Tuesday, 28 February 2017

SIDELIGHTS : : The strength of criticism lies only in the weakness of the thing criticised.—LONGFELLOW.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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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