If he can’t be removed, bypass him. That’s what prime minister Manmohan Singh seems to have decided to do with his ineffectual home minister, Shivraj Patil.
By proposing to set up a task force headed by national security adviser (NSA) MK Narayanan to deal with extremism, terrorism, and insurgency, Singh has effectively divested the home ministry of the responsibility for critical internal security issues and brought them into the prime minister’s office (PMO) through the back door.
Singh announced the proposal at the recently concluded conference of state police chiefs, taking his audience by surprise. While there was near unanimity among the police chiefs and even senior home ministry officials on Patil’s poor track record in tackling internal security challenges, there is also an apprehension that the move may cause confusion instead of beefing up the government’s responses to crises.
“There will be two centres of power now,” said a home ministry official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. At the same time, he acknowledged that the department had been anticipating a clipping of Patil’s wings.
In fact, some weeks ago, the corridors of power in Delhi were rife with speculation that Narayanan would be appointed minister of state for home in charge of internal security, reviving a portfolio once held by persons like P Chidambaram, Arun Nehru, and Rajesh Pilot. The move was dropped because it would have necessitated a minor reshuffle of the council of ministers, which could have opened up a Pandora’s box for the government on the eve of elections.
The proposed task force is a roundabout way of consolidating internal security issues in one basket and turning them over to Narayanan. As per the prime minister’s suggestion, the task force would have the mandate to devise and operate a “proper networked security architecture’’ within 100 days. He said the task force should have suitable representation from the central and state agencies.
For some time now, there have been sharp perceptional differences between the PMO (read NSA) and Patil on a slew of issues. Of late, the discord has become more apparent. At the DGPs’ conference, for instance, Singh and Patil publicly differed on Naxalism. While Patil claimed that the threat was receding, the prime minister rebuffed him by saying, “The most serious threat we face is from left-wing extremism. The steps taken so far have not yielded the desired results.”
Interestingly, the prime minister’s view found resonance with the audience. When Patil painted his rosy picture about the internal security situation, several officers could be heard muttering under their breath in disagreement.
The home ministry and the PMO also spoke in different voices on the recent Assam blasts. While the latter strongly felt that the Harkat-ul-Jihad Islami had masterminded the explosions, the former dropped ambiguous hints about a Bodo andor Ulfa hand.
a_jerath@dnaindia.net
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