A few good Maha mantris

By Vikas Singh

My fellow bloggers have already commented on the selfless spirit that drives all our ministers, and Mamata Banerjee's unique credentials to be railway minister. But I want to take this opportunity to rebut cynics who claim that Maharashtra has got nine ministerial posts because assembly elections will be taking place in that state soon. How can they ignore the fact that the state is blessed with so many politicians of great integrity and merit?

Take Sharad Pawar. OK, so some NGO types mutter about how he was agriculture minister when farmers were killing themselves in Vidarbha. But why blame poor Pawar? (I don't mean 'poor' literally. Whatever Pawar's problems, poverty isn't exactly one of them).

As I was saying, how much time can Pawar be expected to spare from his main job, which is running cricket in India? And he does that so well that there was actually talk of him being the consensus candidate for prime minister if the elections threw up a hung House. Unfortunately, the voters didn't cooperate, and gave the Congress a thumping mandate. Otherwise, who knows, we may well have had Lalit Modi as foreign minister, with the IPL hopping from country to country as part of India's diplomatic overtures. And maybe Sunil Gavaskar as defence minister? After all, nothing ever got past his staunch defence!

Then there's Praful Patel, who showed such exemplary alacrity in organising bailouts for private sector airlines even as the national carrier, which is the responsibility of his ministry, went from bad to worse. But then, don't you know that public sector enterprises are dinosaurs who have no business to be in business?

And how can we forget Vilasrao Deshmukh, whose handling of the terror attacks on Mumbai deserves to be a worldwide case study in crisis management? In a bid to revive tourism in Mumbai, the then chief minister personally conducted the first guided tour of 26/11-hit sites, with his son, Bollywood mini-star Riteish, and director Ramgopal Verma in tow. Unfortunately, some short-sighted people failed to understand Deshmukh's vision and he was unceremoniously turfed out. But you can't keep a good man down for long. He's back to serve the public, and he now has an even bigger platform to do so.

Actually, I do have one quibble. Why leave out the efficient and sagacious Shivraj Patil? It's still not too late. As former home minister, he has experience in handling the police. And we all know that he has impeccable taste in clothes. So why not utilise his twin interests by creating a new post for him -- minister of fashion police?