Newsmaker: Rajnath Singh

Veteran at a low point, for now

Home Minister Rajnath Singh is too disciplined to show what he is feeling. But, he must be writhing with embarrassment and rage. The Pathankot operation should have been his moment of glory. Instead, not only did the thermal imaging systems provided to the Border Security Force (BSF) at enormous cost prove useless in preventing infiltration but he also had to face the unedifying task of deleting his own congratulatory tweet of victory - as ops to contain the Pathankot damage continued almost four days after he had declared victory.

Worse, his own Cabinet colleague, Manohar Parrikar, conceded lapses had taken place in the operation but refused to speak for agencies other than the defence services, basically throwing the home minister to the wolves. Then, Prime Minister Narendra Modi dispatched him to the northeast with the National Disaster Relief Force (NDRF) to address earthquake problems, rather than have him blundering about in Delhi.

Singh is not as inept as he is made out to be. If he were, he would not have been elected to the Uttar Pradesh Legislative Assembly as well as the Legislative Council twice, served as the education minister and the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, twice been co-opted in the Union Cabinet and become president of the Bharatiya Janata Party twice.

As Uttar Pradesh education minister, Singh is best remembered for his draconian law against copying in examinations. Remember the time exams used to take place with many candidates writing them while a knife was placed conspicuously on the desk? One of his first moves as minister was to bring, through an ordinance, an anti-copying law, making copying a non-bailable offence: Which meant the onus of proving oneself innocent was on the accused. This means that children aged 14 and 15 were sent to jail on charges of copying in examinations. The pass percentage in Class X in 1991 was 58.03; in 1992, after the anti-copying law was put in place, it slipped to 14.7.

Singh defends till today the law that not only cost him his job but also the election. He had to move to Delhi and though he became agriculture minister in the first tenure of Atal Behari Vajpayee, and roads and highways minister in the later part of Vajpyee's government, his tenure was unremarkable.

Later, as president of the BJP, he agreed to do the organisational dirty work such as informing Jaswant Singh that he had been expelled from the party because he'd written a book no one in the BJP had read; and telling L K Advani that he was no longer part of the campaign committee, but ultimately he had to cede ground to Narendra Modi and put up with his hectoring.

But Singh is not given to temperamental moodiness. Even if his efficiency quotient is not quite what it should be, he is the ultimate BJP politician. This may be one of the lowest points in his career. But what has been going down can only go up.