Modi 3.0 portfolios: A message of continuity, coalition craft and a task cut out

There is an interesting anecdote about Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s penchant for continuity, which reflects in his policy-making and the way he runs the government. The anecdote is about his cook, Badri Meena. People in the close circle of Modi call his working style the “Badri Meena  phenomenon”.

Badri Meena is the prime minister’s personal cook. Badri was around 15 when he landed up in Ahmedabad in Modi’s home state in the mid-1990s from Rajasthan’s Udaipur, looking for employment. He got employment in the kitchen of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) office.  

The story goes that Modi was impressed with Badri’s ‘swachh’ kitchen, a simple khichdi and kadhi that he had during his frequent visits to the office as a party worker. When Modi became the general secretary of the BJP in 1998, he took Badri in his staff and the 47-year-old cook has stayed with the BJP’s top leader since then through his four terms as the Gujarat chief minister and into the third term as the prime minister.

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The point is Modi prefers to work with the same people as long as possible. The portfolio distribution has shown just that.

A message of continuity

Union ministers Rajnath Singh, Amit Shah, Nirmala Sitharaman, Subramanian Jaishankar, Nitin Gadkari, Piyush Goyal, Dharmendra Pradhan, Ashwini Vaishnaw, Sarbananda Sonowal and Bhupender Yadav are among the top ministers who have retained their portfolios that they managed in Modi 2.0. This gives the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government — with the BJP dependent on its allies to have the majority in the Lok Sabha — almost the same identity display that the previous Council of Ministers had when the BJP had an overwhelming majority of its own.

Some of the ministers from the previous government have also been appraised, so to say, upward. For example, Vaishnaw, who had railways, also got the information and broadcasting ministry that Anurag Thakur, the Hamirpur MP from Himachal Pradesh had held in the previous government.

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Kiren Rijiju, who held the earth sciences ministry, is now in charge of parliamentary affairs, a considerably more significant ministry in a government where the lead party is short of majority on its own.

JP Nadda, the BJP president, made his re-entry to have the same portfolio that he handled before he quit to lead the party earlier. Hardeep Singh Puri, known for delivering the vision spelt out by the prime minister, has got petroleum and natural gas.

Coalition craft

Compared to his previous government, Modi has given Cabinet rank to 11 leaders, up from five, belonging to the BJP’s allies in the Council of Ministers. However, when it comes to ministries traditionally considered as plum ones, they have gone to the BJP veterans. The allies have got ministries that do a lot of work but stay away from the political limelight.

For example, former Madhya Pradesh CM Shivraj Singh Chouhan got the agriculture portfolio. His counterpart from Haryana, Manohar Lal Khattar, has got power, housing and urban affairs — a significant ministry that once BJP stalwart M Venkaiah Naidu, who went on to become the Vice President of India, held.

Another former CM, HD Kumaraswamy of Karnataka-based Janata Dal-Secular, has been given steel ministry, which has a lot of work to do but gets scant political limelight. Similarly, former Bihar CM Jitan Ram Manjhi has got the micro, small and medium enterprises ministry, which covers sectors with a huge unorganised working population but without fetching much of the headline space.

In the case of Lok Janshakti Party (Ram Vilas) leader Chirag Paswan, there is a message of continuity. He has got the food processing industry that his late father Ram Vilas Paswan once held.

Kinjarapu Ram Mohan Naidu of the Telugu Desam Party, the BJP’s largest ally, has got the civil aviation ministry, earlier held by Jyotiraditya Scindia, who has a specific and more significant task cut out in Modi 3.0.

Rajiv Ranjan Singh of the Janata Dal-United has got fisheries, animal husbandry and dairying. The JDU is the BJP’s second largest ally in the NDA.

In the case of both the TDP and the JDU, the understanding seems to be more on better cash flow to the state than a bigger stake in the central government. JDU president Nitish Kumar and Andhra Pradesh’s CM-to-be N Chandrababu Naidu, the TDP chief, are apparently looking to bring faster development in their states than get involved in the politicking over how the NDA government is run at the Centre.

And a task cut out

Before going to the polls seeking his third consecutive term at the Centre, Modi said he had given a task to his bureaucrats to put in place the agenda that the prime minister would be doing in the first 100 days of his new tenure. He began his day in the office by approving a special package for the farmers — Kisan Samman Nidhi, his policy to extend cash support to about 90 million farmers.

A review of the Agniveer scheme is also reportedly on the cards. The army is understood to have recommended, as reported on Monday, some changes to the existing Agniveer scheme, which hogged the limelight during the parliamentary election campaign.

The government is also likely to notify the rules for the Digital Personal Data Protection Act (DPDPA), and introduce an amendment to the IT rules — the deadline to send suggestions for which ended on May 15.

But the biggest task cut out could be on fixing the issues of internal security. The Northeast in general, and Manipur in particular, is likely to be a top priority area. This makes the job Scindia tough and key to achieving the goals of Modi 3.0. Scindia has been given the charge of communication and DONER, the ministry that focuses on the development of the Northeast region.

It does not look like a coincidence that the day Modi allocates portfolios to his ministers, the BJP’s parental organisation Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) chief Mohan Bhagwat said, “Manipur is waiting for peace for the last one year. There was peace in Manipur earlier for 10 years. It felt like gun culture had finished there. But the state has suddenly seen violence."

“The situation in Manipur will have to be considered with priority. There is a need to get over election rhetoric and focus on problems facing the nation," Bhagwat said.  

Manipur saw ethnic violence that left many dead and forced hundreds to live in relief camps. PM Modi was criticised for not visiting the state once since the ethnic violence broke out in early May last year.

In this year’s election, the two Lok Sabha seats from Manipur went to the Congress. And Scindia is a former Congress leader who enjoys the confidence of PM Modi. He has a very specific task cut out in Modi 3.0, it seems.