Unilateral decisions within the party by the Modi-Shah duo included the appointment of the new Rajasthan chief minister Bhajan Lal Sharma who brought not even one day’s administrative experience to the table and Haryana chief minister Nayab Singh Saini who has retained the personal staff of his predecessor and is believed to take most decisions on his advice.
It is a fact that Modi has no experience in running a coalition government or even consulting with NDA allies even though he ran his first two terms notionally as head of a coalition government. On the issue of lateral entry into the bureaucracy, the government ought to have consulted the Janata Dal (United), the Lok Jan Shakti Party (LJP) and others.
However, could KC Tyagi of the JD(U) or Modi’s self-professed ‘Hanuman’ Chirag Paswan of the LJP have come out against the government so stridently of their own accord simply because they represent parties whose vote bank consists of castes and classes that benefit from reservations? It is doubtful whether they have been willing to take on the Modi government if they knew they could not win.
Already, on the Supreme Court judgment giving states the freedom to keep the creamy layer among SC/STs out of reservations, the prime minister himself had to assure his party MPs that the government had no intention of implementing this proposal.
The match then could have been fixed with the allies being asked to raise the demand for the withdrawal of the policy and the government promptly conceding it.
After all, outside of Parliament, there was no major issue for Opposition mobilisation amongst the OBC and Dalits against the Modi government. On the creamy layer, some of the major opposition parties, especially the Congress party, had maintained a studied silence. Lateral entry to the bureaucracy going against the Constitutional provisions of reservations may, therefore, have been just the mobilisational issue the Opposition was looking for.
Paswan and Tyagi publicly criticising lateral entry to bureaucracy and then thanking the prime minister for conceding their demand would serve to keep the credit for policy reversal within the NDA fold. It would also allow the Modi government to present the ruling coalition as a consultative regime. However, even if this makes consultation just a shadow play, it still underlines how old dogs often have to learn new tricks by force of circumstance.
(The writer is a senior journalist based in Delhi. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)