One of the signs that the Prime Minister was calling the shots was the easing out of Jaipal Reddy from the petroleum ministry, following reports that he was engaged in a tussle with the Reliance group. In view of Manmohan Singh’s intention to make up for lost time on reforms, he is obviously in no mood to let ministers put up roadblocks against investors.

The Prime Minister was also apparently unwilling to include a host of Rahul’s youthful followers in the council of ministers since he will not have the time to assess their capabilities in the less than two years remaining for the general election. He might have gone in for such an experiment if the Congress had been in prime political health and not weighed down by scams and inflation. But, the prime minister’s focus now is seemingly on pushing forward his reforms agenda so that the resultant economic buoyancy will divert attention from the charges of sleaze.

The other area where he is bent on having his way is by showing Kejriwal and Co how little he cares for their anarchic antics. By choosing Salman Khurshid for the prestigious External Affairs Minister’s post, although he was engaged in a run-in with the activist-turned-politician and even discomfited the Congress with his intemperate utterances, Manmohan Singh has displayed his utter contempt for the anti-corruption crusaders.

However, if Khurshid is an unexpected winner in these games of bluff and posturing, Anand Sharma has turned out to be a loser. Not only did he fail to make it to the external affairs ministry despite ample conjectures that he might be elevated to the post, he even lost the commerce and industry portfolio to D. Purandeshwari, while retaining only the far less important textiles department. Why the axe should have fallen on Sharma is unclear since he was believed to have done a good job in selling the FDI in retail as an idea and was regarded as a rising star.

Yet, he lost a crucial ministry to a relatively unknown ministerial colleague, whose advantage apparently is that she belongs to Andhra Pradesh, where the Congress wants to regain the ground it has lost to the breakaway group of Jagan Mohan Reddy. Purandeshwari is one of the six ministers from Andhra Pradesh, which is a measure of how worried the Congress is about the state.

Actor-turned-politician Cheeranjivi is another minister from Andhra Pradesh, who had merged his Praja Rajyam party with the Congress sometime ago. However, it is the pronounced tilt towards Andhra that has made Digvijay Singh express dissatisfaction about the absence of anyone from Madhya Pradesh, the state to which he belongs.

Like the no-nonsense message to Kejriwal, the rejig has also sent an unambiguous signal to Mamata Banerjee about the finality of the rupture between her party and the Congress. The selection of two aggressive critics of the West Bengal chief minister, Deepa Das Munshi and Adhir Ranjan Chaudhury in the Union Council of Ministers, means that now the gloves are really off.

Where the Rahul-led youth brigade is concerned, the independent charge of the portfolios given to the three ministers of state – Jyotiraditya Scindia (power), Sachin Pilot (corporate affairs) and Jitendra Singh (sports and youth affairs) – can be seen as their first major step on the ladder of upward mobility. If they prove their aptitude, especially Scindia who has a crucial ministry, then they can expect to be given greater responsibility later on.

Since Rahul has made it abundantly clear that he is not interested in becoming a just another minister, the focus will now be on his role in the party. Since he apparently does not want to be a minister among ministers, it is possible that he will not like to continue as a general secretary among other general secretaries in the party. Clearly, the time has come when he has to show his mettle. If he does not want to show it in the government, he has to display his talent in the party organisation. The need is all the more obvious because he has to prove to be capable of stepping into Sonia Gandhi’s superlatively capable shoes.

It is possible that his hesitancy is due to the fact that he is yet to firm up his views sufficiently to assume a major responsibility. His emphasis so far has been on promoting young people. But, some of his choices – Meenakshi Natarajan, for instance, the MP from Madhya Pradesh, who favoured censorship of the media in a proposal – has proved to be embarrassing for the party. Yet, 2014 is not far away. Rahul cannot delay for too long to decide on what role he wants to play. (IPA Service)