SWATANTRA—AUGUST 30,
1947
THE present Ministry has been in office for five momentous
months—time enough for a review of their work. Individually the record of the
Ministers has been inglorious. Most of them have been barren, some positively
reactionary, and one or two, in charge of important portfolios, so
conspicuously incompetent as to have become a public menace in their present
positions. From none has any outstanding constructive policy, conceived in the
public interest for improvement of the prevailing miserable conditions of life,
so far come.
* * *
At all times sycophants gather
round Governments. At a time like the present when so many controls are in
operation, existence is impossible without official favour for certain classes
of people engaged in particular occupations. These are now the life and soul of
the prodigiously advertised “receptions” that the Ministers get, and they have
learned to do a very flourishing business out of it. They and the police form a
buffer between the public and the more unpopular of the Ministers. The old
enthusiasm of the people for Congress and Congress leaders is rapidly
vanishing.
* * *
The present set of Ministers
shave already cost the Congress and general goodwill of the masses. The
Ministers have sunk to a position lower in public confidence than even the
Advisers. It is recognized that the Advisers were good administrators in a bad
setting, unlike the Ministers who are squandering the invaluable advantages of
a good setting by bad administration.
* * *
The Food Minister has created
round himself an atmosphere of challenge about his own personal response to his
department’s procurement injunctions. He is thrown on the defensive—a plight
far from dignified for the holder of an officer whose good faith is to be taken
for granted if he is to do any good work, and on whose wisdom and reputation
for disinterested public spirit the whole food economy of the province and the
success of its procurement operations hang. Dr. Rajan has deteriorated
considerably since the days he acted as Health Minister in C.R.’s cabinet. He
has lost his guts. While formerly he commanded respect as a strong man, he now
evokes derision as a dabbler in intrigue concerned only in tenaciously clinging
to a post of which the main object he has signally failed to justify.
*
* *
Of the other Ministers, the
Finance Minister has by now completely succeeded in establishing his position
as one who knows very little of finance. It is dangerous to the safety of the
province to permit Sri Gopala Reddi to administer a subject of which he knows
so little. Sri Chandramowli has confessed in public his impotence as against
the permanent administrative service. Why should a self-confessed impotent
Minister stay on? For whose benefit? As for the Industries Minister, precious
little has come from him by way of plans for industrial regeneration. But he
seems very willing to place the power of the State into the hands of his own
business colleagues of pre-ministerial days—a thing that calls for careful
investigation about the advisability of ever entrusting the Industries
portfolio to a company-promoter. Sri Avanashi has gone about like a veritable
Don Quixote waging hectic battles against imaginary evils in public education,
ignoring its essential needs, confounding its cultural mission with the sowing
of illwill and communal passion, and generally making a mess of things and
vainly mistaking it to be so much of progress. The other Ministers have just
fallen into the ruts of old routine. They show no sign of ever being able to
break new ground in conformity with the need of the times.
Sri Omandur the Premier is
reported to be having a tough time with his colleagues as they with him. He has
turned out to be no weakling. He has shown that he possesses personal
rectitude. He has exhibited a firm will in the matter of calling erring
Ministers to order when in his opinion they erred. He has abstemiousness, he is
non-acquisitive and he is not disposed to throw out his favours rashly. He is
capable of dealing with nepotism sternly. But all his virtues are fashioned
into a small mould and spoiled by a narrow outlook; they are applied to
trifling details; they are therefore lost in the sands of littleness. The
Premier lacks constructive vision and the spacious judgment appropriate to his
great office. He has a parochial mind that is being perpetually lost on the
fringes of the stupendous problems confronting him as the head of the
administration. In history, it is not the easy-going licentiates but the
puritans of irreproachable personal character and sectarian temperament living
in the iron cages of rigid pre-determined values, that have done the greatest
harm.—(August 30, 1947) S A K A.
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