“David Cameron hired a Health Secretary who believes in homeopathy and an Environment Secretary who doesn’t believe in climate change. He had to be totally pissed. It’s the only explanation.”  

– Downing Street insider on the recent cabinet reshuffle, Huffington Post, September 6, 2012

Imagine Apple Inc. having 30 iPhone departments. One for the battery, another for the touch screen, a third for the operating system, and so on. One would think, rightly so, that each of these departments is highly specialised – the battery guy knows little about the touch screen, but is brilliant when it comes to batteries; the man heading the operating system has fat fingers that can’t operate a touch screen without dialling wrong numbers but understands everything about viruses and bugs and hackings.

Now imagine that the head of the touch screen department quit suddenly and joined Samsung. What would Apple Inc. do? Would they shift the battery-head to the touch-screen department, or would they bring in someone fresh, someone who is a world expert on touch screens, say an IBMer or even a Samsunger? Let’s say they decide to save some money and trouble and do an internal reshuffle instead: the battery-head becomes the touch screen-head, and the Operating System-head walks over to the battery department and takes charge.

Meanwhile the fountainhead (not, by the way, the man who heads the department of fountains) is worried about the company outlook and extols all his heads to come up with something revolutionary, something that’ll take the company to even greater heights. After all, he has large shoes to fill – the previous fountainhead was a certain gentleman called Steve Jobs.

The 30 swapped-around department-heads work day and night – they sleep in the office, order in pizzas, queue outside the company toilets in the mornings – but despite their honest effort, problems emerge. The battery leaks, the touch screen is soft as clay, the Operating System is virus-prone and easily hackable. The befuddled department-heads scratch their heads; they can’t seem to understand where they’ve gone wrong. The fountainhead is as confused, and in order to rectify the situation, to calm the nerves of the share-holders baying for his blood, he decides to replace all department-heads with their sons and daughters. Someone told him the time is right to bring in the youth, to give the next generation a chance to prove themselves.

The sons and daughters are delighted, as are their fathers and mothers who they have replaced, and they too set about the task of putting things right. But the younger lot are even more skills-bereft than their parents. The battery-head may not have known much about touch screens, but at least he knew a helluva lot about batteries. Not so his progeny who only knows how to use the end product, the iPhone. But he loves it, he feels great while using it, he even shows it off to his friends and neighbours. And now he thinks that there’s nothing to it, that because he has held the gadget in his hand, watched porn and played games on it, he can improve it, contribute in his own small way to its everlasting success. He thinks nothing of the battery, the touch screen, or the Operating System, even less of the post of department head. What matters in the end is the iPhone.

Five years go by. Life is not good in the corporation. The creditors are knocking on the doors every morning. Most good employees have left. No one buys the iPhone anymore. The company is bankrupt. The departments are run by idiots, the same young guns who still haven’t given up, who still feel their fortunes will resurrect. They have tried everything, from buying out smaller companies to distributing free iPhones to flood the market with goodwill and sweet memories. But the common man has seen through the ploy, and now he knows. He takes the free iPhone and brings it to the kabadi bazaar. There it is ripped open and taken apart, its many parts sold off to other phone companies for a small profit. The iPhone is truly dead. And all because the battery-head was made the touch screen-head.

Apple is a company. India is a nation. It is highly unlikely that the above scenario could ever happen at Apple Inc. Why, then, does it happen routinely to India? More importantly, why do we allow it to happen to India? Are we not stake-holders, just like Apple Inc. has share-holders who worry for the welfare of the company, simply because they all have a stake in it? Why then, do we and our media not worry when a minister in-charge of Rural Development is coolly handed the Science and Technology Ministry, or a Minister of Urban Development is shifted to Ministry of Petroleum & Gas? What’s their justification? That decision-making must be in the hands of those who’ve been elected by the people of India? By the same logic, the person who holds the most shares in Apple must decide who the battery-head should be.

But what are the skills of these people? On what basis is Mr Ghulam Nabi Azad – the man who thinks homosexuality is a disease – the Health Minister? What was the expertise of Mr Praful Patel that he was made in charge of Civil Aviation? What civil aviation know-how has he brought to his new ministry, Heavy Industries & Public Enterprises? Does he intend to make a bulldozer fly? Why was Mr Farooq Abdullah made the Minister of Renewable Energy? Does his motorcade run on solar power? Why is a lawyer a Finance Minister, a bailiff a Home Minister, an economist a Forest Minister? What’s tourism got to do with law, or mines with health?

The shareholders can fire a CEO, but it is the CEO’s job to hire department-heads. The people of India have elected leaders, not so they go and take charge of things they know absolutely nothing about – imagine a biologist giving lectures on theoretical physics – but rather, to appoint people with tremendous skill and expertise in each of the areas the ministries fall under. The real irony is that the much derided Narasimha Rao did exactly that, appoint an economist as the finance minister – some may say, “look where it got us”, but it was a reasonable and a correct decision by any measure.

So why is the Chief Justice of India not a cricketer, or the ISRO chief not a Bollywood actor? Is it because commonsense dictates that a Bollywood actor would be terrible in rocket science? That he may still say, “Bah! What’s the big deal – it’s not rocket science,” is beside the point.

The country doesn’t require a Cabinet reshuffle, much less a Cabinet. These are mere perks – at one time the Uttar Pradesh government had 91 ministers – to satisfy those who might jump ship at the nearest port.

We need experts to take over these ministries. At the moment the experts are hired by the ministers – they work under them, having to look the other way whenever the politician ignores the expert advice and does as he wishes. And more often than not, they never criticise the politician for fear of losing their jobs and lal-battis.

The economy is in a bad shape, unemployment is rising along with inflation, something is not right, something needs to be set right. Why doesn’t Raghuram Rajan, the new Chief Economic Adviser to the Government of India, come out and criticise the Government handling? Why does he not give a detailed analysis and ask all of us to: “Shut up, dammit, and listen to the economist. I am the expert and I have been selected to set things right. This is what is exactly needed. Don’t listen to the lawyer who is the finance minister, listen to me. You don’t shout at a heart surgeon when he’s opened you up. You don’t ask him to be replaced by a bartender, do you?”

A Cabinet reshuffle is likely to happen very soon. This is because some ministers of the Trinamool Congress, the erstwhile coalition partner of UPA, have resigned en masse. Each newly appointed minister would get his or her own “Breaking News” bullet point. The media would only scream what minister what ministry, never what minister, why the hell this ministry.

Because the Ministry of Railways was a keep of the coalition partner, a new railway minister would have to be found. His skills would be that he has travelled on a train.

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