There appears to be some thing more with the party leadership at the Central level rather than the Chief Minister Siddaramaiah for the flip flop manner in which the ministry making exercise has been undertaken.
Imbalance of sorts is rather inherent in the arrangement undertaken. One third of thirty districts have gone unrepresented and some select districts like Mysore (to which the Chief Minister belongs) and Mangalore, Belgaum and Gulbarga (with the first two topping the list in terms of numbers) have received over-representation The rationale behind giving the highest of three berths each to Mangalore and Mysore remains to be explained. If it is a reward for the performance in the polls, other districts with similar achievements have merited the same treatment. The only redeeming feature has been that the Northern Karnataka has got its due share notwithstanding the fact that three districts of the northern half of the state, namely Bidar, Raichur and Haveri have drawn a blank.
The Congress has overlooked the mandatory provision of a member of the Legislative Council being accommodated in the council of ministers to enable him to function as the Leader of the House, in the event of the Chief Minister not being a member of the Council. Despite the availability, not a single MLC finds a place in the ministry.
An old and trusted party loyalist like Mallikarjun Kharge with more than four decades of the party has been sidelined in favour of a person, for whom party loyalty is no virtue at all. Building his political career on an anti Congress plank, Siddaramaiah embraced Congress to seek new political pastures when the same opportunity had been denied to him under his political dispensation under Janata Dal. Within the Janata Dal, he also when the party split, he moved over the JDS camp led by Devegowda, on the reported promise of being made as a Chief Minister , which of course was never redeemed.
According to an analysis of the affidavits made by the Karnataka Election Watch and Association of Democratic Reforms criminal cases with serious charges are pending against two Ministers, namely Mr. Quamarul Islam of Gulbarga and Ms. Umashri of Terdal in Bagalkot district, which goes against the claims made by the Congress spokesmen that no persons with criminal records would be given ticket.It was on this score that D K Shivakumar, a Krishna supporter and a mine owner has been denied the ticket, and he has been in New Delhi going round the Delhi Congress durbar seeking his rehabilitation in the ministry. He had earlier declared that he has chief ministerial ambition too.
The selection of legislators for the berths for the ministerial berth and the allotment of portfolios is another facet which has not exactly enhanced the image of the party, which has come to power after a gap of nearly decade obviously with the intention of making the people forget the bad governance under the previous dispensation.
The manner in which the selection of legislators has been made for the ministerial berths and allocation of portfolios have a stamp of adhocism and lack of planning and vision.
Senior party men and former ministers with proven record of competence like A B Malakareddy (Bidar district) and Basavaraj Rayareddy (Koppal district) have been sidestepped to accommodate the juniors, to cite one such example. And the man who has been accommodated, Mr. Baburao Chinchansur in the ministry happens to be originally from Gulbarga district that moved to Gurumitkal, when it lost the status of a reserved constituency in 2008. He enjoys no reputation as a minister as a performer politically or otherwise. He has been preferred to Malakareddy only because of his OBC tag, while Malakareddy happens to be a Reddy lingayat.
Basavaraj Rayareddy from Koppal district has an unenviable record as a legislator, minister and parliamentarian. Even as a legislator from Yelburga, he had the reputation of using the computer to keep track of the development of his constituency and had been able to get maximum benefit when the rival party government was in power. As a Housing Minister, he was known to the nonsense man and task master. In his maiden stint as the member of Loksabha in 1996, he had prevailed upon the UDF government, led by Devegowda to sanction the Munirabad Mehboobnagar railway line (which of course has not been able to take off for more than 15 years for want of effective follow-up operations after his exit from the scene. A junior like Shivaraj Tangadagi, who came to fame when as an independent member he supported the Yeddyurappa government in 2008 and made hay of the position like five others belonging to the genre and made over to Congress on the eve of the 2013 election finds a place in the present cabinet and gets a portfolio of minor irrigation, about which he has hardly any knowledge.
A virtual mess has been made in the allotment of portfolios. Former Ministers with proven record of service in specific areas like R V Deshpande Uttar Kannada and H K Patil from Gadag, in areas of Industry and Water Resource Development respectively have got different portfolios. While portfolio of Industry is among the nearly dozen key portfolios left with the Chief Minister, Deshpande has been made as Minister for Higher Education, a field which is alien to him. Mr. H K Patil had made a name as a Minister of Water Resources during the Krishna regime in Karnataka during the 1999-2004 period. It has been a common knowledge that he was wronged by the then Chief Minister Krishna when the portfolio was divested for reasons other than performance. And it was expected that under Siddaramaiah the injustice done to him would be undone. Water Resources Department is one of the key portfolios of the government, charged with the task of protecting the interests of the state in Krishna and Cauvery water disputes, where Karnataka has suffered setback because of the rank bad handling by the BJP government. And nobody knows better about the department at present than Mr. Patil. But Siddaramaiah has chosen to give this portfolio to a new comer like M B Patil of Bijapur district for reasons not very clear. Though Mr. M B Patil also hails from Northern Karnataka forming part of the Krishna basin, and belong to a district, which has been waiting for decades to get its due share of irrigation from the Krishna valley rivers, it is certainly doubtful whether he can understand the complications and take cool and calculated steps or in the alternative let the officials guide him as some his predecessors in office have done in the past.
It has come as a puzzle as to why the Chief Minister has chosen to keep eleven key departments like Finance, Energy, Large and Medium Industries, Mines and Geology, Planning, Bangalore city, IT BT, Science and Technology, while only five vacancies are to be filled in due course, at a time when he has only a short time at his disposal to prove his merit before the next loksabha elections are due. (Mr. Dharam Singh, who headed the Congress led coalition with JDS in the first half of the 2004-2008 period had twenty two departments under him and so much was confusion that when the bureaucracy took a historic decision to transfer the powers to the gram panchayats in tune with the comprehensive legislation on panchayat raj passed earlier, he was not even aware of the fact that it was a matter on which his government could take the legitimate credit. He was however not alone in the ignorance. As the Deputy Chief Minister in charge of Finance, Mr. Siddaramaiah was also unaware of the special window on panchayat he had created in his budget for the first time in Karnataka history, a major milestone in the evolution of the panchayat raj system in the state). Can he not find one single Minister from Bangalore to handle the Bangalore city, where the problem of uncleared solid waste had evoked the ire of the State High Court?
It has been said that in the allotment of the key portfolios, Siddaramaiah has chosen to favour his trusted aides more than others. Though Northern Karnataka is given due share of representation in the ministry, the departments allotted to ministers with the exception of R V Deshpande and H K Patil are too minor to give a sense of participation in the process of the development to the people in the region, which has been one of the causes for the prevailing regional imbalance. The most important task that the region has been waiting for the government to implement has been the Nanjunadappa Committee report on the Removal of Regional Imbalances and the new Chief Minister has maintained discreet silence.
`The chopping and changing of the portfolios among the ministers lacks homogeneity What has the Law and Parliamentary Minister got to do with Animal Husbandry, or Minister for Small scale industry to do with Muzrai, and Sugar, or Youth Services Minister to with Fisheries, or a Cooperation Minister to do without Agricultural Marketing, which essentially comes under the domain of cooperatives? Only the Chief Minister should explain the region.
Neither the Chief Minister nor the Congress High Command is in a position to pass the back to other. For both of them are closely involved in whatever has happened so far. And this coming in the context of the report that the wrong selection of candidates by the High Command has cost around dozen of the seats and it did yield to the pressures to grant party tickets to people with tainted image and those involved in the mining scam.
The only possible reason for the apparent lack of seriousness of the Congress leaders is that the victory in Karnataka has come on a platter. They had no confidence or a ghost of an idea that the party would win in their hearts despite their public protestations. The only preoccupation that the Karnataka Congress leaders including Siddaramaiah or the KPCC Chief Minister Parameshwar had was to who would adorn the Chief Ministers gaddi. The thought of giving good governance by mobilizing the resources available with the party perhaps never occurred to them.
(Posted on May 22, 2013 @ 7.50pm)
(Author is a Senior Journalist and Columnist. Mobile: +91 94480 74872 Email : madan.mm@gmail.com)
Well analysed it should eye opener for true congress men.
now it is ruling by exile jd parivar under the leadership of siddu.
What experience do you Madan Mohan ?? go do you your homework before giving unwarranted lectures. It is your right to opinion but, because of some desperate publicity hungry people like you there who think they are journalists, our country is getting into a mess. I suggest you to do something more productive and write on greater issues rather than talk about things which your micro processor can never process. Now take it from me Madan.
Also I thought journalists were view point neutral. I do not know from which angle a society can call you a journalist. You are politically biased, journalist. Your deeds are going to exponentially negatively slope your career and also impact other decent and fair journalists.