T N Ninan: Grooming ministers

Shortly after he took charge three decades ago, Deng Xiaoping started a conscious policy of preparing China’s third and fourth generation leaders—young, educated people (many with professional qualifications in disciplines like engineering) who would be consciously groomed to take leadership positions. Deng (a member of the post-Mao, second generation of leaders) realised that his successors would have to be competent technocrats with a different worldview and skill-set from the party old guard, most of them hang-overs from Mao’s Long March. If China has been able to deliver effective governance on so many fronts in the past decade and more (sustained GDP growth of 10 per cent does not happen by accident), it is because Deng took the key decision to prepare a new set of leaders with executive capability, and with their primary focus being economic development.

This task is easier in a country where one party has a lock on political power—as in Singapore, and used to be the case in Japan and South Korea. In India, where some two dozen parties aspire to be represented in the central cabinet, those who rise to the top are people who have to survive electoral politics before they can hope to become statesmen. Few manage the transition, because they develop their relationship with voters on the basis of caste, community and state-level issues; hardly any develop a pan-India appeal. As one consequence of coalition rule, prime ministers find that their cabinet colleagues more or less pick themselves, whether they are robber barons or not; and their collective view tends to be more populist than developmental.

But if the government in New Delhi is to address all the urgent challenges that face the country, it needs at least a dozen capable and committed cabinet ministers, other than the prime minister. These are for the four offices of state (home, finance, defence, external affairs), the four key economic ministries (industry/trade, agriculture, education, health) and the four key infrastructure areas (power/energy, communications, transport and law). Assuming that one of the two broad coalitions will form the next government, which one offers the better dozen?

Everyone will have an opinion when drawing up such a list, but a UPA government might offer a probable list from the Congress of Pranab Mukherjee and P. Chidambaram, AK Antony and Kamal Nath, and Kapil Sibal and Jairam Ramesh. Note that the quality of the list improves after the exit of Arjun Singh and Shivraj Patil. You would then add from the allies a very mixed bag of essential names: Sharad Pawar, Mamata Banerjee, Dayanidhi Maran, Mulayam Singh, Lalu Prasad and Ram Vilas Paswan.

Against this, an NDA government might offer the following: from the BJP, Yashwant Sinha, Arun Shourie, Arun Jaitley, Jaswant Singh, Sushma Swaraj, Rajnath Singh and Venkaiah Naidu; one each from the Janata Dal (U), Shiv Sena and AIADMK; and one from either AGP, TRS or Biju Janata Dal.

It should be obvious from these lists that while India has a formidable phalanx of politicians, it is unquestionably short of competent and honest people to run the most important ministries. By the time you are half-way down the list, you are making fairly serious compromises on either ability or integrity, or both. If you were to look at the next rung of future leaders from among its relatively young MPs, the Congress has a better-looking list of probables, whereas the BJP probably has a better crop of chief ministers in Shivraj Singh Chauhan, Raman Singh and BC Khanduri. As should be obvious from all this, unlike Deng, our national leaders are not doing enough to build a cadre of ministerial candidates who are carefully groomed so that they are effective in high office.