For Salman Khursheed, promoted to Cabinet rank in the Ministry of Minority Affairs (with additional charge of Water Resources), the challenge will be to give a new orientation to a Ministry that he has himself described as powerless and redundant.
As a full-fledged Cabinet Minister participating in decision-making, Mr. Khursheed can finally hope to have the interventionist role that he has long sought for the MMA. Indeed, up until now, Mr. Khursheed has had two reservations about the MMA — one logistical and the other relating to the Ministry's restricted, minority-centric vision.
When Mr. Khursheed took charge of the MMA in 2009, the Ministry immediately benefited from a raised profile. However, the Minister soon went on record to quash mounting expectations brought about by the United Progressive Alliance's sweeping victory. He said that unlike most demands-driven Ministries, the MMA lacked real power and could not effectively intervene on behalf of minorities. The Ministry acted mostly as a post-office, forwarding requests and recommendations to Ministries that actually took decisions.
Coming from a newly appointed Minister, these were certainly strong views. In a 2009 interview to The Hindu , Mr. Khursheed was frank to admit that the MMA had no major role in the lives of minorities except to award scholarships, which could have been handled by any other Ministry: “Where are we in the lives of the ordinary people,” he asked.
Recently, the Minister reiterated this position. “We are a letter-writing Ministry,” Mr. Khursheed told a newspaper. For the MMA, the biggest problem thus far has been its dependence on other Ministries — the Human Resource Development Ministry for education-related matters, the Planning Commission for budgetary allocations for various projects and so forth. “I cannot even appoint a Muslim Vice-Chancellor,” Mr. Khursheed told The Hindu .
The MMA's flagship Minority Concentration Districts (MCDs) programme has also suffered from being critically dependent on the States, some of which have showed little interest in lifting or deploying funds earmarked for MCDs. There have been complaints of the funds going into majority areas under instruction from biased district magistrates.
These complaints were voiced recently by Muslim civil society activists at a heated round-table discussion featuring Mr. Khursheed, Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission Montek Singh Ahluwalia, and Congress general secretary Digvijay Singh. Most of the activists wanted the bulk of the funds to go into Muslim education, arguing that education was the single biggest need of the community. They also wanted the funds to go to Muslim clusters.
Mr. Khursheed told The Hindu that this was an impractical idea. His own vision, he said, was more inclusivist with the MMA eventually evolving into an Equal Opportunities Ministry. With the Equal Opportunities Commission practically disbanded, Mr. Khursheed's long-term vision is unlikely to materialise anytime soon. For now, he can look forward to directly intervening in the Cabinet on behalf of the MMA.
