When India’s cabinet was sworn in about six months ago, two important portfolios were given to one man. Arun Jaitley held both defence and finance, two of the four jobs considered most important in the union government (the other two being home and external affairs). On the day he took office, Jaitley said he would only hold the defence portfolio for a few weeks, till someone else came along. At the time it was being speculated that this someone could be the former journalist Arun Shourie. Whoever was on the prime minister’s mind, that person did not come along and May has turned to November.
It is for this reason that Goa’s chief minister, one of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s best minds Manohar Parrikar, has now been brought into the cabinet.
The question is why get a chief minister, particularly one who is seen as very competent, to leave his job and move to Delhi? Why bring an outsider when there are over 300 Lok Sabha MPs and Rajya Sabha MPs available to Modi to choose from? And if Parrikar is the man Jaitley was keeping the seat warm for, why not bring him in earlier? Clearly someone else was in mind who did not work out for Modi.
In my opinion there are two reasons why this problem of a shortage of talent has come about.
The first problem is a general one. Any strong ideology, especially one like Hindutva which is based on anger and resentment against real or perceived injustices, will attract a certain sort of person. We must not expect those who gravitate towards the writings of such people as Guruji Golwalkar and Veer Savarkar and Deendayal Upadhyay to be subtle in their thinking. It requires people who believe in a black and white to buy into such strong ideology.
The Congress is no longer an ideological party and that is why, with only 200 seats, it had many more capable leaders than the BJP with 280. Not because they are a better party, but because they tend to attract better talent at the top.
The Congress had a choice of any of three first rate finance ministers (former prime minister Manmohan Singh himself, Chidambaram and Pranab Mukherjee). On the other hand prime minister Narendra Modi must use the only finance minister he has available to also spend time on defence.