MARGINALIA By Anuradha Bhasin Jamwal
CM and his Noah's ark Jumbo was once a perfect word to describe gigantic cabinet size.
But once its starts oozing out of its elephantine existence, even Jumbo would seem like a word from the Lilliputian world.
Even obese would suddenly seem light in the face of the just expanded cabinet of Mufti Mohd Sayeed led government in Jammu and Kashmir.
With a strength of nearly forty ministers in the state cabinet is not just jumbo-sized, gigantic and elephantine or even obese.
It is plain simple ugly, displaying the shameless lust for power and the outright violation of austerity.
In a house of not more than 87 legislators, the government has made a record of kinds by increasing the size of the ministry to a generous 45 percent.
This has come at a time when a major coalition partner in the state government the Congress has offered support to the bill on cutting the size of the ministerial cabinets in the Centre and all states of the country.
Perhaps the ceiling on cabinet size in this case has been given a special height.
This has also ironically come on a day finance minister Muzaffar Hussain Beig has advocated financial austerity while talking about tax regime restructuring.
The cabinet expansion would be nothing but lavish spending unless the king-size cabinet is willing to perform sans all the perks and salaries that come with the chairs of power.
The chief minister argues that the exercise was essential.
Everyone may have thought it was necessitated by the pressures and pulls within a coalition government where the leading Peoples Democratic Party has only a stake of fourteen legislators.
But the CM emphatically denied the same.
He reasons that this has been done in view of the 'special circumstances'.
Pray, what 'special circumstances'? Does a violence ridden affair where managing a big fleet of VVIPs is already a problem call for greater stress and pressure on the already fatigued police and security force? Does a state where the promise of zero-deficit budget has only ended in delayed salaries to its employees and overdraft from Jammu and Kashmir Bank accord it the special privilege of having a ship-load of politicians to govern? Does a state where employment is deep-rooted and often seen by mainstream politicians as the root cause of militancy allow it to divert all expenditure it promised on such schemes for the cause of the privileged 'netas'? Unless, the government was by way of expansion only living by its promise of providing employment ......
atleast to the ten 'poor aspirants' who had been in the waiting queue for a long time.
The chief minister has also reasoned that the expansion was not violation of austerity slogan.
It will benefit the state and its people, he said.
Perhaps, the notion of state and its people stops beyond the confines of the netas benefited by a berth in the ministerial cabinet.
It seems the chief minister has taken on himself the task of Biblical Noah with his huge ark of ministry where he feels duty bound to pick up all species of politicians lest they become extinct after the flood of Lok Sabha polls.
By all accounts this has been the largest sized cabinet in Jammu and Kashmir and in terms of percentage even the previous regime's cabinet size at 32 had put every other state out of race.
Coming at a time when Lok Sabha polls are around the corner and the coalition faces stiff resistance in both the Valley and Jammu region, it is only too obvious that the bid has been made to silence and scuttle any kind of opposition from within the coalition by gagging the mouths with a ministerial rank.
The writing is too clear on the wall whether the coalition partners choose to deny this or not.
But one wonders why the government has settled at a 'modest' 39.
Perhaps, an addition of two more would have made a the figure more auspicious.
Or, maybe the addition of one more may have given the government's opposition a chance to find a new nickname for the coalition partners 'Ali Baba and Chaalis Chor'.
Perhaps, an addition of ten or eleven more, making the cabinet size hike up to sixty percent may have served a better purpose if the expansion is all about power politics and holding on the seat.
That would mean luring the National Conference to its side.
At least, that would have solved the problem for the next five years and stopped all nightmares of losing the throne.
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