Pranab-less Cabinet left to search for troubleshooter

The Union Cabinet, comprising some of the most powerful men and women in the country, assembled on Tuesday in the capital -- as usual, at 7 Race Course Road. But missing was a diminutive giant: former finance minister Pranab Mukherjee.

On Tuesday was the first Cabinet meeting of the United Progressive Alliance in over eight years that did not have Mukherjee in government. He resigned last week following the UPA’s decision to nominate him as its Presidential candidate.

At least three ministers—Kamal Nath, Anand Sharma and Kapil Sibal—did not publicly heave sighs of relief at Mukherjee’s absence for good. But, privately, there was some loosening up. All three have been targets of Mukherjee’s vinegary observations in the past. For instance, Mukherjee once told Nath, who chose a meeting of the Union Cabinet to promote his constituency Chhindwara in Madhya Pradesh: “This is a meeting of the Union Cabinet, not the Chhindwara Panchayat.”

On Tuesday’s meeting was the first to see Prime Minister Manmohan Singh act as finance minister as well. Singh, normally the most patient of men, is also prone to taking recourse to vinegar once in a while—he has told Sharma on at least one occasion to “be brief” because “this is not an occasion for speeches”. But from Monday, a minister said, the government was likely to cut back on creating Groups of Ministers (GoMs). In the past, on any complex issue, the PM would turn to Mukherjee for advice. Mukherjee, after holding forth on the upside and downside of any decision, would propel the meeting into deciding to refer the matter to a GoM, headed, in most cases, by him.

So, who will now be the government’s principal troubleshooter? The consensus in government appears to be that the mantle is most likely to fall on agriculture minister Sharad Pawar who, coincidentally, today occupied the very chair Mukherjee used to sit on . An ally and not a Congress minister? Ministers say Pawar is a reluctant troubleshooter, knowing the Congress and his Nationalist Congress Party might have to be adversaries in Maharashtra in the future.