Opinion The North Block Challenge

A critical perusal of declassified files of the home ministry show how, in an exquisite Indian avatar of the BBC’s Yes, Minister, seasoned bureaucrats have been able to hem in the excessive zeal of powerful home ministers. The hallmark of the ministry is governance by stealth — a process of generating compliance through the knowledge of rules and mastery of facts, supplemented with persuasion, material incentives and other forms of inducement, tactical posturing, and the application of limited force. The colonial home department had honed this to a fine art which has survived in the entrails of its successor, ensconced in the majestic North Block.

A robust and detailed interview of Shah to The Indian Express provides some valuable clues to how the new regime in the home ministry might work out. The punctilious defence of the letter of the law, and the political vision that underpins them are significant pointers. Home, under Modi 2.0, is likely to follow a policy of festina lente — making haste, slowly — but doggedly, and pursue a careful, balancing act.

From its inception, the BJP has set itself on course to transform India into a modern state which it sees as a political entity with a definite body of citizens who are allowed free movement within national territory. The idea appears alluring on the drawing board but its transformation to reality in the sprawling, continental diversity of India runs into immediate roadblocks. The courts, regions, media and civil society are likely to work in unison to moderate the hectoring pace of the regime seeking to cast the country into a new mould. The Ministry of Home Affairs is directly involved with the challenge of the full integration of Jammu and Kashmir with the Indian state and market, preparing a definite roll of citizens who are entitled to state protection and welfare, and to sustain the pace of development. Its mandate of ensuring orderly rule causes it to be indirectly involved with land acquisition, and connecting the state and citizen directly — skipping over the heads of the traditional intermediaries and fixers. On the top of this list of roadblocks that could stymie most political parties in a hurry comes the challenge of devising a bovine policy that can balance the sanctity of the cow with its materiality, and to build a consensus over Ramjanmabhoomi. Regaining the trust of minorities in a charged environment where these issues have become a political slogan for triage of the Indian population into those who are in, and those who are out, is probably the hardest challenge facing the Ministry of Home Affairs.

This is where the role of the Ministry becomes vital for Modi 2.0. Home is the most political of Indian ministries. By constitutional design, it is the keeper of order and has, at its beck and call, vast resources, the public services, the paramilitary and an intelligence network. The home minister sits at the centre of this spider’s web of civil servants, spies, paramilitary units and its own transport to ferry them rapidly to the scene of action at short notice. More than mere physical agility, the occupant of this office needs vision; to be in sync with the regime’s transformative ideology, and inspire trust. All this amounts to a tall order. Can the MHA deliver?

Looking back, one can see how India’s home ministry had risen to this challenge in the past. Vallabhbhai Patel had led both the Ministry of Home Affairs and the States Ministry, which merged with it in 1955, with great vision and resolution. Between them, the two ministries melded fragments of the far-flung country together and gave it the territorial shape by which we know it today. Patel’s sobriquet — “Iron Man of India” — stems from his role in this critical juncture which complemented the charismatic aura of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Professional civil servants, who had once been loyal servants of the British raj, served both leaders with aplomb. The post-Independence generations of leaders and civil servants added enormously to this legacy. In consequence, functions like holding the disparate and dispersed political units together within the four walls of a territorial state, making the new wielders of political power accountable to rules and procedures, and developing options acceptable to all stakeholders have remained the main remit of the Ministry of Home Affairs.

The rise of new assertive leaders in the regions, emergence of centres of power like the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) and the NSA, the growing importance of the corporate sector, have affected the centrality in public affairs that home ministry once enjoyed. Thanks to the proximity that the new home minister enjoys to the prime minister and his previous ministerial experience, the ministry, under his leadership, might regain some of the centrality it has lost to its competitors for power and influence.

India today is at a turning point. The country under Modi 2.0 has set its trajectory on the goal of achieving the breakthrough of China, but achieve these results without a political apparatus that folds party-bureaucracy-army-regions into one agency and without the inconvenience of democracy’s angry crowds. and its terrible political costs. As things stand, the unresolved structural issues of agriculture, territorial integration of Kashmir and India’s Northeast, rights of forest-dwellers threatened by encroaching markets, and the emotive issue of cow protection will continue to plague orderly rule and demand the constant attention of the home minister. With trusted and experienced professionals in four key ministries, a massive mandate and effective party organisation to support its political initiatives, Modi 2.0 might have a fighting chance to deliver on what it has promised. The moment of Narendra Modi’s reckoning, is, now.

Mitra is an Emeritus Professor of Political Science, Heidelberg University, Germany