The snowballing controversy over the remark made by Union minister of state for external affairs General VK Singh (retd) following the murder of two Dalit children in Faridabad has focused the spotlight on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s cabinet. General Singh’s remark shows that technocracy is a necessary – but not a sufficient – condition for ministers. They need political nous as well.

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Consider some global best practices in cabinet formation.

In the United States, members of the cabinet rarely fight elections. They aren’t senators. They aren’t members of the House of Representatives. Often they aren’t even politicians.

US President Barack Obama has a lean cabinet of 15 technocrats. (In contrast, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had a bloated cabinet of 78 ministers and ministers of state. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has a total of 66.)

Consider Obama’s key cabinet members: Defence secretary Ashton Carter (defence minister Manohar Parrikar’s counterpart) is a physicist who taught science and international affairs at Harvard University before beginning his career in public life. He has never fought an election.

Treasury secretary Jack Lew (equivalent to finance minister Arun Jaitley) is a former chief operating officer (COO) of Citigroup. He too has never fought an election.

Interior secretary Sally Jewel (broadly home minister Rajnath Singh’s counterpart) is an engineer who has spent most of her career in the banking and oil industries. She too has never stood for electoral office.

Very few in Obama’s cabinet have. But they all have outstanding domain knowledge. The point is politicians don’t necessarily make efficient administrators.

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Of course, the US has a presidential system. It is not a Westminster parliamentary democracy. The Indian cabinet obviously can’t be made up of only apolitical technocrats. But a sprinkling of mature professionals would help remedy the cabinet’s talent deficit.

And there’s a precedent right at home. In an article for The Sunday Times of India in 2011, this is what I wrote:

In Jawaharlal Nehru’s time, India co-opted leading private sector professionals to frame policy. Economist John Mathai was India’s first railways minister and businessman CH Bhabha the country’s first commerce minister. The problem is such professionals have rarely enjoyed the political clout to push through non-populist policies. That role has been reserved for ministers who help keep the government in office. In India, there is no constitutional bar on inducting apolitical professionals into key cabinet portfolios rather than just giving them advisory roles with ministerial rank. However, for even a partially technocratic cabinet to succeed, the top political leadership has to become less cynical about clinging on to power at any cost.

Quadrilateral power structure

Prime minister Modi runs the government through four layers: One, a powerful prime minister’s office (PMO); two, a relatively low-key union cabinet; three, a calcified, overstaffed bureaucracy; and four, a scattering of understaffed institutions like Niti Aayog.

Three sides of this quadrilateral power structure need strengthening. Only the PMO, though over-centralised, is doing a good job. The cabinet isn’t (more of that in a moment). The bureaucracy hasn’t shed its insouciance and is part of the wink-and-nudge Lutyens’ ecosystem that presided over the UPA establishment’s decade of scams.

The fourth layer – a clutch of institutions – has not yet come into its own. Niti Aayog replaced the Planning Commission a year ago but is not yet quite pulling its weight. Much of the Planning Commission’s role of allocating funds for projects and to the states has fallen on an already overburdened and not particularly visionary finance ministry.

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The key problem lies in the uneven quality of ministerial talent in the cabinet. Fix that and the bureaucracy and supporting institutions like Niti Aayog will fall into place. For instance, Niti Aayog’s recent proposal could provide a regular income to drought-hit farmers by leasing their agricultural land. A ten-member committee has been formed headed by former commissioner for Agricultural Costs and Prices (CACP) and director of Council for Social Development (CSD) Dr T Haque. The report is expected to be submitted by December. If implemented, the new agricultural land lease law will be just the boon financially stressed farmers need.

Arun Jaitley holds three portfolios – finance, information and broadcasting (I&B), and corporate affairs. The finance ministry has not distinguished itself in the past 17 months. Its several missteps: not forthwith repealing retrospective taxation; allowing the central board of direct taxes (CBDT) to impose a retrospective minimum alternate tax (MAT) on FIIs before being forced to withdraw it; and delivering two budgets (July 2014 and February 2015) lacking clear economic vision. India’s economy is growing at over seven percent a year not because of the finance ministry but despite it.

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The recent high-level personnel changes in the previously moribund Enforcement Directorate (ED) and a more proactive policy on prosecuting economic offenders from the UPA regime signal a robust change in intent – notably absent till now. Jaitley, too, provided a strong and necessary critique of the Supreme Court verdict on the National Judicial Accountability Commission (NJAC): “Indian democracy cannot be a tyranny of the unelected and if the elected are undermined, democracy itself would be in danger.”

The performance of the I&B ministry has been particularly disappointing so far. The government’s significant achievements have not been professionally communicated. Media management has been poor. An already notoriously hostile press has been provided ammunition. Select editors – many of whom have a long history of animosity towards Modi – have been mollycoddled. The result: the worst of both worlds – lack of effective media communications with those in the media who are relatively neutral and tacit encouragement to those who are implacably hostile to Modi.

Defence minister Manohar Parrikar is honest and modest. Alas he may, as Winston Churchill said in a different context, have much to be modest about. The one rank, one pension (OROP) issue was poorly handled. Though Parrikar had approved the OROP file in March 2015, it got stuck in the finance ministry for five months. Parrikar did not have the clout to catalyse the process. It eventually needed the PMO’s intervention to prise the file out of the finance ministry. The delay in issuing the official notification on OROP (the model code of conduct during the Bihar elections notwithstanding), and the veterans’ unhappiness with the outcome, shows how an opportunity to win back the trust of our men and women in uniform has been lost.

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On defence purchases, too, it is the PMO that is driving the agenda though to be fair Parrikar has lately done well to indigenise key defence procurements, including much-needed artillery guns, battle tanks and fighter aircraft, from private sector Indian firms such as L&T, Reliance, Mahindras and Bharat Forge.

The recent decision by Boeing to manufacture fighter jets and other aircraft in India is part of Parrikar’s strategy to both accelerate the Make in India initiative and solve the chronic shortage of battle-ready air squadrons.

Though the prime minister recently praised the work of railways minister Suresh Prabhu, the rising number of train accidents, the slow progress of high-speed train projects and a laissez faire attitude to reforms within Indian Railways as suggested by the Bibek Debroy committee, had earlier drawn a sharp written response from the PM’s principal secretary Nripendra Misra.

To Prabhu’s credit, the pace of railways reform is beginning to pick up. As he said in an interview to The Economic Times on October 18, “Railways has to be profitable organisation. It has to be economically sound. So, unless it is commercially driven, it can’t serve social interests.”

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The performers

There are obviously several ministers who are performing well. Nirmala Sitharaman has been an excellent commerce and industry (and corporate affairs) minister. Her negotiations in global forums, on especially trade, have been exemplary. Power, coal and renewable energy minister Piyush Goyal too has done well, beavering away quietly at reforming India’s coal and power industries. (The next round of coal auctions must, however, not be delayed any further.)

Road transport and highways minister Nitin Gadkari is said to be building 17-20km of highways per day. If that continues, and tenders are given transparently, he will vindicate the prime minister’s recent praise of his work. Petroleum and natural gas minister Dharmendra Pradhan has been another quiet performer, carefully navigating the treacherous terrain of his high-profile ministry.

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The performance of most other ministers has ranged from indifferent to poor. Some like culture and tourism minister Mahesh Sharma have embarrassed the government. The civil aviation minister Ashok Gajapathi Raju has not distinguished himself either. General Singh has been a disappointment – and not only for his thoughtless remarks.

In the middle range of performance lie telecom & IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, skill development and entrepreneurship minister Rajiv Pratap Rudy, home minister Rajnath Singh, environment minister Prakash Javadekar, HRD Minister Smriti Irani and law and justice minister Sadananda Gowda. They are hard-working and well-intentioned. But they all have the potential to do better.

The best performing minister in the Modi cabinet (ironically his strongest rival before the 2014 Lok Sabha elections were announced) is external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj.

She has dealt coolly and efficiently with various crises involving Indians in Yemen and elsewhere, gave a tough but nuanced response to Pakistan at the United Nations and has uncomplainingly allowed Modi to front foreign policy while she looks after the nuts and bolts.

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With just over three-and-a-half years to go before the next Lok Sabha election, the prime minister should now consider reshuffling his cabinet. Bring in a handful of experienced professionals and technocrats – especially in finance, railways, education, technology and healthcare.

The bureaucracy is crafty. It needs strong, no-nonsense ministers who have impeccable domain knowledge as well as political maturity to neutralise the default setting of corruption and sloth in the Lutyens' ecosystem the Modi government inherited.