Mr Modi, why are you so silent?

Governance is a tricky business. It is certainly more complicated than criticising an incumbent government. The former requires one to deliver to expectations which are always spiralling upwards. The latter provides you the abandon to demolish without responsibility for performance. Narendra Modi was exuberantly eloquent while he highlighted the failures of the United Progressive Alliance dispensation. Having come to power, his personality appears to have undergone a sea change. Whereas but a few weeks ago he could wax lyrical on the failures of others, now he seems to be acquiring the prosaic restraint of someone under the search light himself.

Certainly, there have been enough reasons for him to appear sombre. The first days of the new National Democratic Alliance regime have thrown up a remarkably large number of avoidable administrative and political missteps.

The first was the appointment of his key aide, the principal secretary in the Prime Minister’s Office. Nripendra Mishra is a good man and a competent bureaucrat. This is, therefore, not about his personal qualifications for the job.

However, as a consequence of his assignment as chairman of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) from 2006 to 2009, he was debarred from taking up any future government assignments. This reform was introduced by the NDA government itself in 2000, and there were sound reasons for it. The chair of the Trai adjudicates over large contractual allocations in which the government has vital stakes, and can, therefore, be amenable to insidious incentives of post tenure benefits.

Mr Modi had a straight forward choice, whether to persist with his choice for his office or to respect the law which his own party had brought in as a reform measure. He chose the first option, through the extraordinary instrument of an Ordinance.

Smriti Irani may well be a dynamic leader and could surprise us as the minister for the all important portfolio of human resource development.

Mr Modi must surely have chosen her for this Cabinet berth over many competing claims from members of his own party. But the fact that she is not even a graduate is a relevant factor for anyone who hopes to oversee the future of a country which has the world’s largest number of the aspiring young. The controversy over her contradictory statements in three sworn affidavits before the Election Commission on her educational qualifications is no less an embarrassment.

In one she says that she has only done the first year of a three-year graduate course through correspondence, and in another she avers that she is a graduate. The country has a right to know what the truth is, and the BJP itself would have made much political capital out of such a major prevarication if the minister had been from the rival UPA.

Nihal Chand, newly appointed minister of state in Mr Modi’s Cabinet, has a right to claim his innocence until he is proven guilty. But the fact of the matter is that his name does appear as one of the accused in as serious a crime as rape, and the concerned district court has sent him a notice to appear before it. It is true that the case against Mr Chand was closed in 2012, but it is also true that the victim persisted in her search for justice and persuaded the district court to readmit her complaint. The BJP has only to ask itself what it would have done if a similar charge of rape was under judicial scrutiny and the minister was from a rival political party. On the basis of its track record in attacking the UPA, there is little doubt that it would have launched a vociferous campaign for the minister’s resignation. But standards of behaviour seem to have conveniently changed when the party has assumed power.

I have had the opportunity to know General V.K. Singh personally, and once again, this is not about his personal integrity or competence. But his tweet as a minister of the government wherein he accused the new Chief of Army Staff (COAS) appointed by his own government of criminal activity protective of dacoits must qualify as one of the most irresponsible acts of any serving minister and openly repugnant to the collective responsibility of Cabinet. Strangely, he was not reprimanded, and no action was taken against him. It is yet to be seen how his publicly derogatory comment will impact his dealings with the new COAS once he takes over, and how the undeniable tension between two key interlocutors on the vital matter of the country’s security will affect public interest.

In addition to all of the above, the continuing price rise seems to have dampened the faith in Mr Modi’s conscious projection of himself as someone who has a solution for all the problems that the previous government was incapable of resolving. To add fuel to the fire, the government selectively announced a steep hike in passenger and freight fares just a few days before the Rail Budget was to be presented.

The government is now only a little more than a month old. It is too early to pass a definitive judgement, but the beginning seems to have been less than encouraging.

To arouse expectations as part of an Opposition party is easy; how you deliver on them once you are in power is what the people of India are waiting to see.

But one thing is clear: the eloquence of denunciation has already lapsed into occasionally deafening silence, such as when on June 2 this year young Mohsin Shaikh, a techie in Pune, was beaten to death allegedly by goons of the Right-wing Hindu Rashtra Sena. Mr Modi, whose tweets the young in India have begun to look forward to, remained absolutely silent.