One thing can be said with certainty: Union home minister Sushilkumar Shinde, the man in the eye of the storm over his baseless and bizarre statement that the country would “forget” the coal scam the way it had the Bofors, was not born with a silver foot in his mouth. Indeed, he is a man of modest origins who began his life as a bailiff in the sessions court at Solapur in Maharashtra, and later became a sub-inspector in the state police.

In 1971, at the invitation of the redoubtable Sharad Pawar, he moved to greener pastures of politics where his trajectory has been impressive enough. Having served as an MLA, an MP and a junior minister in Mumbai, he became Maharashtra’s first dalit chief minister in 2003. A year later, when the Congress-Nationalist Congress Party coalition came to power, it was considered expedient that Maharashtra should have a Maratha chief minister. The Congress solved the problem easily through a time-honoured technique. It sent Mr Shinde to the Raj Bhavan in Hyderabad, and another year later brought him to New Delhi as power minister in the Union Cabinet.
Remarkably, all through this long period nothing uncomplimentary about him was ever heard. This was the result largely of his becoming attribute of maintaining a low profile, and being nice and polite to everyone, even across the political divide. Sadly, this quality seems to have deserted him almost immediately after his dual elevation — to the ministry of home affairs and the leadership of the Lok Sabha, which is a heady promotion, no doubt.
However, he evidently failed to realise that simultaneously to replace P. Chidambaram as home minister and step into Pranab Mukherjee’s shoes as Leader of the House was a formidable challenge to him. On the contrary, all he has done so far is to make one gaffe after another. Days after his ascent he needlessly clashed in the Rajya Sabha with Jaya Bachchan, a Samajwadi Party member and respected actor, for which he had to make amends later. During a discussion on the Kokrajhar riots, he seemed inadequately informed on what was going on in Assam. And now, by his utterly uncalled-for remark on Coalgate and Bofors he has given himself a certificate of insensitivity, stirred a hornets’ nest and greatly embarrassed the Congress Party.
Murky details of what he had to say and the shattering retorts it has evoked from the Opposition as well as independent observers — most appropriate being the Communist Party of India (Marxist) chief Prakash Karat’s comment that in 2014 “Mr Shinde would learn how short the public memory is” — are already well-known. So more need not be said about them, except to make two brief points. First, to compare Coalgate with Bofors is inappropriate. The successive cancellations of allocation of seven coal blocks to relatives and cronies of ministers and other influential politicians clearly bespeaks wrongdoing. In the case of Bofors, bribes amounting to `64 crore were doubtless disbursed. But 26 years later nothing has been proved against anyone, and certainly not against Rajiv Gandhi. The home minister should also ponder what impression his linkage of Coalgate with Bofors might make on the top leadership of his own party.
Secondly, all TV videos show him roaring with laughter over his wit and wisdom. But two days later he tried to exculpate himself by pretending that he was “only joking”. He is doing no justice to the exalted office whose first incumbent was titanic Vallabhbhai Patel. Other Congress home ministers have included men of such high stature as Govind Ballabh Pant and Lal Bahadur Shastri.
This said, it is not enough or fair to concentrate only on one man’s faults and failings. The deeper malaise is the woeful paucity of talent in the core of the ruling United Progressive Alliance, which, in turn, is rooted in a much bigger problem for which there is no easy solution. Dynastic rule and inner-party democracy are totally incompatible with each other. But, without inner-party democracy, how can any leadership grow from grassroots upwards? Since the practice has prevailed from the days of Indira Gandhi, it is no surprise that after the death of Y.S.R. Reddy in Andhra Pradesh there is no Congress chief minister with a standing of his own. Chief ministers are appointed and removed by the Congress president, always at the request of Congress Legislature Party. Worse, in states where regional parties are deeply entrenched, there is no Congress leader worth the name that can take them on. It suits Congress members also because they can be sure their rise within the party would not depend on their merit or performance but on their loyalty to the First Family. The excuse that every other party run as a family concern behaves exactly the same way is neither here nor there.
However flawed, this system did work during Indira Gandhi’s time. For, party machine or no party machine, she could appeal directly to the masses and lead the Congress to power in most states though not in all. Today, there is no one like her in the entire national scene nor is one even remotely in sight.
One other point must be made. The number of Congressmen that rushed to Mr Shinde’s defence was large but the arguments they used were fatuous. Most astounding was senior leader Digvijay Singh’s explanation that the home minister had said nothing more than that Coalgate was as “false” a charge as the one about Bofors. It reminded me of what the Samajwadi battalions did when their senior minister exhorted government employees to “steal a little, but not loot”. They all shouted that the hon’ble minister “never meant what he had said”. When West Bengal’s chief minister Mamata Banerjee, crossing all previous limits, declared that court
judgments could be “bought”, there was no dearth of her gallant defenders that included the articulate Union
law minister, Salman Khurshid.