There is not a little irony in the fact that the Cabinet Secretary should be writing to Union ministers asking them to do what they are required to under the rules, namely disclose their assets on an annual basis. Which essentially means that ministers have not bothered with the rules. (This would be true not only for the present government, but also for all the states.) The Cabinet Secretary, under the Prime Minister’s instruction — has indicated the deadline of August 31 for declaring assets by the PM’s colleagues.

The most prominent weakness of the missive sent at the behest of the PM a week ago is that it comes at an unfortunate moment for the government, when it is embroiled in a series of corruption-related court cases and controversies, some involving Cabinet ministers. The logical corollary of this is that were this not the case, a reminder to ministers may not have ensued. Considering the overall circumstances, then, it is hard to see the Prime Minister’s assertion as the cracking of the whip, or the seizing of high moral ground in a season of scams that the Opposition parties and civil society activists are only too happy to exploit.
In the event, it is not difficult to visualise that at least some ministers may be inclined to disregard the Cabinet Secretary’s note. They would reckon that the Prime Minister may be too weak at the moment to enforce the rule. If the government meant business, it might have taken the trouble to at least leak to the media names of ministers who have evaded or overlooked compliance in the recent past. (It may even be instructive for the public to know which ministers — say in the last 10 years — have actually filed an account of their assets on a routine and regular basis without being prompted; that indeed may be an instructive compilation both from the point of view of governance and for the morale of citizens.) Naming and shaming is an acceptable way of doing things in a democratic set-up.
In the coalition era, the authority of the PM comes chipped, and there are many examples over the years to demonstrate the point. If this weren’t so, it is just conceivable that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh might have asked the wrong ones among his ministerial colleagues tough questions, or even shown them the door. On the personal plane, he is quite rightly seen as an upright individual. Many would like to believe that he would not have stood for wrong-doing if his own position — and that of his party — did not so completely depend on the allies. This is a further reason that compliance with the Prime Minister’s directive on the declaring of assets might be hard to come by. To that extent, the malady is systemic; it is symptomatic of the slow transformation occurring in our body politic.
But these impersonal forces of history cannot, in the final analysis, be allowed to become an alibi for inaction where public weal is concerned. If a Prime Minister running a coalition government decides to take his call, he can ask the supporting cast of alliance parties to change the ministers they have nominated from their unwritten or de facto quota. In the event any of them demurs, the Prime Minister always has the option to recommend fresh polls. However, in the context of the equations that obtain, Dr Singh would require the full backing of his party to envisage a step of such magnitude. In any event, before he can summon the moral energy to pull up an alliance party, he will have to deal with the relatively less observant elements from within his own ranks with the full backing of the party leadership. Should this become feasible, the UPA-2 government and the Congress will be well placed to cut though the moral dilemmas that have raised their head.