Smriti Irani: The legacy and the challenge ahead

The difference between Irani and Javadekar is that despite similar levels of achievement in their ministries, the former has had to scream hers out

Her fans call her pugnacious, others say she is bellicose. Now she is not the HRD minister, and instead heads the textiles minister. Smriti Irani got the last word in most debates she engaged. And, there were plenty. But on Wednesday she lost her pulpit – the human resource development ministry.

 
The best contrast to set her performance up against is perhaps the incoming HRD minister, Prakash Javadekar. Like, Javadekar, she too delivered on counts that mattered either to the party leadership or the affiliate RSS networks. Well, almost. But, Javadekar remained affable - when he got things done, when things got done on orders or when things went wrong and required fire-fighting. At the environment ministry, he was never off the message. At the helm of HRD, Irani became the message. Not that the list of achievements she once rattled off in response to another textual war, count as any less than Javadekar’s.
 
But she had to scream them out. The ones she didn’t have to make too much effort to remind people were all the controversies she hit up at high pitch.
 
Her spat with Mayawati over the Rohith Vemula suicide in Hyderabad University got her eyeballs countrywide but the BJP may not have liked being pitched so aggressively on the Dalit rights agenda. The correction with induction of Dalit leaders in the council of ministers, ahead of UP elections gives a signal that the party would have preferred.

Her intervention in the JNU case added grist that the fiery-end of her party and its affiliates loved but observers wonder if that was the way to make inroads into institutions that even the finance minister suggested publicly were too left to swing the right way. She invited it and became the target for the opposition. 

 
She took on a committee of ex-bureaucrats who had been hired by her government to recommend changes in the National Education Policy. The tiff brewed over not the contents but merely the release of the report. The committee was only recommendatory in nature and the ministry well capable of moulding the final policy the way it wished.
 
Her twitter spats may have engagingly entertained or enthused sections of those on the social media but the meatier issues she dealt with kept the ministry mandarins on the edge, say in the case of managing the debate over freedom of IIMs. The independence of the top engineering management institutions of the country became a topic itself.

 
Irani had stepped in to a sector where the RSS has strong beliefs and the party believes has too long remained a domain of the left. Some would say, a confrontation was natural and Irani had the quarrel in her to fight it.
 
But what was surprising is the tiff she landed up in with the PMO on the matter of world class universities opening shops in India.  
 
While Javadekar comes in to now calm down the nerves at HRD ministry she will get another chance to show her talent at a ministry that matters for UP elections and regulates a large economy with great job potential and a PM’s package to deliver.