PUNE, 27 May 2007 — The news originating from the Congress High Command in Delhi of a likely Cabinet reshuffle in the first week of June, has sent shivers down the spine of ministers in the Congress-led Democratic Front government in Maharashtra.
State government rest houses and leading hotels in Pune have been booked and hordes of ministers from the Congress party and its alliance partner the Nationalist Congress Party are holding meetings with legislators and their party bigwigs to ensure that they are not shunted out in the reshuffle or given insignificant departments.
Every minister is trying to earn bonus points to prove that he or she has performed well.
Such is the panic among ministers from both political parties that they have even canceled their summer vacations with their families and friends to foreign locales. Every one from Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh to the junior most minister, is engaged in preparing their performance data.
According to a senior Cabinet minister who spoke to Arab News in Pune yesterday evening, many Congress and NCP ministers had planned their vacations to America, United Kingdom, France, Switzerland and Dubai along with their families. But the news of a reshuffle has thrown their vacation into a tizzy. Pune has been the lobbying center as the NCP supremo and other top NCP and Congress leaders hail from Pune and are thus easily accessible. The Congress ministers are also flying between Pune and Delhi and meeting their mentors in the federal capital, so that they are able to retain their berths in the government or get better portfolios. Also, the socio-political developments in the state have also forced the ministers to remain in the state capital.
The reshuffle fear factor has also sounded alarm bells for Chief Minister Deshmukh, who too has canceled his trip to Switzerland fearing that he would lose the chair to the front-runner for the chief minister’s post — Revenue Minister Narayan Rane. Deshmukh has decided to skip the vacation and concentrate working on the problems faced by the people in the state. Twenty-four hours ahead of his 62nd birthday, Deshmukh was trying to appease the Congress leaders in Delhi by working hard on the Congress party political fortunes in the Goa Assembly elections, followed by a series of meetings relating to monsoon preparations in Mumbai and other flood sensitive districts in western Maharashtra.
Dilip Walse-Patil, the NCP state energy minister was forthright in stating that a summer vacation was out of the question and that it has been three years since he has gone abroad with his family. “The power situation is critical in the state and I am busy trying to streamline the power shortage,” he said.
Such is the fright of the reshuffle among the majority NCP ministers, that they canceled their vacations after the NCP supremo Sharad Pawar held an unscheduled meeting with Deputy Chief Minister R.R. Patil and his nephew, Water Resources Minister Ajit Pawar, last week, giving hints of a reshuffle. Except for Minister of Forests Babanrao Panchpute and Minister of Finance Jayant Patil who went abroad on short official tours, and returned post haste to ensure their berths in the Cabinet reshuffle, all the NCP ministers remained in the state.
