Well done, Sushma Swaraj, you may take a bow

At last, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj had her 94 minutes of fame. Her press conference, on Sunday May 31, on the ministry’s achievements in the first year under Prime Minister Narendra Modi drew a full house brimming with questions and thick with (suppressed) curiosity. The live video streaming of the event had quite an audience.

What attracted attention and attendance was the fact of Swaraj meeting the media. Her holding a press conference itself was bigger news than anything she said during her 94-minute interaction with journalists. 

That Modi would visit Israel (dates to be worked out) was known the day he became PM. India’s terms for talking to Pakistan, sharing Teesta waters not being on PM’s agenda when in Dhaka and the many countries Modi would be visiting in his second year are not “news” that call for a briefing by the minister. 

A visible, active and articulate politician as Leader of the Opposition and, earlier, as a minister in Vajpayee’s Cabinet, Swaraj has been little seen and even less heard in the last one year as minister in Modi sarkar. The enviable public profile that had kept her in the limelight during the 15 years before Modi is gone. Which, predictably, is what provokes a question like whether there’s a gag order on her.

Swaraj said that the Prime Minister has not imposed any restrictions on her. “This is what goes with my profile. I decided that (given) the profile I have got, I should not speak. I follow that”. There were no sniggers, no knowing exchange of smiles or looks. This indicates the respect and sympathy she commands in the ministry as well as media, where it is known that she is stifled by Modi, who is his own flamboyant foreign minister.

Talks with MEA officials reveal that although Modi has diminished her and kept her down, she is well liked in South Block. She has a clear grasp of issues and is rarely known to ask officials for “support”. Once she is briefed, she has shown herself capable and competent of taking international interactions to the desired conclusion. She is said to know most MEA officials by name and asks for them by name instead of their (abbreviated) designations. 

Unlike some other ministers, it is said that she never berates bureaucrats in her ministry; nor does she put them down or lose her cool even in times of stress.  At her press conference, she appeared somewhat tense to begin with. In the latter half, she slowly warmed up to a point where she adopted even a bantering tone in replying to one or two questions. Her tone, posture, language and choice of words left no one in doubt that the press conference was about the Ministry’s achievements; and, digressions about her personal equation with Modi and her profile in his sarkar were not questions she would engage with here.

It is no secret that Swaraj, to put it mildly, is not Modi’s favourite minister. She can expect to keep her job as long as she does not presume that the MEA is hers to run as she thinks best. 

Sections in her ministry and the media refer to Swaraj as ‘Modi’s Bali’ – sacrificial victim in Modi’s scheme of things. The word ‘Bali’ here is also a reference to Bali Ram Bhagat, who was Minister of External Affairs for a year, 1985-86, under Rajiv Gandhi. He is remembered for being the most ineffective Foreign Minister in recent memory.

Swaraj ’s press conference was news because it was a public reminder of how little she is utilised, seen or heard in the present dispensation. 

The author is an independent political and foreign affairs commentator