Narendra Modi cabinet 2.0: Rajnath Singh in the front, not at the centre

Despite emasculation of his position, Singh never lost his cool and responded with grace

The first indications of tension between Rajnath Singh and Narendra Modi were, not unexpectedly, denied by him vehemently. Asked if he regretted conceding primacy to Modi by joining the government, Singh told the magazine Governance Now in an interview: “I never hankered after primacy.” Referring to the BJP national executive in Goa just before the 2014 elections where Modi was declared the party’s face for the elections, he said: “You must have seen me conceding primacy to the country’s most popular leader as I chose to speak before him... In politics, the most popular leader gets primacy.”

But despite this, Singh’s rule in the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) did not begin on a propitious note. Amid swirling rumours that he was not ‘allowed’ to appoint his own personal staff, he lost his home secretary, Anil Goswami who had allegedly tried to influence the course of the Saradha scam investigation. National Security Advisor (NSA) Ajit Doval made himself comfortable in an area that was the home minister’s preserve: Accords were signed with insurgent groups in the northeast and the minister was the last to know. This was only the tip of the iceberg. In Kashmir, the home minister’s role should have been the centre-stage: Both for its politics and for the administration of the state after the central rule was imposed. But Singh was mostly missing from the hands-on management of J&K. 

Despite this emasculation of his position, Singh never lost his cool and responded with grace. Never acknowledging that he had been pretty much crippled by the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), Singh relied on the sense that has guided him through the years: The rectification of a system that has shown excessive indulgence to the minorities. With one stroke of the pen, 10,000 non-government organisations (NGOs) were derecognised and rules to register NGOs, especially those that receive foreign funds, were made stricter. 

Singh also pushed the National Register of Citizens (NRC), despite an outcry from civil society. He took on the mantle of wiping the tears of paramilitary forces that answer to his civilian command. Although intelligence agencies managed to prevent many crises and security challenges we will never know about, the ones that still occurred were put down to the MHA’s ineptitude. In the case of the Pulwama blast, for instance, no satisfactory explanation was given by the government on exactly how tens of kilos of explosives were gathered in the first place that led to the blast and ultimately was the catalyst for the Balakot aerial strikes.

What Singh did do was to set up a committee under the chairmanship of Madhukar Gupta, a 1971 batch Uttarakhand cadre officer and former home secretary, to overhaul the functioning of the ministry. The report of the committee has not been made public. 

The government needs from the home ministry a specific doctrine on fighting the Left Wing Extremism (LWE) beyond niceties and political correctness. It also needs to explain why civil society activists are being locked up with no proportional decrease in the LWE, which suggests the government is shooting the messenger.

This is the thing with the MHA: It is such a diverse, sprawling ministry that addresses freedom fighters and Rajbhasha (Hindi) as well as liaises with the President in addition to state governments and intelligence agencies that the minister has the option of doing nothing and still being a performing minister; or put in place a proactive agenda and include within the ministry’s ambit, intelligence agencies as well as previous home ministers like Pranab Mukherjee and P Chidambaram did. LK Advani also enjoyed a high degree of respect: There is no reason why Rajnath Singh who has been BJP president and Cabinet minister several times, should have done.