The latest reshuffle in Manmohan Singh’s Cabinet is not going to be a cosmetic exercise. The number of ministers who have put in their papers now and others who were earlier lost in the aftermath of falling out with ally Trinamul Congress means the Prime Minister may be able to start on a virtually clean slate.
It’s a particularly strategic time in the contemporary history of the second avatar of the United Progressive Alliance. With the general elections hardly a year and a half away, image-building assumes urgency in the wake of several scams that have hit the collective image as well as individual profiles.
So much so that the clarion call for youth sounds desperate this time around. The outgoing external affairs minister, S.M. Krishna, articulated it best when describing the need to make way for the next generation. Government cannot be seen dithering like old fogeys in a connected world in which the public pulse, in its youthful incarnation, is tuned to Twitter and Facebook as well as visual media where images of political personalities in the public domain are made or marred in minutes.
The million-dollar question remains whether Rahul Gandhi, in many ways still a sprightly youth icon, will actually join the government or keep to the family tradition that has emerged in the last 23 years — ever since Rajiv Gandhi lost out to V.P. Singh — in which no member of the Gandhi-Nehru lineage has taken up ministerial responsibility. This massive exercise of attuning the Cabinet to young blood, fresh spirit of enterprise and logical governance would somehow be incomplete if the heir-apparent to the Congress mantle insists on sticking to party work.
Reading the tea leaves gives a fair indication of who is going where in the Cabinet, including new faces like Chiranjeevi and Tariq Anwar. It is believed, and rightly too, that the old guard is needed in the traditional powerhouses of home, finance and defence. But unless youth are promoted to handle other key ministries, like human resources and communications and information technology, with their techno-savvy and media-aware ways, little might change as far as building a more positive image for the government is concerned.
Having experienced the bitterness of coalition politics with its skewed compulsions, the Prime Minister can show his hand best by depending more on his own party to provide the answers to the weighty issues that cropped up in the last two years during which the burden of scams may have been the most hard to bear. The Congress hand is certain to be more prominent as the leader of the coalition of parties re-energises itself to face the nation at the hustings.