Sangh Parivar's Reshuffle Blues

Managerial to the dot, or not exactly? The relayed message is : perform, and don't mess with Modi. But beneath, it's mostly caste and khaki.

- Bula Devi

A delightful story doing the rounds in Lutyens’ Delhi says a lot about politics in the national capital. In the initial list of MPs to be inducted into the ministry, it seems, the name of C.R. Chaudhary from Ra­jasthan did not figure. But once the list was leaked, BJP circles pointed out that P.P. Chaudhary, a Supreme Court advocate from Rajast­han whose name was on the list, was not, in fact, a Jat; he belonged to a commun­ity known as Seervi. That was when the other Chaudhary, a Jat, was hurriedly added to the list. Apocryphal or not, the story takes away some of the shine from the carefully orchestrated ‘stories’ about the managerial precision with which the Narendra Modi and Amit Shah carried out the ministerial reshuffle.

According to these reports, the duo spent hours over performance audit rep orts of ministers and potential ministers before vetting the names. The reshuffle was done with “clinical ruthlessness”, writes Pratap Bhanu Mehta in The Indian Express. Other commentators said the rejig sent out two messages: perform or perish; and don’t take the PM for granted or mess with him.

With the dust settling down on the most ambitious rejig so far, in which he dropped five junior ministers, inducted 19 new faces and effected two-dozen changes in portfolios, Modi took off on a five-day visit to Africa, leaving Shah to smoothen ruffled feathers, if any. In fact, Shah’s unmistakable imprint prompted some commentators to call it Shah’s reshuffle, not Modi’s. Rarely has any party chief dominated an area said to be entirely the PM’s preserve. While Manmohan Singh was criticized for taking ‘orders’ from his party president, Modi was lauded for working in sync with Shah.