the File moved 140 steps (in the Union Government alone), the Union Government recommended the sentence be cut from dismissal to compulsory retirement, with a 10 per cent cut in pension — this, the order even said, was in keeping with the September 7, 1998 judgement of the Central Administrative Tribunal’s Mumbai bench! (By the way, it’s not just the NDA that is to blame for this, the ‘system’ itself has got geared to just khanapurti, or filling of forms, instead of to obtaining results.)

Sinha may have to go for several reasons, but there are some very basic issues of governance (and we’re not even talking of Gujarat) that will continue to dog his successor. And us.