People of India and especially those who admire him and dislike 'Sickular gang', prefer Namo not for anything else - but for his decisiveness! PM Modi has lived up to that.
On April 27 this year this blogger said - "......it is time - Modi must reshuffle his cabinet and bring in some 'performing talents'. Some of his Rajya Sabha colleagues can be sent back to BJP headquarters to hold media briefings - both on the record and off the record".
I did not expect Prime Minister will get rid off two of his blue eyed boys - Prakash Javadekar and Ravi Shankar Prasad - of course the latter was a 'deputy leader' for BJP in the Upper House of Parliament and to his credit he had defeated Shatrughan Sinha in the polls of 2019.
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| Accountability Fixed ! |
One does not have anything personal against the two. Rather personal rapport was good with them especially Mr Javadekar, who has BJP poll in-charge for battle of Karnataka in 2018 has been quite cooperative. But when it came to 'performance' as Ministers especially since March-April 2021; things were not up to the mark. Of course there were plethora of reasons for the same !
Please note, I had written the April 27 piece - days before May 2 when the counting of votes took place in West Bengal.
My point was also specific - ....
"....if he (PM Modi) gets back to rhythm as a quick learner, Modi can salvage his image and also bail out millions of his admirers - more often called Bhakts - from the depression"
Neither Modi Bhakts nor his critics can run away from the fact the second wave of the pandemic in April-May this year left devastating fallout with hundreds of deaths including many due to oxygen shortage and other mismanagement in hospitals.
The gory scenes of bodies burning for hours – some of them unclaimed – and a large number of them floating in rivers in the country’s most populous state Uttar Pradesh has been an unprecedented experience for India in its post-independence era history since 1947.
During the peak of the crisis, there were "few success stories in diplomacy" - that the US changed its previous stance and laws to boost supplies to India for making of medicines were "never reported and highlighted properly".
"It is time for some of these outgoing ministers and also others to gaze in 'thine own hearts".
Was people like Javadekar playing too safe ? Was he too soft, again a typical Maharashtra politician's style-signature ?
In fact, there were several reasons for PM Modi to have taken the tough stance against a few of those who would have been easily called his 'blue eyed boys'. These two were - outgoing IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad and ex-Information Minister Prakash Javadekar.
These two have been in his ministry since 2014 although it is not for the first time that their performance has been found wanting.
I agree with a friend of mine who argues that Javadekar had to go apparently because he could 'not handle' the government’s ‘media communication’ part of the story during the pandemic crisis. World media and those in India lambasted the Prime Minister personally and exposed the hollowness in claims of mega-management efforts to meet the challenge.
The government’s versions hardly reached people as they were fed with persistent anti-Modi stories. There could have been better way of handling. He could have hosted a breakfast meeting with senior Editors, Health Correspondents of popular news agencies and newspapers and websites and also a separate meeting with Foreign Correspondents.
Of course media would have and rather should have written what they decided 'independently' but some communication is always better than no communication. At least the government's versions should have come out effectively.
In the case of oxygen shortage, it later came out that Delhi government played some games. If certain things were going on, the central government should have known this. This was another failure area, and of course I do not blame Javadekar or outgoing IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad for this.
The story of outgoing Minister for IT and Law Ravi Shankar Prasad is somewhat similar. Prasad could not manage the ongoing legal and social media wrangling with Twitter.
The confrontation with Twitter and at this heightened scale was uncalled for. If there was a growing Left-liberal and Congress party's alleged conspiracy with Twitter, this should have been sensed (or anticipated) in advance.
There are reasons for Modi to be furious on this front. More so, because no politician in India knows the power of IT tools better than Modi himself.
It goes without saying that social media Twitter and Facebook had helped him build up his larger than life size image especially when he was a pariah in the western world due to 2002 anti-Muslim riots.
Modi certainly knows the power of IT tools. Once upon a time, he was the only Twitter-friendly politician in India and he had benefited by that in the run up to his becoming India’s Prime Minister in 2014. Now the confabulation with Twitter and others gave a 'bad message' across the globe for an image conscious macho-Indian leader.
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| CEO Namo |
I have argued this in my book 'Modi to Moditva: An Uncensored Truth' published in 2012 and also elsewhere that a section of the middle class perceives Narendra Modi as a super-CEO. He is a man who “functions like a modern day CEO laying emphasis on the outcome and often allegedly putting the rules and normal norms in the backburner”.
Thus the surgical perfection in getting 12 ministers out is not without good reason! A hard task master that he is, why should a Prime Minister have 'favourites' - what counts is 'performance'.
In the case of outgoing Health Minister Dr Harsh Vardhan, a medico, the Prime Minister was apparently displeased with his style of functioning and the manner he made public speeches and handled media questions.
Not best among the articulate ones in the BJP rank, in March, Vardhan had said India was in the “endgame” of the pandemic, only weeks before the counts jumped about 20-fold to reach over 414,000 daily new infections on May 7.
Soon he was shown the door, Dr Harsh Vardhan now got sympathisers among Congress leaders. “Poor Dr Harsh Vardhan. A good man has been made a scapegoat for monumental failures at the highest level — nowhere else,” Congress leader Jairam Ramesh tweeted.
That things were not planned well became evident when patients died as they could not get beds, oxygen, or appropriate medical care.
Where was the so-called grand preparation for the pandemic fallout due to Lockdown 1.0 slapped by Modi for 21 days in March 2020 ?
India was one of the first countries to do so but the final results only show how issues of gross governance failures have left the Modi-regime haunted.
To top it all, Dr Vardhan had also drawn criticism in February 2021 from the Indian Medical Association, a body of doctors, when he breached protocol and appeared for a private Indian company Patanjali Ayurved where Yoga guru Ramdev claimed a herbal cocktail called Coronil was “the first evidence-based medicine for Covid-19”.
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